Courtesy Kemosabe-RCA
It’s not arduous to know why Doja Cat typically appears to have a chip on her shoulder. She rode in 5 years in the past on an unabashed novelty track referred to as “I’m a Cow” (selection lyrics: “Bitch, I’m a cow / Bitch, I’m a cow / I go ‘Mooooo’”) and was initially positioned as a Dr. Luke-produced, sassy and stable if unspectacular pop-R&B singer. Cue haters.
But over the previous few years, the true artist — a bizarre, fearless, sex-positive, empowered and funny-as-hell rapper — has progressively emerged. Her singles bought higher and higher, particularly the bubbling “Say So” and her glowing 2021 duet with SZA, “Kiss Me More.” During the pandemic, her movies and awards-show performances bought extra musically formidable, and the visuals bought stranger and stranger. With her high-billed Coachella efficiency in 2022, she proved that she has the expertise, catalog and charisma to headline maintain a serious stage. And on “Scarlet” — her fiery fourth full-length — all of it comes collectively.
Doja has all the time had a provocative, Madonna-like picture, a formidable social-media sport, and a uncommon skill to show the tables on haters — we’re not even going to attempt to unpack all of the snapbacks on this album. She takes on morons who say she’s selling Satan; the “people that were sleeping [who] say I rap now”; trolls attempting to pit her and her admitted greatest affect, Nicki Minaj, in opposition to one another (with some hilarious impersonations); to not point out the numerous lyrics right here which are as sexually aggressive as any male rapper’s — and much more intelligent — and switch the tables on chauvinists criticizing her appears to be like (“Boo-hoo, n—a, I don’t care you don’t want to fuck me”). A track referred to as “Fuck the Girls” follows one referred to as “Wet Vagina.” The video for for “Agora Hills,” which dropped final evening, begins together with her levitating like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist” and ends together with her using a bicycle whereas sporting a T-shirt that claims “Queen of Blowjobs” on it. (See how simple it’s to get distracted?) But on “Attention,” she raps, “You follow me, but you don’t really care about the music,” so let’s shut out the remainder of it and deal with the highly effective set of songs she’s dropped right here.
“Scarlet” isn’t solely hands-down her greatest album, it’s additionally her first full-on hip-hop set, with an uncommon sound that mixes delicate and arduous: hazy keyboard textures and baby-doll backing vocals with hard-hitting rapping, skittering drums and thundering bass. The pop ingredient continues to be there, however is generally channeled into sung choruses or bridges and the backing vocals. There are a few perky, pop-leaning songs, however even these have an ironic edge: “Agora Hills,” essentially the most conventionally pop track right here, comes full with a girlie “no, you hang up!” phone-call section, till she will get to a center rap about “sucking a little dick in the bathroom” (let’s simply say that’s the one reference to a small one on the album). There are most likely 20 completely different producers and 40 songwriters within the credit, however her main collaborators are seasoned vets with huge observe data, a lot of whom she’s labored with for years: Kurt McKenzie, Earl on the Beat, Fallen, Jean Baptiste and Jay Versace, whose collective work ranges from Lil Yachty, Childish Gambino, Drake and Lil Baby to Selena Gomez and Black Eyed Peas. And whereas she stays signed to Dr. Luke’s Kemosabe label, the one Luke within the credit is a Luther Campbell pattern.
Musically, the sounds are everywhere in the map: “Attention” has an indelibly slinky melody, “97” is constructed round a RZA-ish hook that appears like a Japanese koto, “Paint the Town Red” makes use of Dionne Warwick’s “Walk on By” as its basis, “Often” might be a track by Solange or Brittany Howard, and most of the songs have spare backing to focus on her jaw-dropping lyrics. Head over to Genius.com for the total pull, however some highlights embody “James Dean/ Let me in them jeans/ Put me on yo hip and let me ride it till I cream”; “Shorty walk-in like she gotta a stick in her ass/ Pretty face, plastic/ It’s giving Kardashian/ Agent 47, I’m giving assassin/ Kick me out the Met but I really run fashion”; “We are enemies, we are foes/ Who are you, what are those?/ You are gross/ Percocet got you playin’ with your nose.” Yet among the album’s catchiest traces are easy, like Kanye West-like “Ugh”s on “Paint the Town Red” or her song-stopping, “Look at me, look at me — ya lookin’?” on “Attention.”
The album is loaded with singles, but it surely’s an actual album, with many of the different songs branching out her sound and exhibiting off her killer movement. With 17 tracks spanning almost an hour, it sags in a few spots, however “Scarlet” units a brand new bar on a number of ranges, and never only for feminine rappers. As she sings on “Fuck the Girls”: “Who dare ride my new Versace coattails?”
