In 2023 people started to believe that American rapper Doja Cat had sold her soul to the devil. The social media speculation was endless, the music videos for “Paint The Town Red” and “Attention” were obsessively analysed for their dark and demonic themes. If you saw her perform at Fabric or XOYO in 2019 you might be inclined to believe the rumours; this was the time of brightly coloured polyester wigs sliding halfway down her head, grotty club locations, £15 tickets to watch Doja sing “Bitch I’m a cow/ I don’t say meow/ I go moo” to a bunch of students drunk on vodka and cokes. This could not be further from her 2026 Tour Ma Vie world tour.
Doja Cat floated up on stage at the O2 to greet a melting pot of sub-cultures unified by a uniform of leopard print and black lace. She hovered 10 feet above the ground dressed in white, with the hem of her trousers sweeping the stage floor beneath her. And just like that she disappeared through a trap door in a haze of smoke.
On reappearing, she paid tribute to London; she came back on wearing a lingerie set in Union Jack colours (including a Union Jack g-string pulled over a pair of blue leggings and white fishnets). The crowd went wild. The shouting of the two teenage girls beside me left my ears ringing well into the night.
But the concert was mellow to start with. Doja Cat is known for her humorous, eccentric and larger-than-life internet personality – here she was dialled-down. Accompanied by brass instruments including the saxophone, she began performing songs from her latest album Vie, to a gently swaying crowd. But the real show was yet to begin.
If Taylor Swift puts narcotics into all of her songs, Doja’s older music is laced with something much stronger. I couldn’t tell if the crowd was enchanted or possessed as it bent to the whims of the band playing tracks from the albums Planet Her (2021), Hot Pink (2019) and Amala (2018). Lacy, tiered rara skirts flounced around as the girls moved to the music. From the sultry “Streets” to the empowering “Woman”, the atmospheric shift between each song was palpable. With each subsequent track, the Doja we had watched on our screens seemed to materialise in front of us.
There was no need for impressive sets or numerous costume changes to make the show – Doja herself was the show. She moved around the stage with the natural grace of a dancer (now 30, she has trained in ballet, tap, jazz, breakdance since the age of five, and even the classical Indian dance Bharatanatyam while living in a Californian ashram). The backdrop of the Seventies-inspired disco lights pulsed to match the cadence of the tracks. The choreography did not seem overly rehearsed and perfected; it looked like it came naturally to her, as if she were simply moving to the beat of her music and actually enjoying herself. She engaged with the crowd, joking around, like we were her friends.
“Look at me, look at me/ You lookin’?” She sang. And I was looking, gaping even, alongside tens of thousands of others. I saw that those wigs straight from Amazon belong to the Doja of a previous era. Instead, what I saw was a Grammy-winning artist with 36 billion worldwide streams, Billboard’s 2nd female rapper of the 21st century, and one of the iconic personalities in today’s music industry. Many have sold their souls for less.
[Further reading: Miles Davis’s blues is more alive than ever]
Content from our partners
Related
