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Doja Cat
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Doja Cat is the stage name of Amala Dlamini, an American rapper, singer and songwriter, born in 1995 in Los Angeles. Her father is a South African performer, her mother an American graphic designer. As a child she lived for a few years in an ashram in Agoura Hills, where the jazz musician Alice Coltrane was the spiritual leader. Later she took up breakdancing and popping and locking. At sixteen she left school and taught herself to sing, rap and produce, with beats she found on YouTube.
Music and breakthrough
In 2012 she attracted attention with So High on SoundCloud. In 2014 her first EP Purrr! appeared, and in the same year she signed to Kemosabe and RCA Records. Her debut album Amala from 2018 hardly made a mark, but the absurd Mooo! became an internet meme that year. With Hot Pink in 2019 she broke through, mainly thanks to Say So, which spread at lightning speed via TikTok. After that came the albums Planet Her in 2021 and Scarlet in 2023.
Influence
Her music shifts between rap, r&b, pop and dance and changes tone from funny to soft. She raps and sings in the same track and plays with styles, even to the point of a metal version of Say So at an awards show. Doja Cat shows how an artist in the 2020s breaks through via social media and viral clips, before a record company knows its plan.