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Doja Cat’s 1980s Extravagance Is Remarkable on ‘Vie’ » PopMatters

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Doja Cat is an all-or-nothing pop star. In 2023, the rapper tweeted to fans, “I don’t love y’all cos I don’t know y’all.” Extremes are her medium. When Doja Cat, whose real name is Amala Dlamini, attended Schiaparelli’s Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show, she wore a red body paint look covered in head-to-toe crystals. With her song “Paint the Town Red”, the absurd look captured Doja’s refined brand of camp. At that show, when the singer crossed paths with beauty mogul Kylie Jenner, who wore a lion’s head on her chest, the pair exchanged a cursory ‘Good to see you’ with each other. Their outlandish costumes were not acknowledged. 

Doja’s fifth album, Vie, French for “live”, is an about-face from its predecessor, 2023’s Scarlet. On that record, Doja sought to prove herself as a rapper, perhaps in response to a 2022 comment from Remy Ma on the podcast Drink Champs: “I don’t think [Doja Cat] is a rapper,” Remy said. While Doja did not respond directly, she tweeted, “The truth is I do tell stories, use punchlines regularly, and prioritize world play frequently. This is what rapping is by definition.”

In response, Scarlet crusaded for rap dominance, but critics said it lost the charm of Doja’s pop-infused early hits. This criticism became the jumping-off point for Vie, which rejects the notion that a need for rap credentials is the singer’s primary motive and establishes Doja as the type of star whose credibility as an artist does not rely on album-by-album critiques. Mixing 1980s pop and R&B on Vie, Doja remains an elusive, genre-bending savant. 

The record’s standout tracks fully embrace 1980s synthpop. The lead single “Jealous Type” bears no trace of another genre, giving Doja room to experiment on the other tracks, while proving the album’s thesis about versatility. The familiarity of 1980s pop brings Doja dangerously close to validating the criticism that she’s not a real rapper. However, by repackaging a maximalist genre in her seductive image, Doja turns herself into an enigma, immune to accusations of pastiche. 

A modern pop star paying homage to the 1980s is not a new idea. Taylor Swift received a synthpop makeover with 1989, and Dua Lipa tried disco on Future Nostalgia. Why does pop keep going back to that decade? During that time, the genre became glamorous. The rock stars of the 1960s were larger than life, and the singer-songwriters of the 1970s were open-hearted and intriguing, but the 1980s made music opulent. As a result, modern celebrities are cartoonish fashion muses. At the 2023 Met Gala, in honor of Karl Lagerfeld, Doja dressed as a cat and “Meow” -ed during interviews. 

While Vie’s main throughline is the 1980s, other elements surface. In “Acts of Service”, Doja Cat’s sultry vocals glide over a laconic R&B soundscape, while dreamy synths allude to the album’s central motif. A psychedelic guitar riff opens “Make It Up”, a trap-inspired plea for forgiveness where indifference becomes a means of seduction. In the irreverent “AAAH MEN!”, Doja recounts a litany of lovers’ shortcomings, but does not wallow. The ease of her delivery over a rapid bassline suggests that any former pain is no longer worth considering. 

The rap verses and catchy chorus of “Gorgeous” tie the album together, reconciling Doja’s nature as a hip-hop provocateur and pop hitmaker. The song’s music video is a parody of a cosmetics commercial, starring Doja alongside models Alex Consani and Anok Yai. The video is sumptuous and luxurious, featuring panoramic shots of glistening bottles of product and close-ups of the stars’ faces.  

The video accomplishes several purposes. Firstly, it continues the album’s 1980s references by depicting the over-the-top beauty trends of that decade. Secondly, it examines Doja’s place in pop. A frequent front-row presence at fashion shows, Doja Cat embodies the marriage of fashion and pop culture. Similarly, her celebrity stemmed from the union of music and the internet. By satirizing commercialized beauty, Doja Cat portrays herself as glamorous while upholding the cultural change that produced her: beauty must be contextualized to have meaning. 

Unlike other celebrities, Doja does not set boundaries with the public to create a mystique. Instead, she critiques the absurdity of her platform. “I got surgery ’cause of the scrutiny,” she admits in “Gorgeous”. “Vegas”, a song Doja recorded for the 2022 biopic Elvis, embodies the main accomplishment of Vie by interpolating the melody of Elvis’ “Hound Dog” over a trap beat. By referencing pop so overtly, Doja finds her own place within the genre. 

At the 2024 Met Gala, Doja Cat and Kylie Jenner crossed paths again, this time in a not-so-polite manner. Instead of a courtesy greeting, red-carpet footage showed Jenner cast a judgmental up-and-down glance in Doja’s direction. Pop culture is like an arena where celebrities utilize various creative media to further their self-expression. As a title, Vie does not have a clear thematic connection to the album’s contents. Is it meant to imply that Doja Cat is living her best life? Given the star’s inscrutable persona, pulling off an extravagant album is a remarkable accomplishment. No matter what criticism she is responding to, Doja Cat lands on all fours. 

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Doja Cat: Vie Album Review
Music

Doja Cat: Vie Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Doja, born in 1995 and influenced by 2000s radio, doesn’t have a deep attachment to the era. There are no explicit tributes to ’80s idols, although she has cited Nina Hagen as an inspiration. (Hagen is “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja told The New York Times. “She has layers to her.” Preach.) The rapper’s main idea about the decade is essentially that it was a time when girls just wanted to have fun—a message very compatible with the Doja Cat experience. Swinging synth-funk cut “Take Me Dancing,” another team-up with SZA, presents clubgoing as the perfect post-coital digestif. “You’re so raw, boy, and you’re so romantic/When you fuck me right, and then you take me dancing,” Doja sings on the hook, skipping across the roller-rink-ready beat in her airy upper register. She’s just as loose and fun-forward on the slow jam “All Mine,” cooing and harmonizing with herself over gleaming synths and keys. For Doja, the ’80s is a whole vibe.

That fuzzy connection to the decade mostly makes for a breezy listen, but Doja runs into trouble when the pastiche boxes her in. Her singing and rapping are uncharacteristically binary on most songs, notably “Jealous Type” and R&B track “Acts of Service,” where the cool melodies mostly keep time until Doja spits. This has never been a problem in her music before, but here when she switches from rapping to singing, it can feel as if she’s featuring herself rather than changing direction. All her expression and color seems to get reserved for the rhymes.

That’s the case on the groovy “Couples Therapy,” which features some of her deftest singing but really erupts with personality once she starts rapping. “Cussing you out, you the one I resent/Cussing you out, I delete and re-send/Sorry, I got three selves, one’s 12/Sorry, you gave me hell once felt/Sorry, honeymoon phase over now,” Doja raps, her repeated pauses and phrases mirroring a back-and-forth with a partner. She’s worked to close the distance between her rapping and singing, but Vie’s retro framework sharpens the disparity; the emphasis on homage seems to discourage Doja from filling these songs with the constant transitions that propel older tracks like “Need to Know” and “Talk Dirty.” Where on previous Doja Cat records every little melody and tic and punchline felt memorable, here it’s always the rap that stands out.

The exception is highlight “Make It Up,” which notably departs from the album’s retro aesthetic. Gliding across keys and bass kicks, Doja swings between melodic rapping and crooning while ad-libbing in both modes, the constant motion culminating in a quiet countermelody that accents the final hook and becomes the outro. It’s not an accident that it’s one of the stickiest songs. Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them. Pop rap has never been the oxymoron the heads want it to be; it’s just one of the genre’s infinite permutations. Doja could use the reminder.

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Doja Cat Tries to Reframe Her Purpose in Pop on Vie: Review
Music

Doja Cat’s Vie Tries to Reframe Her Purpose in Pop: Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

If everything means nothing to Doja Cat, what actually matters? Fans, stans, and casual listeners are now just as familiar with the pop/rap star’s chaotic provocations as they are with her music. In May 2023, she dismissed her breakthrough albums, unprovoked: “Planet Her and Hot Pink were cash-grabs and y’all fell for it,” she wrote. “Now I can go disappear somewhere and touch grass with my loved ones on an island while y’all weep for mediocre pop.” Months later, she brushed off her hard-edged 2023 hip-hop album Scarlet with equal irreverence: “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” Doja told the New York Times earlier this month.

Doja Cat’s talent has never been a question, but rather how she chooses to engage with it. She has historically been deeply unserious in her assessments of her own work — but with Vie, it’s clear that she’s seeking to understand herself a bit more broadly this time around. “Jealous Type,” the album’s New Jack Swing-inflected lead single, indirectly illustrates the conflict of Doja as an eager artist who feels both overexposed and misunderstood: “Boy, let me know if this is careless, I/ Could be torn between two roads that I just can’t decide/ Which one is leading me to hell or paradise?”

Duality has always made Doja Cat a more compelling artist, and Vie proves she thrives when she’s embodying every version of herself. Instead of committing to one lane, she treats the album as an experiment in blending eras and styles. She stands under the neon haze of the ’80s, fusing sleazy synths with the glossy pulse of R&B of the era and the grandiosity of glam rock. Vie also doesn’t forget that rapping is still in her arsenal — even if used sparingly.

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After spending the last album cycle hyper-focused on hip-hop, Doja returns here to the comparably softer space of pop — but she doesn’t abandon the grit she picked up along the way. She finally seems less concerned with choosing between her creative instincts and more comfortable letting them co-exist, treating her full range of talents as equally valid tools rather regarding one or another like an affliction she needs to shake off.

On the opening track, “Cards,” saxophone bleeds through the left speaker before evening out and expanding to a soundscape that would be fit for electro-funk band Zapp & Roger. Doja Cat slinks and prowls as she vacillates between singing and rapping, setting the thematic tone of the album: “Maybe in time, we’ll know/ Maybe I’ll fall in love, baby/ Maybe we’ll win some hearts/ Gotta just play your cards.”

It’s a generic mission on its surface — deconstructing and rebuilding love in all its iterations — but it’s direct in its simplicity, which has often powered the best pop of the past and present. Which makes sense, as Jack Antonoff, the purveyor of dominant, era-crossing pop, has his fingerprints all over a Doja Cat album for the first time, producing on nine of the 15 total tracks.

In addition to “Jealous Type,” Antonoff’s contributions sparkle most on “AAAHH MEN!” Sampling the theme from the 1980s program Knight Rider, the song inserts itself into the lineage of hip-hop songs that have lifted the memorable synth, joining the ranks of Timbaland & Magoo’s “Clock Strikes” and Busta Rhymes’ “Turn It Up (Remix) / Fire It Up.” As averse as she seems to the pure “rapper” label, Doja can spit her ass off, and she demonstrates that most clearly here: “Men need to cry more, boys need to work/ But not when he beg his employee to flirt/ Ain’t nobody finna force me to twerk/ When you’re finished with your goon sesh, join me in church.”

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Doja Cat 'Vie' Review
Music

Doja Cat ‘Vie’ Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

When Doja Cat decides to go Eighties, she doesn’t mess around. On Vie, Doja devotes an entire album to the pop and R&B sounds of the Hair Decade, an album full of pastels and neon and mega-cheese sax solos. She’s always had a thing for Eighties synth-pop, as in hits like “Kiss Me More” and “Say So.” But this time she goes all the way. The album opens in “Cards” with a sample from the Knight Rider theme, and closes in “Come Back” with a sample from the soundtrack of the Brian DePalma/Melanie Griffith erotic thriller Body Double. You can’t accuse Doja of not doing her Eighties homework.

On her last album, 2023’s Scarlet, she went for hip-hop aggression, out to prove herself as a confrontational street-smart rapper. But on Vie, she’s all about Eighties synth-pop — a lot of Prince, a lot of Janet Jackson, a lot of Klymaxx and Nu Shooz and Naked Eyes and Billy Ocean, plus basically every hit that Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis ever produced. You can practically hear the shoulder pads. She spends these songs in a romantic shake-you-down mood, boasting, “I smell like ice cream and pheromones.”

Vie might be an erratic listen, but that’s why it sounds like Doja Cat. She seems to take pride in building one of the most entertainingly maddening careers around — such high highs, such low lows. This year she’s dropped the excellent summer single “Jealous Type,” produced by Jack Antonoff and Y2K, but also showed up at the Oscars for the bizarre James Bond tribute, belting “Diamonds Are Forever” and nailing about .007 percent of the notes. She makes routine disasters part of her charm. She’s a fun pop star in a very old-school way — she doesn’t take herself too seriously, and is more than willing to fall on her face from time to time.

She brings back SZA, her most famous duet partner, for “Take Me Dancing,” which goes right for the faux-Prince funk throb of Ready 4 The World. (It’s a real achievement to sound like Ready 4 the World but NOT sound like Prince.) SZA is the only guest artist on the album, which is a surprise, considering it couldn’t be too hard to get some of her favorite Eighties one-hit wonders on the phone. It’s no “Kiss Me More,” but it’s frothy pleasure, with SZA on hand to boast “I’m beyond the drugs you need.” Doja coos the chorus, “You’re so raw, boy, you’re so romantic/You fuck me right and you take me dancing.” 

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“Come Back” and “Stranger” are standout Prince-style jams, dance-floor bangers with funk bass and sax solos that go off the deep end, somewhere in between early Quarterflash and Christopher Cross. She also pulls off slow jams like “Acts of Service,” where Doja reveals, “I just deleted Raya, that must mean that I’m your provider.”  In the falsetto ballad “All Mine,” she drops another strictly-for-the-hardcore Eighties reference when she says “Grab him and take him” — a quote from Grace Jones, when she played a Bond villain in A View to a Kill.

Jack Antonoff is executive producer here, doing nine of the tracks, and this concept is right in his sweet spot, given that he’s a hardcore Eighties geek — as any Swiftie can tell you, he and Taylor knew they were destined to work together the first time they bonded over the snare drum sound in Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy.” Also, given that Doja dropped Vie a week away from The Life of a Showgirl, you have to give it up for her extremely Swiftian song titles: “Gorgeous,” “Stranger,” “Lipstain” (great title, that), “All Mine,” Take Me Dancing.” That’s half the lyrics of “New Romantics” right there.

So the production is impeccable, getting the period details right and exact, down to the last slap-bass throb, while also sounding fresh and up to date. The weak spot on Vie is the songwriting, since few of these tunes have a dynamic hook that you can imagine crowding the competition for a Top 40 rotation slot between Madonna and Gregory Abbott. Most of the songs work the same formula — featherweight pop tunes with brief rap interludes — so they tend to blend together even when they’re quality filler.

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“Aaahh Men!” is an uptempo highlight, with Doja lamenting that she can’t live with ‘em but can’t live without ‘em, asking herself “Am I gay or am I just angry” while saying, “I feel shame because you’re such a pain / But my DNA wants your D in me.” Yet she holds out hope with her ideal of romantic bliss, promising, “You act right, you’ll get a movie, limo/Two chains, dinner, and a smooch down below/And all new fans yelling ‘You my hero!’” She’s playing remarkably nice with the boys here, as in “Make It Up,” where she reveals, “Did you hear about it? I’m a submissive top.” “Silly! Fun!” lives up to the title, with the Eighties synths and vocal chants straight from the Saturday-morning cartoons. “Lipstain” is her sultry ode to leaving hickeys on a man as a way of claiming her turf. As she says, “Every girl’s a queen but I’m the boss/We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” She often sings in French all over the album, as if paying her respects to Prince’s Euro-gigolo performance in Under the Cherry Moon. 

Doja couldn’t sound further from the rap bluster she displayed on Scarlet. On Vie, she veers closer to the high-gloss pop of her breakthrough albums Planet Her and Hot Pink — yes, the albums she later repudiated as “mediocre pop” done as a “cash grab.” (Nobody renounces her own hit albums faster.) But it’s the sound of Doja Cat at her most playful and unpredictable.

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