Doja Cat Looks to the Past to Create Her Own Scarlet Moment

This is the era of real flowering of women in rap. A pair of peak personality superstars, Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, are vying for supremacy. A second wave of rising stars are firmly established, including Megan Thee Stallion, Latto and Ice Spice. A seemingly endless supply of future gadgets is emerging from TikTok, which has done for women in hip-hop what record labels and radio stations simply haven’t done: let them be themselves and let them be found.

Too often, though, Doja Cat is left out of this conversation—perhaps because she’s too quick. A frisky performer who can rap and sing, she shines most prominently in songs that show, but don’t highlight, what a nuanced rapper she can be. Her two biggest hits, “Say So” and “Kiss Me More,” are quasi-disco-pop revivalists, and while her rhymes are sharp and tart, they are almost drowned out by the sheen of the production.

So it’s notable that “Paint the Town Red,” the lead single from her fourth album Scarlet—and the second No. 1 song of her career—is something else: a light, airy, almost disarmingly laid-back hip-hop song. , woven into a motley sample of Dionne Warwick’s version of “Walk on By.” Doja Cat knocks deftly and deftly, and the cheerful horns alternate between polite and stern.

But even as a hip-hop song, it is an exception in the current climate. Throughout “Scarlet,” Doja Cat has a disarmingly accurate ear for hip-hop, showing that she’s far less interested in making songs in the style of today’s biggest stars than in reminiscing about earlier eras, be it then the early 1990s or early 2010s.

She does this not in a particularly nostalgic or imitative manner, but rather as decoration. “Can’t Wait” is yet another hip-hop song that uses the signature drums from the Honey Drippers’ “Impeach the President” and is the first to address intense romantic affection, with clever imagery such as “I want to be you have a stubborn crust of shells. There’s a kind of confusion in the production that makes the song feel contemporary, but most of the components would have been at home three decades ago.

This is repeated on the edgy “____ the Girls (FTG),” which sounds like it could have been produced by 90s New York rap stalwarts like Diamond D or Lord Finesse; and on “Ouchies”, filled with the chaotic, fast-paced energy of the late 1980s.

Doja Cat also changes up her rapping technique, reminiscent of past eras. “Love Life” nods to the mid-90s proto-neo-soul of Groove Theory, and Doja Cat pairs it with a percussive flow reminiscent of Digable Planets’ Mecca Ladybug. And “Balut,” the muscular, boom-bap track at the end of the album, full of self-indulgent punchlines: “Glass houses, I don’t really like keeping my rocks there/Oh well, I’ll buy another property for $4 million.” — sounds like it could appear in Rokus’ Soundbombing series.

Lyrically, “Scarlet” has two main themes: Doja Cat’s dominance and her lust. In Skull and Bones she embodies the first:

I look like I have something that you hate.
And believe me baby, God doesn’t play with hate like that
So you’ll be very upset when he chooses Kat.
Be number one on the charts all over the map.

This is the archetypal Doja Cat: she’s not usually a long story teller, but a rapper who likes to return to a rhyme again and again, from different angles, working on a specific sound until it becomes almost tantric. Sometimes she raps about fights with fans or observers (“It’s a grade, it’s some hate/It’s an engagement I could use”) and sometimes about fights with peers (“Who dares ride in my new Versace tailcoats?”). And her songs about sex, like “Agora Hills” and “Often,” are raunchy and light-hearted.

“Scarlet” is more uneven than Doja Cat’s last two albums, simultaneously more inventive and more unstable. But it is also her most promising and hopeful album yet. There are countless templates for women in hip-hop right now, and she has no interest in sticking to any of them. Her path to and through this genre is unparalleled among her contemporaries. If she’s being overlooked in the current conversation about hip-hop, maybe that’s exactly what she wants.

Doja Cat
“Scarlet”
(Kemosabe Records/RCA)