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There’s a popular saying on the social networking site formerly known as Twitter: “I miss the old Dodge.”
With the release of her album Scarlet This fall, pop star Doja Cat debuted a new look. She ditched her colorful lace cuffs for a shaved head. She eschewed skin-baring costumes in favor of brutal, demon-inspired looks. Oh, and she told her fans—repeatedly and aggressively—to fuck off.
Planet She the singer built her career on being a pop star who, like ordinary people, enjoyed the best things the Internet had to offer. She constantly wrote shit, did comedy Instagram Lives, and got her first real fame in the music industry thanks to a green screen video of her singing a song with the lyrics “Bitch, I’m a cow.” She was knowledgeable enough to enjoy internet comedy, but didn’t feel like she was selling anything, and took a playful approach to promoting her music, which most fans appreciated.
But in the lead-up to Doja’s new album – and with it the sudden appearance of Doja fully immersed in the dark side of the Internet – users have intensified discussions surrounding her online interactions, homophobic comments and past connections to obscure chat rooms. numbers. On Friday, the singer posted a selfie to Instagram showing that, in addition to her bejeweled eyebrows and rhinestone crown, she was wearing a T-shirt with a photo of Sam Hyde on it. (Hyde is an infamous comedian, best known for his show Adult Swim. Extreme Million Dollar Gifts: World Peace, which was canceled due to reports of racist, sexist and far-right content. Whenever there is a school shooting, 4chan fans spread the rumor that Hyde was the shooter, a disinformation hoax so common that it once fooled U.S. Congressman Vicente Gonzalez.) After strong backlash from fans, Dodge deleted and re-uploaded the photo, this time cropped. to remove Hyde’s face, but not without changing the caption to include a slew of eye-rolling emojis—39 to be exact. The prevailing criticism seems to be that this is an era that Doja needs to leave behind, that there is a past version of the singer that would have given fans the same quality of music, without any perceived neo-Nazi sympathies or connections. There’s just one problem: the old Dodge isn’t dead. This version has been here all along – people just didn’t pay attention to it.
In fact, most past controversies about Dodge have centered around the fact that she’s too online for her own good. At the height of her initial fame in 2020, a video of Doja in a Tinychat room leaked online, rolling around on a bed and saying the n-word. Video chat has been associated online with alt-right and white supremacist movements, and fans have described Doja’s presence in such spaces. (Or as rapper NORE called it, Doja was “in race chats with her legs showing.”) In a 2020 statement, she denied being involved in any race conversations but said calling her friends white supremacists was “fucking stupid.” There are also past (and now deleted) social media posts from 2015 in which Doja used homophobic slurs to describe Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator, as well as her staunch defense of her long-rumored boyfriend, J. Cyrus. Cyrus, a streamer and comedian, has been accused of manipulating and emotionally abusing members of his team and the Twitch community. (Cyrus issued a since-deleted apology on December 20, 2020, admitting that he had hurt many of his moderators but was working on himself.) In short, Doja Cat has long been associated with her extreme views online. The difference is that as she becomes more famous, she seems less inclined to hide it.
On September 22, Doja Cat released Scarleta 15-track record that challenged all criticism of the star’s fame and virality. rolling stone writer Larisha Paul described the album as Doja “fighting in the trenches of an IDGAF war”, failing to cement her internet troll status by showing cracks in her bravado. “Seventy percent almost hourly Scarlet trying to convince you that Dodge doesn’t care,” Paul writes. “Even though she’s come out with hyper-specific speculation about what exactly it is, she’s not bothered by it.” But as her controversies continue beyond the release of her album, Doja becomes a pop star who seems determined to distort the valid criticisms people throw her way.
A small—and male—contingent of the “I Miss the Old Dodge” crowd seemed fixated on the singer’s past appearance, comments that allowed the vocalist to spin legitimate concerns about her edgy obsessions and past ties to the alt-right into a hazy picture. applause for fans with parasocial relationships. “I don’t even know you,” she wrote to a fan on Threads in July. “Watching all these people unfollow makes me feel like I’ve conquered the big beast that’s been holding me back for so long,” she commented on Instagram after seeing her follower count drop. “I don’t care what you think about my personal life, I never have had one and never will. Goodbye and good riddance, you pathetic whores.”
At Doja Cat’s 2021 rolling stone On the cover, her team and managers cited her past Internet controversies as an example of how a child of the Internet blossomed into her newfound fame. “When you deal with a real artist, everyone makes mistakes. Everyone says different things. I’d be lying to you if I said she wasn’t nervous (about her time online),” her manager Gordan Dillard said. “But Doja is becoming an adult. She’s growing up. She’s human. And I can never be mad at her for being herself. She is who she is.”
But at 27, Doja Cat isn’t a kid who accidentally went too far on Facebook while her parents are away. She’s an adult with a big platform who apparently thinks wearing a neo-Nazi T-shirt is just annoying and everyone is too sensitive. And as she continues her career, Doja Cat’s actions are more like those of an adult pop star who has no desire to learn at all. She screamed for people to pay attention to her. Perhaps it’s time to do it.