Ode To The Doechii Way
What is it about the rapper that makes her star power so unique?
By now, you know that Doechii is dominating. Not just in hip-hop, but in life.
Since the Tampa, FL phenom dropped her critically-acclaimed mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal, late last summer, she’s kept her foot on necks with her rollout, a plan that’s flaunted her infinite creativity and star power and rewarded her in ways that continue to break ground in hip-hop.
The trap Grace Jones won her first Grammy in February for ABNH and has since been everywhere in the best way possible. Fashion shows, magazine covers, TV appearances, more awards, more fests, more trends. More more more. Her rise has even inspired fans to look back into her archives. Her highest charting song to-date, “Anxiety” is thanks to a five-year-old YouTube freestyle over the “Somebody That I Used To Know” beat. (Don’t you just love when you can get credit for work you already did?!)
She’s blowing up so big right now, she got an onstage cosign from Lauryn Hill and got accused of being an industry plant all within the same week. That’s how you know she’s on forreal.
The story of Doechii’s breakthrough hasn’t left my mind all year. I’ve listened to her since 2021 and known she’s had the it-factor. She’s been a star. Now, she’s a new leader. A crusader even. She’s got the talent, the tenacity, the hunger and the label. But, so do a lot of people. What is it about Doechii? What’re the building blocks of her foundation that make her come-up so distinct?
Let’s break them down.
Radical Vulnerability
The last time I talked with Doechii was in early 2023. I was interviewing her for an episode of the podcast Louder Than A Riot. This was post-“Persuasive” but pre-“What It Is (Block Boy),” a pivotal time for her artistry where you had to actually be tapped into unapologetically Black, art house rap antics to be aware of her. This was when she referred to her fanbase the coven, not yet the swamp. Years before an adrenaline-injecting, heart-stopping tour, viral performances on late night TV and Tiny Desk.
Years before her dream collab with Tyler, The Creator was made into a reality that caused alt-rap fans to shed a few pseudo-thug tears. Years before her sickening style transformation for the ABNH era; A swampcore uniform of cornrowed, preppy Thom Browne, Gucci and Miu Miu ensembles and snatchy face tape to signal she’s the sexy, calculated, fully dialed-in rap nerd the game’s been missing.
In the timeline of her journey, 2023 was actually one of her darkest years. Despite being signed to a major label and supplying fans with well-performing viral tracks, Doechii had lost sight of herself. The trending audio was checking all the boxes for others but lacking the creative substance she craved of her music. She sums up these timeline plot points on the centerpiece track of ABNH, “DENIAL IS A RIVER”:
"Platinum record" this, "Viral record" that
I'm makin' so much money, I'm all over the net
I'm movin' so fast, no time to process
And, no, I'm not in a gang, but I'm always on set
Wristwatch, drip drop, labels want the TikToks
Now I'm makin' TikTok music, what the fuck?
I need a cleanse, need a detox
But we ain't got time to stop, the charts need us.
The topics of our chat flowed into, well, a few different places: Pronouns, colorism, making her first big budget music video, industry politics, fits and starts of inspiration, resisting body policing. But at its core, the convo kept coming back to radical vulnerability; That depth of honesty that seems so naked and raw that it's irrational, almost antithetical to what’s required for survival.
She called the video for her major label debut single, “Crazy,” “a symbol of vulnerability, but also ultimate power.” Thinking back to her YouTube vlogging days (the same source from which “Anxiety” sprung), she told me, “I realized I was just trying to work it out, like… I was trying to work out who I was as an artist, as a creative, trying to work out my purpose, who I wanted to be in life. And that’s the same thing I’m doing now, I’m just doing it through music publicly.”
If Millennials are all about ‘trusting the process,’ then Gen Z is definitely about ‘showing the process.’ And like many Gen Z bbys, the 26-year-old artist has a pretty robust digital footprint. She was once a high school vlogger doing story times about breaking her arm, getting a new boyfriend, getting fired from Chipotle. In the vlogs, she’s learning how she likes her eyeliner, what hairstyle suits her face shape, how to set boundaries with friends, and the best way to record freestyles on her MacBook. You know, the typical building blocks of life.
But in her case specifically, Doechii got serious with her shit around 2019. She made a point to document her creative awakening on YouTube by filming her 12-week practice of The Artist’s Way. Julia Cameron's 1992 self-help book has been renowned for years as a creative roadmap for tapping into your power. Some say going through practice is the soulful equivalent of unlocking your full brain power.
Now, in the shadow of her Grammy win, there’s mini clips of Doechii’s YT journey circulating all over the Internet.
Doechii’s initial video introducing the journey, uploaded in December 2019, is titled “A course in discovering and recovering your creative self.” When watched all together, these videos unfold like something of a True Life docuseries. There’s clips where she’s learning how to make decisions based on her internal voice, her gut instinct. She learns how to push through the periods where she hates her art. She learns how to create without worrying about being perceived. She taps into her messy, silly, vulgar, childlike instincts of creative play.
It’s honestly a treasure trove of information and by digital age standards, it's some of the most vulnerable material any artist — let alone a rapper — has ever left for people to find. The fact that she and her label have still left these YouTube videos up shows a commitment to that vulnerability in her artistry as she’ll continue to ascend.
Studious In Practice and In Pursuit
If you see Doechii perform even once, you know she was meant to live on a stage. Her performing arts school background shines through the extension of her limbs. It fuels her breath control. It informs her playful motivation to rework arrangements. Her whole energy is frenetic yet precise. Like Chaka or Tina or Janet or Doja, her movements become one with the music and her lyrics. She never gets lost in the rhythm of the moment, she begets it.
There are plenty of clips of how hard her performances hit when it all goes right. But what about when something goes wrong?
As she was on her Grammys campaign last November, I got to see Doechii perform at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. It was for a Rolling Stone event. Despite the venue, it was obviously a stuffy, “C-suite’s big night out” type of crowd in the front rows.
Doechii was one of a few performers that night, in and outside of hip-hop. When it was her set time, she exploded from stage left with all the charisma I’d expected. The problem was, as she started to sing a jazzy, swing-style rendition of “Persuasive,” her mic wasn’t working!
It’s a frustrating moment for anyone, especially in front of a crowd. It’s a little thing that can knock you off kilter, causing the nerves to rush in. But Doe barely missed a beat. She signaled to the stage hand she needed a new mic, but her eyes remained fixed on all the eyes staring back at her. Her body language remained confident. She met the moment and she went even harder. She threw her whole body – her whole instrument – into that performance. By the end, she earned a standing ovation from the crowd with all the corporate suits Shazaming and Googling her.
I jotted down the quickest lil recap of the moment on my IG story and like I wrote there, she changed the whole frequency of the room. Her star power isn’t only innate, it’s informed by her studious ability to learn and adapt.
Divergent Audacity
Doechii’s no longer the subcultural “little Miss. Who Are You?” baby sis of Top Dawg Entertainment. She’s a full-fledged rap star right now who’s existing at odds with the original definition of the term. By general accounts, Doechii is one of the most unlikely stars to shine this bright in the history of the rap game. As a commercial space dominated by stories of cis-het Black men and their catharsis, fears, fantasies and escapism, Doechii’s success is a transgression to hip-hop’s norms.
She’s a darkskin, bisexual Black woman who raps circles around a good 80% of them and who thinks being a straight man is a dating red flag. Her comment about being against dating straight men during a First We Feast interview is what spiraled into accusations of her being an industry plant who only popped up overnight to push the new “gay agenda” in hip-hop.
Idiotic? Definitely. Homophobic? Clearly. Unexpected? Not at all.
When the not-so-uncommon insult in today’s music media machine was recently hurled her way, it showed that, even in her come-up, Doechii’s still being harassed and underestimated. Every time she steps on a stage or in front of a mic, she knows she’s working against that. But she also knows that by being on the stage, in front of that mic, she’s speaking to every Black woman who's been called weird, crazy, fast, ugly and/or difficult (Spoiler alert: All of us.)
There’s a reason why, even as her discography grows, she continues to put “Black Girl Memoir” from her 2020 mixtape, Oh the Places You’ll Go, in her set lists.
Please don't fuck with me
This head on my shoulder's been weighed down with a hundred beads
I'm combin' out my trauma like my mama, do bdb's
A hot comb'll hit you with third degree
Burns around your neck for making moves that you shouldn't be
Her success represents an offense to the over-indexed ideology that Black women, especially darkskin women, exist only as sex toys, backbones, babymoms or bottom bitches. Her ascension is an affront to the status quo. That’s how most revolutions start off.
While there was some online discourse (using that term very lightly here) that quickly showed receipts and refuted the claim of her being a plant, Doechii herself kept it cute on the chatter. But when she recently accepted the award for Woman of The Year at Billboard’s Annual Women in Music Awards show, she gracefully shut down any claim that her success is anyone else’s design.
“I want everyone to hear me clearly when I say it is not a button, it is our brain. It is not a machine, it is our leadership. It is not a conspiracy, it’s our vulnerability. It is not an agenda, it’s God,” she declared.
So, Doechii’s not the first artist who threw herself into her work and threw caution into the wind. She’s not the first artist to put her journey on YouTube. She's not the first artist to follow The Artist’s Way. But who she is is someone providing a guided view through a vista of what’s really required to be a true artist and a superstar right now: A balance between radical vulnerability, studious pursuit and divergent audacity.
Doechii’s genius is rooted in her study of the greats and the deep study of herself. In her kinetic stage presence and in her ability to reimagine her work over and over. Heading into the spring and summer months, I guarantee she’ll stay the topic of conversation after big moments like Coachella, the Met Gala and more.
These are the factors of Doechii's stardom that make her so standout and so necessary right now. And what’s better is they’re elements any one of us can borrow and build with. Doechii’s momentum is manifested, conditioned and hard-won and its motion pushes anybody who wants to achieve their goals to do the work with the building blocks provided. Just follow the Doechii way.
In the between time, continued Doechii The Don reading material:
Cutting room floor gems from Doechii’s The Cut cover story, courtesy of writer Danya Issawi.
The new series Parallels by Scene Serene is an exploration of women sampling women complete with a DJ mix. Natelegé Whaley features Doechii, Beyoncé, Amara La Negra, Sister Nancy, Junglepussy, The Clark Sisters and more in the mix. So simple yet so epic.
This Doechii interview for Rolling Stone about ditching the formula remains one of my favorites ever. Shoutout to producer and host Delisa Shannon for this one. It’s a gem for the archives.