Can a widely known artist retain their popularity while being rude to her audience? “Vie,” Doja Cat’s fifth album, released on Sept. 26, may answer that question.
In Doja Cat’s previous album, “Scarlet,” she strove to demonstrate her genius as a rapper, claiming the pop albums she previously released before were mere cash grabs. She stated that pop music no longer sounded exciting for her anymore, and that she’d stop making pop songs. However, in “Vie,” Doja Cat appears to have backtracked, returning to the pop influences that made her famous and produced hits like “Say So” and “Kiss Me More.”
The singer admitted that the album is “a pop-driven project,” and that she perceives herself as a rapper who makes pop music. “I know that I can make pop music, and pop is just that it’s popular,” Doja Cat said in V Magazine. Is she implying she returned to pop only to gain more commercial success?
Throughout her career, Doja Cat has shown she can move effortlessly across genres, and this album confirms her versatility. The 1980s-inspired production blends with her cheeky, ironic and lustful lyrics to reiterate that she can be both a creative rapper and a fairly skillful singer.
“Jealous Type” was the lead single, and it perfectly anticipated the direction of the album and its lyrical content: an ode to romance while holding on to jealousy, yearning and regret. “You’re my person, this my first time, I’m in love / Those men were practice in my past / Don’t be dramatic, let’s have kids,” she adorably sings in “Silly! Fun!” In this, we get a more introspective Doja Cat than the mainly banal or performative storytelling that filled her previous albums. Still, she doesn’t abandon her sexually blunt lyrics in songs like “Cards”: “He’s turned on when I fill this tank up / No bra, fresh beat, watch him scrunch his face up.”
“I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning, I’m doing what I know I know how to do,” Doja Cat stated about her last album in Pitchfork. She was best known for her ability to take on challenges and cross genre boundaries and structured barriers unpredictably.
However, that’s not the case in “Vie.”
After the first couple of songs, the album starts sounding monotonous, unmemorable and formulaic. “If I wasn’t paying close enough attention, I wondered if I was listening to the same song,” Elle’s content strategy manager noted about the album, expressing what I felt perfectly.
It seems that her adaptability got lost in the focus of creating a pop album. Although the album was highly anticipated and she even performed “Jealous Type” at the VMAs to promote it, “Vie” fell short of commercial expectations, considering Doja Cat is one of the most influential artists of our generation.
The recording debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 chart, but “Jealous Type” is the only track on the Billboard Hot 100, and it couldn’t even re-enter Spotify’s Global Top 100 Songs after the album’s release. The second single, “Gorgeous,” debuting at No. 56th on the Billboard Hot 100 doesn’t suggest a stronger commercial performance ahead either.
“This initial lack of interest from the public in reaction to “Vie’s” release simply demonstrates that listeners have raised their voices: the audience has had enough of her arrogance and disrespect. ”
In 2023, Doja Cat called out her fanbase in a since-deleted Threads rampage after they started referring to themselves as “kittenz.”
“My fans don’t get to name themselves s–t. If you call yourself a ‘kitten,’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house,” Doja Cat wrote on Threads.
This came after her alleged negligence toward fans waiting for her in the rain in Paraguay, followed by her complaints that nobody had waited for her. On Threads, she also went as far as to categorize some fans as “miserable h**s” after they accused her partner of emotional abuse, forgetting that listeners are the reason artists like her have a platform.
Her disrespectful attitudes may have once been interpreted as fun and carelessly authentic, but after several instances, we grew weary of listening to an artist who, despite claiming she doesn’t hate her fans, proves the opposite with unexpected emotional outbursts.
“If, for any reason, a project of mine does a little less good than the last one, I don’t want to be up in arms and upset about it. I want to embrace that,” the artist said. Well, it is time for Doja Cat to face the music and acknowledge that her new album is unlikely to have any lasting cultural impact.
With “Vie,” Doja Cat sought to regain her place as a mainstream pop star. Her return to the genre, motivated by the notion that “pop’s what is popular now,” was undermined, as the risks of being recklessly harsh alienated her fans. If Doja Cat wants to regain her cultural and commercial acclaim, she’ll need to stop taking her streams for granted and start hitting the right chords — not just in her lyrics, but in how she engages with fans online and in real life.
Tomy Helman PO ’28 is a music columnist from Argentina, interested in media, culture and politics. His Duolingo streak is over 1660 days.
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