By Jude Jones
Since the early 2020s, the culture vultures have been circling Internet darling Doechii, waiting to coronate her music’s new big thing. Now, with a Grammy Award nomination, a feature on Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia, a prominent spot at his Camp Flog Gnaw Festival, and an ultra-viral Tiny Desk Concert under her belt, the bisexual rapstress seems ready to at last snatch her crown.
Photo by Patricia Schlein/Star Max/GC Images.
Of course, Doechii has been poised to do so for a while now. Following the organic, TikTok-driven success of her 2020 track “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” – a sort of psycho-manic class intro in which she spits Nicki Minaj-inflected responses to a slew of “let’s get to know you” questions – she became the first female rapper signed to Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), at the time Kendrick Lamar’s label, and was soon taken on tour by SZA, the experimental R&B singer who remains TDE’s glimmering empress.
Oh the Places You’ll Go, Doechii’s self-funded, self-released 2020 EP put out in “Yucky Blucky”’s wake, was a wake-up call to the industry and what won her that TDE call. As a piece of music, it is experimental and conceptual, named for Dr Seuss’s surrealistic children’s book (his zany wordplay is masterfully matched by Doechii’s linguistic turns – and directly imitated in the effervescent synth-track “Something Real”) and told from the perspective of a kid ‘seven-years-old, going on seventeen centuries,’ navigating the Everglades-like quagmire of Floridian high-school.
Inevitably, much of this is thinly veiled allegory for a prodigious rapper’s coming-of-age. But, given that Oh the Places was dropped when the artist was just 22, there was also much still-bleeding memory to her posturing. Her alma matter was Howard W. Blake High School, a specialist in visual and performing arts in swampy central Tampa, where she learnt ballet, tap dance, cheer, poetry, and musical composition. However, as an oddball queer kid at an inner-city school, she never fit in, despite its ostensible creative credentials. ‘I felt marginalized by my Southern community,’ she told Billboard in a Pride Month love letter, ‘As a bisexual woman living in Tampa, Florida during the early 2000s, I stood out from the perceived norm.’
In the same letter, she describes “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” as an attempt to ‘encapsulat[e] my journey as a Black woman navigating self-discovery, exploring aspects of identity, sexuality, and public perception.’ Oh the Places was an extension of that. On it, she talks about making her Barbie dolls fuck when she was younger on its title track, mythopoesises all her self-doubt in the epic monologue “God”, and yet comes out triumphant and headstrong: ‘I spit the pitch and I make the face / I am the huntress / I am the queen.’ She says that the drag queens of Ybor City, the energy of New York ballroom, and the online community that rallied around her after “Yucky Blucky” were her power sources in this syncopation of shyness into power – ‘Thank you for being there for my uphill battle,’ she writes, ‘this is only the start of a lifetime journey.’
Her start at TDE was a little shaky, haltering her grassroots momentum with a debut big label release, she / her / black bitch, that critics derided as generic, dearth of the electrifying personality and self-styling that first brought her to their attention. Gone were the vocal tics, her almost show-off melodies, the unpredictable tempo shifts. In its place: ‘empty flexes and filler.’
Doechii, in she / her’s wake, took a moment time to recalibrate. she / her / black bitch was meant to be an appetiser on her way to a full-flesh album, yet the derision necessitated a shift in direction; or, maybe just a return to the old. ‘They want real rap from a bitch like they out rappin’ a bitch,’ she complains in 2024’s slyly satirical, delightfully unhinged “Boom Bap”, ‘I just can’t sang a lil’ bit? I mean, that shit was a hit.’ The object of her complaint, it seems, is TDE itself, trying to shape her to an artificial industry standard. (Later, in her boom-bap track “Boiled Peanuts”, she complains ‘label always up my ass like anal beads / why can’t all these label n****’s just let me be?’). If she / her was their version of Doechii, her next drop was going to be hers.
Thus was born Alligator Bites Never Heal, a 19-track mixtape in which Doechii reclaims her narrative (still without fully conceding a debut album, perpetually in the works). And her premise is simple: don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. In its flagship “Denial is a River”, she calls back to “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” and fills us in on her lore by talking to the latter’s same exteriorised voice-in-her-head, tells us everything that has happened since its release: break ups, cheating, getting signed, drug addiction, and ‘platinum record this, viral record that’ (stated flippantly, as if this is no small feat). In the opening track “Stanka Pooh”, she brings back her anxious, relatable self too, wondering, ‘What if I choke on this Slurpee? What if I make it big.’ And in “Nissan Altima”, she proves she can rap (not that she ever needed to), crowning herself ‘the new hip-hop Madonna… the trap Grace Jones.’
This was her critical and personal return to form, even though she spends much of the mixtape dunking on said critics (‘they don’t make statues of critics,’ she notes in bromide on the luscious, “Bound 2”-esque “Profit”). Yet, her post-Alligator Bites success has been more organic than industry plant, despite all the industry chatter and big label backing she has had behind her. She took something of the Chappel Roan path to success; that is, give some feral live performances to give your name buzz on TikTok, an instant-classic NPR Tiny Desk concert to cement your status (hers is the first to feature an all-Black woman ensemble of musicians, hype people, and backing singers), and roll on from there. Now, with her debut album finally promised in 2025, we will have to wait and see. ‘I thought it was all over’ a voice mocks at the start of “Denial is a River.” Evidently, this is just the beginning.
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