I hear Doja Cat before I see her. I’m standing under basement fluorescents in Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena, being eyed up and down by security guards. Her vocal warm-up drifts through closed doors: “Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh!” Doja’s assistant slips through, gives me the thumbs-up, and ushers me into a dressing room the size of a tennis court, black velvet curtains concealing the walls. The arpeggios continue—“la-la-la-la-la-la-la!”—and then, as my presence is announced, Doja’s silky, supple voice switches to a theater-kid vibrato: “I like ho-o-o-ot guys!”
Behind a black pleather sofa in the far corner of the room, a flaming Ziggy Stardust wig pops up like a periscope and Doja assesses me. Slight and athletic, she moves to the middle of the floor and leans forward to grip her toes in a yoga pose, then springs, grasshopper-like, into a makeup chair, puffing on an ice-blue vape and vamping into a mirror studded with light bulbs. I settle into the chair beside her, and ask—over a playlist that has shifted dramatically from a Heidi Montag deep cut to a gloriously sleazy track by the X-rated British rapper Ceechynaa—how her afternoon was. “I caught chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea, and herpes,” she deadpans, flicking on a tabletop humidifier that releases a theatrical pump of fog. Sounds busy? “Oh yes,” she replies. “A very busy day.”
It’s a few weeks before Christmas, and Doja is here in Australia for the fifth (and just-added sixth—due to demand) date of her world tour in support of Vie, her playful, genre-bending fifth album released in September. An artful pastiche of 1980s R&B, pop, and funk—with nods to Prince, Janet Jackson, cock rock, and German punk singer Nina Hagen—the record is a reminder of Doja’s talent for smart (and sometimes silly) lyrics, killer hooks, and the ability to spit a punning verse. Vie has been accompanied by a typically radical Doja reinvention, this time into high-octane ’80s fashion of archival Claude Montana, Yves Saint Laurent, and more. Onstage she’s been wearing blond mullet wigs, power shoulders, animal prints, and kaleidoscopic, smoky eyeshadow that could be straight out of an Antonio Lopez illustration.
Her hairstylist, Jared Henderson—a puckish wig specialist, a.k.a. @JStayReady—prizes a bonnet off her head and begins massaging her scalp. (“Got to hydrate that melon,” he mutters.) Doja leans toward the humidifier; she’s already coming down with something. “Whether it’s the tail end or I have a new thing, I have no idea. But it’s been very….” She pauses to consider the precise term. “Annoying-dot-com.”
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