FEATURE:
Spotlight: Revisited
PHOTO CREDIT: John Jay
underwhelming or lacking if I include Doechii in Spotlight: Revisited. Seeing as she is a huge artist now who is very much on her way to the mainstream, one might not be able to label her as a ‘new’ artist. However, as this feature is me shining new light on artists I originally included in my Spotlight feature, I wanted to return to Doechii. To me, she is the most essential and finest voice in Hip-Hop right now. I love her music. So distinct, compelling and original, this is someone who is going to the big leagues. Hip-Hop and Rap still have an issue with sexism and misogyny. Doechii is an artist who will inspire other women coming through. There is nobody on the scene who writes like her. I am fascinated to see where she goes. Her 2024 mixtape/album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, was received to critical acclaim. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the mixtape. First, I want to get to a few recent interviews with Doechii. The first interview I want to spotlight is from The Cut. Fresh from her GRAMMY win, the unapologetic Florida rapper was only getting started. The rest of this year is going to be massive for her:
“Though she has experienced this kind of virality before, mostly on TikTok, where her songs tend to soundtrack everything from puppeteering performances to “Get Ready With Me” videos, this moment feels different. She’s collected co-signs from Kendrick Lamar (he called her “the hardest out”) and Tyler, the Creator, who told me, “She’s really sick. Like, super-duper-duper-duper good.” And then there are those Grammy nominations: Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album. She’d go on to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, giving a heartfelt speech to boot. Since the category’s creation in 1996, she said, “two women have won …” Then she corrected herself: “THREE women have won! Lauryn Hill, Cardi B, and Doechii!” The moment was capped off by a performance of her songs “Catfish” and “Denial Is a River,” in which she rapped with a fleet of dancers wearing Thom Browne. (“This is serious,” she told me between rehearsals before the show. “It reminds me of when I would do talent shows and it was cute for everybody, but it was very, very serious for me.”) Right after the ceremony, she dropped a celebratory track, “Nosebleeds,” with a gramophone as the single’s cover art. On the song, she boasts, “Everybody wanted to know what Doechii would do if she didn’t win / I guess we’ll never …,” seemingly referencing Kanye West’s infamous Best Rap Album winner’s speech at the 2005 Grammys.
Doechii’s career has been operating in hyperspeed ever since the artist released her 2020 single “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” an acerbic, wry song about bits of her childhood — food stamps, Lisa Frank lipstick, and getting caught masturbating. The title was inspired by Barbara Park’s Junie B. Jones children’s-book series. “I was a lot like Junie. She did what she wanted. She was very curious, and she just went for it,” Doechii says, settling into a small leather couch back at her hotel, both legs crossed beneath her, brown leather boots still on. “Even though she had her issues, she had this feminine rage about her that I really, really liked.” Since “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” she has received pressure from her label and fans to make cookie-cutter hits to please the masses, but she pushes back: “I don’t like making music just for a moment. I like to make music for therapy, for an inner experience, an inner purpose, and not just for an algorithm.”
Doechii was born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon in Florida. She says her dad writes raps in his spare time and her mother, the more “analytical” one, primarily raised her. She grew up in Tampa, a place she says will always inform her body of work. Her “Swamp Princess” persona and the reptilian titles of much of her discography? That’s all Florida. But it’s not only her artistry that’s been influenced by the Sunshine State — “My chaos, my freedom, just my raunchiness,” she says. Doechii remembers a night at her grandmother’s house by the railroad tracks when she, her cousins, and her younger sisters, all still children, tore off their shoes and began racing on a patch of concrete. “The whole family was outside barefoot. The little kids would race. The aunties. Then we made Grandma and Grandpa race. We just do it bare feet,” she tells me. “That’s the most Florida shit.”
When she was in the sixth grade, she says God told her to write down the phrase “I am Doechii.” The decision saved her life. “I don’t want to get super-dark,” she says, raising her eyebrows when she looks at me. “I was getting bullied so bad that I was thinking about killing myself. I realized, Oh, fuck, I’m gonna kill myself and then I’m gonna be the only one dead. The bullies aren’t gonna be with me, and everything they said is not coming with me either. I would just be gone,” she says matter-of-factly before cracking a half-mouthed grin. “And then I was like, Fuck that!” She’s almost yelling now, leaning back into the couch and waving her hands playfully. “Fuck that shit! I’m not going for that! And this wash of peace came over me, and I received ‘I am Doechii.’ But it was more like this feeling of — I made a choice, a decision. I am the most important character in this movie. This is my motherfucking movie.”
Doechii’s sound is a callback to old-school ’90s hip-hop; playful, up-tempo contemporary spoken word; pop-culture references; and Gen-Z shitposting. On Alligator Bites, which she says is for “the girls and the gays that have a passion inside of them and are sassy, independent, strong, but they need an extra push,” she mocks the hamster wheel of the music industry, blows raspberries, and trolls her own label, yet still pumps the brakes on the irony by peppering in soulful bridges. She claims the mixtape’s name popped into her head via the same higher power that christened her with her stage name. “God told me to do it, and I did it,” she says. The meaning of the mixtape’s title still evades her, but Doechii trusts the process: “I know that God will reveal to me what it means later.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam
On “Nissan Altima,” Doechii flexes her rapping chops and gets cheeky about her bisexuality — “She munchin’ on the box while she watchin’ Hulu” — in just two minutes. “Denial Is a River” is a traversing, therapeutic conversation. “People are a little bit worried about you … / Why don’t you just tell me what’s been goin’ on?” the other voice asks before Doechii admits to her experiences with drugs and alcohol: “I like pills, I like drugs … / I like daydrinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood … / The shit works, it feels good, and my self-worth’s at an all-time low.” It’s a relatable cycle of self-destruction, and Doechii’s vulnerability is striking. “I have moments where I am worried and I’m like, Maybe I should dial it back because that’s a little too honest, but I don’t give a fuck because I know that in the end, it’s going to pay off more for me to be real,” she says. “In my music, I have to be raw and explicit or else it’ll make me uncomfortable. I don’t like secrets.” To record the mixtape, she locked herself away for an entire month, letting only her sound engineer, Jayda Love, in on the process.
PHOTO CREDIT: Richie Shazam
Doechii attributes the retro sound of much of Alligator Bites to her newfound sobriety, a lifestyle she adopted this past summer to allow her brain to “remember things.” She has started to feel a little sentimental, too. “I’m gravitating back towards things that I used to love,” she tells me. “The first album I ever purchased and ever remember listening to in full length was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” The nostalgia trip also inspired the creative direction of her “Denial Is a River” music video, a modern-day homage to the laugh-track sitcoms of the ’90s, starring Zack Fox, Rickey Thompson, and Earl Sweatshirt, among others. “Old-school hip-hop is vulnerability,” Doechii says. “I’m gravitating towards the pure skill that was incorporated. Anyone who doesn’t think that hip-hop is an intellectual genre, I think that assumption is rooted in racism.” The women who paved the way for someone like Doechii to come along — Lil’ Kim, Mary J. Blige, Missy Elliott — pushed back against the notion that sexual liberation had to come at the cost of vulnerable emotional transparency. “The feeling that I have when I listen to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is the same feeling I want some other Black little girl to have when she listens to me,” Doechii says. “And in order for her to have that feeling, I have to talk about my feelings”.
There is a lot of new buzz around Doechii after she won the GRAMMY for Best Rap Album. In the process, she became only the third woman ever to win that trophy (Ms. Lauryn Hill is one of the other two women). I want to start with a brilliant interview from DAZED. Discussing the GRAMMYs, Met Gala and Superbowl, it is a time when the whole world has caught up. People around the world know Doechii’s name:
“Outside of the big night, what is a typical day in the life of Doechii? Is there a routine you adhere to?
Doechii: Lately, I’ve been starting my mornings early with tea and a good stretch. I’ve been trying this peach ginger tea. It’s really good. I like to meditate and have time to myself before I start the day. I’m around a lot of people all the time and as much as I seem social, I’m really an introvert and I like to be by myself. I have my routine before I get social in the day, and then I either write a poem or try to create something in some way before I start. And then I get straight into work.
I’m sure you’ve seen everyone reposting your old YouTube videos by now. Coincidentally, the day before our shoot was 10 years to the day of your first YouTube upload. In the second video you posted, you spoke candidly about practising your confessions: “Every morning and then, right before I go to bed, I confess everything that I want in my life and watch it come to pass.” Is this something you still do today?
Doechii: Absolutely. When I talk about my meditations, a lot of it includes my confessions and the things that I desire. I still take time to imagine and dream and think of new goals... Actually, I’m going to change the word ‘goals’ to: I just like to imagine. You have to dream and find time to dream or else you stop creating new things to chase. So, yes, I like to do that, and I like to have my affirmations and claim them.
Tell me about that girl. Who was Jaylah back then, and what’s her backstory?
Doechii: I’m still that girl. I’m very good at chasing my dreams. I’ve always been mesmerised by my life and what it could be. The concept of being able to manifest anything is cool to me, and so I made it my business. I just wanted to share with other people the cool things that I’d learned and tapped into. How you could dream and be something. How you can change yourself and change your circumstances. And I would just vlog my life because I thought the way I lived was cool and I wanted to teach people how to tap into this thing. And that’s who that girl was and still is.
PHOTO CREDIT: IB Kamara
I’d love to get a sense of Tampa and some of your earliest memories or pivotal moments of growing up there. How has it informed you?
Doechii: One moment sticking out to me is around 2007, when I lived in Sulphur Springs and my house was one house over from this community rec centre. It was in the hood, and they would do barbecues and sports, and all the kids from the neighbourhood would go there. A lot of my earliest memories of Florida are based around community and culture. Black people coming together, being creative and doing cool shit. Everybody would come to the rec centre on the weekends and stunt in the hardest outfit, just to do it. My earliest memories of fashion and showing up in a look and getting a look off was at my local rec centre. Or playing tetherball in the heat; everybody coming with the hardest hairdos and music, rappers and mixtapes, all of that started in that community. A lot of my memories are based around that.
Where in those moments was Doechii born? How did she come to be?
Doechii: Doechii wasn’t born until years later. This was around sixth or seventh grade. I was bullied so bad that I was becoming somebody else for someone else’s comfort. It fucked up my head because I always knew I was that girl. I always knew I was dope as fuck. My taste level was very high when I was young. I was not into the shit that everybody else was into. Not to say they weren’t into cool shit, but my shit was just cooler. So, anyway! [laughs] I was in a position where I thought about killing myself because the bullying was so bad. Then I had this realisation: I’m not gonna do that, because then they’re gonna all get a chance to live and I’m gonna be the one dead, and look at my taste! Nobody wants that. I don’t want that. That’s not the life I want to live. It made me realise I had gotten down to a point where I was thinking about taking my own life because of what other people thought about me, and I realised, “OK, what do I really think is important? What do I want here?” I had that realisation pretty young, and that birthed Doechii.
Who were you becoming? Who did you want to be?
Doechii: When people bully you, they want you to feel ashamed of yourself. They want you to feel insecure, to feel bad. They want you to feel ugly, like, “Bitch! You shouldn’t have that confidence. Look at you, your dark skin, you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re weird. Why are you wearing that? You should not feel this confident and be looking like that.” That’s how they wanted me to feel, and I was starting to become that person. Like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t be acting like this. This confident. Maybe I shouldn’t be wearing these things, maybe I shouldn’t be listening to this type of music. Maybe I shouldn’t be going these places.” I was in gymnastics and shit when it wasn’t cool. I was becoming less of myself to make them more comfortable, to fit the box that they wanted me in, and that wasn’t truly who I was. I was brilliant and have always been stunning.
You’ve described yourself as an alt Black girl and have just detailed some of your struggle to fit in in the past. SZA recently discussed the lack of alt-Black-girl representation when she was growing up on The Drew Barrymore Show, and so I wanted to ask you your take on this. Did that representation exist for you at all?
Doechii: Yeah, that representation for me was in Janelle Monáe, Lauryn Hill, SZA in high school, André 3000 – Outkast in general, actually – Missy Elliott. Those alt-whimsical archetypes in music are what I lean towards. Grace Jones!
What role does storytelling play in your writing? Alligator Bites Never Heal has a clear narrative but how do you translate these personal stories into universal messages?
Doechii: I treat songwriting like my vlogs. I treat the songs like my diary. Just say what it is – say what happened, honestly. I have no idea. I don’t know how I’m doing this. I don’t know how it’s translating to the masses at all. I’m just being really honest about my life. That’s it.
How does vulnerability or transparency serve you and the work that you create?
Doechii: It is my gateway to the next part of myself; honesty, authenticity and audacity are how I unlock the next level of myself. I have to do that by being honest about who I am in each moment. Sometimes that can be hard. And that’s what vulnerability is to me. It’s having the audacity to be real with yourself and then love yourself. Like, this is who I am right now. I don’t like this part of me, but it’s still worth it, right? It’s still worth talking about and writing about”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews for the phenomenal and award-winning Alligator Bites Never Heal. NME awarded it four stars and had a lot of praise for an artist blowing up right now. I hope that Doechii comes to the U.K. and performs a few dates as there are so many people here who would love to see her on the stage:
“With her last offering – the 2022 EP ‘She/Her/Black Bitch’ – Tampa’s Swamp Princess proved to the world why she was a hybrid-pop powerhouse in the making. Doechii’s effortless switch between her avant-garde rap bark and syrupy vocals showed she has musical agility like no other; pair that with her unapologetically quirky style, and she quickly secured a spot in the upper echelons of current hip-hop. But, on her third mixtape, ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’, her wacky personality takes a dip, and Doechii adopts the darkness of the swamp.
The 26-year-old’s latest single ‘Boom Bap’ wasn’t just a satirical clap back at those who “said they wanted her to rap” – it sets the tone for the throwback hip-hop vibes that can be found throughout the record. That’s no bad thing – Doechii is a witty, comical songwriter who can tell you vivid stories with little effort, and this approach allows that side of her to shine (see ‘Denial Is A River’ for proof of that, where she narrates the heart-wrenching time she found out she was being cheated on while in her own therapist’s chair). But, compared to her recent singles’ dance and pop-R&B sounds, this lyrical style is a swift detour that takes over most songs on the 19-track mixtape.
‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ doesn’t feel like a record made for radio or to show off how adaptable Doechii can be. Instead, it reflects her personal struggles – like the doom she feels about approaching her thirties, industry politics and label demands, and her place in the music world. Through it all, her honesty must be commended.
From the opening track ‘Stanka Poo’, she gets candid, sharing that she feels reduced to a “TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor”. ‘Boiled Peanuts’ continues her frank sharing, the rapper complaining, “Label always up my ass like anal beads / Why can’t all these label niggas just let me be?” before calling herself a “dying sunflower leaving a trail of seeds”. This sense of being trapped or feeling inadequate is all over the mixtape, turning what should be a bright and joyous record into something more upsetting.
‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ ultimately finds its way to a brighter place as Doechii pulls us out of the dark and misty swamp and into the warmth of her current home in the Sunshine State. After ‘Nissan Altima’, the Floridian shows off her musical versatility, trying out new genres like bossa nova (‘Beverly Hills’) and synth-led hip-hop (‘Huh!’, ‘Fireflies’). The gentle guitar and airy harmonies of the soulful titular track, meanwhile, create an ethereal experience while Doechii begs us to “dance with her”.
At first, Doechii gets into the nitty gritty on this release, but – by the end – she finds solace and strength, making the mixtape feel more like a sonic diary of her emotional journey. It’ll take time to see if it becomes a standout in her discography, but this boldly brazen record definitely makes a statement”.
I am going to finish off with a review from Rolling Stone. I think most people in the U.K. know Doechii from DENIIAL IS A RIVER. It is a phenomenal cut. I would urge people to explore the rest of her catalogue. We are going to get many more albums from Doechii. There is no doubt this queen is primed for greatness:
“Doechii — a fierce and fearless lyricist with a natural ability to shape-shift — became Top Dawg Entertainment’s first female rapper right on the heels of Kendrick Lamar’s departure from the label. That could have set her up to be an heir to an impossibly gilded throne. It would make sense to look at her that way. The expanse of talented rappers left on the roster are Lamar’s friends who have solidified their own domains, too established in those roles to take such a vaunted spot. Though Doechii’s signing was preceded by young Long Beach rapper Ray Vaughn’s, she quickly garnered a broader audience with the viral hits “What It Is (Block Boy)” and “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” — one a sexy, sung homage to early-aughts R&B with a sample of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” the other a hybrid of high-energy schoolyard bars and raps over dreamy Nineties hip-hop. She quickly crafted opening-act slots on tour with SZA and Doja Cat into major moments, crushed Coachella, and got loved on by women across Black music, from Janelle Monáe to JT of the City Girls. With SZA currently standing as the toppest of the dawgs on TDE’s roster, it’s fair to wonder if she and Doechii will shape the future of the label’s prestige.
Yet, with her full-length debut, Alligator Bites Never Heal (a gesture to the Florida roots of the self-proclaimed “Swamp Princess”), she makes herself more than a successor. She’s a fully realized artist, with immense technical and curatorial skill. (This is one of the only recent albums that deserves to be 19 tracks long.) On it, she slickly glides from gritty boom-bap, sensual electronic, dance music, Miami jook, and earnest soul with a wicked pen and brilliant charisma. Her varied vocal tics and beat selections are often akin to Lamar’s — like her creeping and nefarious “Skipp,” which plays like a spawn of Untitled Unmastered’s tracks two and seven — but she also sounds like as much a student of A Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, and Nicki Minaj.
She’s also just a human being, and most often she simply sounds like Doechii. This is a feat of originality for someone so early in her mainstream career. The standout is “Denial Is a River,” in which Doechii gives an Oscar-worthy performance as both herself and a therapist of sorts in an immaculate display of her quirks, relatability, and tenderness. She dishes on her depression and failed relationships, and defends a pesky drug habit she picked up in Hollywood, before blasting into “Catfish,” an assertion of why she made it there. Doechii can be brash, reckless at the mouth, and dizzyingly dexterous, but her gentle heart is at the mixtape’s core — her fears, vices, and dreams as she becomes who she always knew she could be are at the center.
Early on Alligator Bites, she seeks to settle any debate about her rap bona fides, with track after track of hardcore spitting on beats that sound like they were plucked out of hip-hop’s golden era and had the dust blown off them. Yet, on the sarcastic single “Boom Bap,” complete with retro scratching by her touring DJ, Miss Milan, she pokes fun at the idea that her ability to skate like that is what makes her worthwhile. After making fart noises into the mic and peppering the song with deeply unserious scatting, she says, “Get Top on the phone/Tell him it’s all rap, nigga.” It’s a rather brazen evocation of her label head and a nod to Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered itself. “Say it’s real and it’s rap and it boom and it bap and it bounce and it clap and it’s house and it’s trap – It’s everything! I’m everything!” she screams.
Throughout the emotional journey of Alligator Bites, she confronts the expectations of her label as a major source of strife for her (without exactly differentiating between TDE and Capitol Records, where she is also signed). She bemoans that they’re “always up my ass like anal beads” and pushing her toward “TikTok music,” but also shows reverence: “Who’d-a got the ball from Big Moo,” she says of current TDE co-president Moosa Tiffith, who signed her, “and who’d-a dunk it?” Later, at the end of “Profit,” where she raps, “My label hate the direction I’m going, they knock my shit,” there’s a recording of a call between the two of them. “I just wanna tell you that I’m proud of you,” Tiffith tells her. “I love you, like, talk your shit, go crazy. I mean, go be the icon that you are.” It feels familiar, like the historically contentious but fruitful relationship between SZA and her manager and TDE co-president Terrance “Punch” Henderson, and you see what magic has come of that. Here, the result is one of the year’s very best albums”.
Let’s leave things there. Doechii will be playing in the U.K. on 23rd August. She will feature at Victoria Park. She has also been confirmed for Glastonbury. A huge platform and well-deserved booking. A perfect moment for her to slay in the U.K.! If you have not witnessed the brilliance of Doechii then check her music out. In years to come, she will rank alongside the queens of Hip-Hop. The icons she looks up to. This amazing artist has…
A bright future ahead.
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