Doja Cat Cancelling Party

5.28.20

Doja Cat

Doja Cat is a female hip-hop artist who started making noise in the industry over the past two years. Many may have heard of Doja Cat for being the female artist who always seems like she’s ‘on one’ for acting rather strange on social, but she recently received her first Number One sport on the Billboard Hot 100 charts with her song ‘Say So’ featuring Nicki Minaj. While Doja’s music has been slept on, or just really not sticking up to this point in time, this should have been Doja’s big break. However, the internet did some dirty work, and now Doja Cat has been cancelled by the hip-hop community.

A few of Doja Cat’s hit singles are ‘Mooo!’ and ‘Tia Tamera.’ They are both definitely strange, but somehow quirky and catchy enough to have caught the attention of the industry. Being a personality is half the battle of remaining relevant, and Doja has spent plenty of her time being active and entertaining us on social media. What has most recently rubbed people the wrong way, are old video chats of Doja Cat in chat rooms, and Tweets that were dug up from during these times.

Apparently there is this app called ‘Tiny Chat’ which is essentially like Zoom, but you can meet people for the first time here. I do remember chat rooms back in middle school, but I remember they always instantly got weird and I did not want to be murdered by an Internet stalker so I refrained from joining those. I honestly thought they died out. Anyways, Doja Cat is seen in a Tiny Chat chatroom with a number of white men, this was a few years ago, but much more recent than a decade and half ago in which we were both in middle school. The internet is giving this group of a men the name; “alt-right/incel community” which means that they are involuntary celibate. Who cares if Doja is talking to a bunch of virgins? Well, they are hateful people, and things get a bit racist in the chat room. Doja is of African and Jewish decent, so it does seem really strange why Doja is entertaining these men. If it was kept a secret for so long, it is not like she was trying to make it funny, like her odd gestures on social which I do take for jokes. She was not mocking these men, she was hanging out with them. But why? Does she not have her own friends to hangout with? Why give these guys the time of day?

With this emerging chat room incident, the internet did their job. An old song resurfaced to the internet, titled ‘Dindu Nuffin.’ If you read it slowly, you can read that this translates to “didn’t do nothing.” The term is used by supremacists against black men after having an encounter with the law. This is a racist term, but what did Doja really mean by it? I do not believe for it to be clear that this song had anything to do with the men in the Tiny Chat she was speaking with. This song can be found on YouTube if you search for it, and it is just another one of Doja Cat’s strange songs. The chorus sounds to reference “how much wood could a wood chuck chuck” but using the “Dindu Nuffin” term, and her own words. Of course it seems extremely disrespectful, but Doja Cat claims she was using it in a way to flip the hate, which we’ve all done. Many people who are reacting to the song have cancelled Doja for her insensitive remarks towards her own race, but others do believe she was trying to flip the situation and shed light on to what wonderful things her race has brought to the table. The line “how much money could a dindu make if a dindu did all the things you wish to” may be one your one argument here to make this case true.

While both are questionable acts, I do want to believe Doja for attempting the flipping of the term, however there were some really bad tweets out there, directly from Doja’s Twitter account. With all that has risen from the situation, it is just apparent that Doja does not care about anything. She has since apologized, and I can only say one thing. There was a point in time that at a young age, you may have thought certain things were funny, and you were around people who thought they were funny too. However, that is not the case today. We are mature adults and need to take responsibility and remorse for our actions. Doja Cat apologized on Instagram Live, she posted about in on her story and in-feed, she is doing her best to make up for it. However, when you are in this industry of people who are going through so much hurt right now for what the President, government officials, police offers, and racist chat groups that apparently still exist are putting them through daily, they are not going to rock with you for going against them.

I am not sure if this is something that Doja Cat will come back from with the artists within her own community. I think if she has any real friends in hip-hop, they’ll say they know what she meant with the song and they’ll continue to support her. However, I’m not sure how many people that really is. She was on the song with Nicki Minaj, but Nicki took to Twitter saying Doja’s team called her to be on the song and Nicki sat on it for quite some time. I think that was immediately dubbing any potential friendship right there. I do think that Doja Cat will continue to have her young fans, that do not really pay attention to the controversy in music. Or perhaps they hear about it, and do not want to believe it true of their favorite artist. Either way, the “big outbreak” for Doja is definitely cancelled. We will see what, if anything, comes next from Doja Cat.