Doja Cat

Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini didn't come up through the Disney machine or get help from godparents in Hollywood's upper circles. At sixteen she dropped out of high school, locked herself in her bedroom in Oak Park and started downloading instrumental beats from YouTube to record on GarageBand. Her mother, a painter, and her father, a South African actor and dancer who worked on the film Sarafina!, left her a purely artistic inheritance. Before turning eleven she was already living in a Hindu ashram in Agoura Hills, learning classical Indian dance, a physical discipline she later brought to underground breakdancing competitions in Los Angeles.

In 2014 she posted a demo of So High on SoundCloud, and the label RCA signed her to an exclusive contract at just seventeen to release the EP Purrr!. That first release passed largely unnoticed.

Nobody paid her much attention.

The industry didn't know what label to put on a young woman who rapped with a '90s-style flow over spacey synthesizer beats. Her debut studio album, Amala, hit stores in 2018 and crashed in the sales charts with fewer than 2,000 copies sold in its first week. Any other artist would have panicked in front of their record label executives. She chose the opposite path.

The meme as a Trojan horse

In August 2018, she built a homemade green screen in her bedroom, pulled on a cow costume with synthetic print, and shot the music video for Mooo! while holding a hamburger. The video racked up millions of views in a matter of days and blew up the manufactured image the record label was trying to shape. In doing so, she proved she understood internet culture better than the marketing directors of half a dozen multinational corporations.

That visual joke served as a launchpad for her next album. In 2019 she released Hot Pink, where West Coast street rap met danceable pop and the aesthetic of Japanese anime. The track Say So spread uncontrollably across social media until it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 2020, thanks to a remix recorded with Nicki Minaj.

But her pop success did not quench her need to control the cinematic language of her music videos. Her visual pieces began to fill up with explicit references to B-movie science fiction, stylized gore, and pop surrealism.

Self-destruction in prime time

In 2021, she released Planet Her, a flawless piece of pop engineering that brought together collaborations with SZA and The Weeknd. The album spent nineteen consecutive weeks in the top ten of the U.S. charts and earned her first Grammy Award. In 2022, she signed Vegas for the soundtrack of the movie Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann, reimagining Big Mama Thornton's classic with a sharp, cutting sound.

The industry feared a commercial suicide.

Yet right at the peak of public acceptance, Amala decided to set fire to her own image as a crowd-pleasing star. In August 2022 she shaved her head and eyebrows during a livestream in front of thousands of stunned viewers. Shortly after, she openly disowned her earlier records, calling them empty products designed to make easy money.

In 2023 she appeared at Paris Fashion Week covered from head to toe in 30,000 hand-applied Swarovski crystals during a four-and-a-half-hour session. That same year she released Scarlet, dropping the sugary hooks to focus on dark, aggressive rap, backed by a music video for Paint the Town Red packed with satanic imagery, shot under the direction of Christian Breslauer.

During recording sessions at Conway Recording Studios, she still uses the same Avalon VT-737sp tube preamp and a Shure SM7B microphone to capture her original vocal takes before the post-production team steps in.