Known for her viral and explicit songs, “Juicy” and, “Tia Tamara” feat. Rico Nasty, Doja Cat released her new album, “Hot Pink,” on Nov. 7. Her songs are most often found in TikTok videos where people lip-sync, dance or tell stories.
This is Doja’s first full album since she started releasing music in 2014. She promoted her album through Twitter with the use of what one could call “Gen Z humor” featuring lewd language.
She embodies the rising generations’ online culture that includes simple lyrics with seemingly tame artistic choices where beat and instrumentals are concerned. This is especially evident in her hit song, “Tia Tamera.”
“I’m in the hall, Regina / I’m on the wall at Genius / I am the wiz, the teacher / Skinny legend like Wiz Khalifa,” Doja sings.
The song, despite having extremely simple lyrics, has approximately 34 million streams on Spotify, but it isn’t her most popular song. “Juicy” comes in close to 25 million streams and is ranked first on the list.
In one of her later songs on the album, “Say So,” Doja gets a tad deeper.
“It’s been a long time since you fell in love / You ain’t coming out your shell, you really ain’t been yourself / Tell me, what must I do to tell my love?” she raps.
With the explicit and bold lyrics, there are deeper parts to some of Doja’s songs. She sings about themes of addiction, insecurity and unstable relationships. Despite most of the relationships that Doja sings about being just short of romantic, they still hold important topics within them.
In “Streets,” Doja opens into a more melancholy song than the rest of the album. Her song describes a person whom she wants to be with and could even see herself marrying.
“I can’t sleep no more / In my head, we belong / And I can’t be without you / Why can’t I find no one like you?” she sings.
By the end of the song, Doja returns to her more common sound throughout the album, full of cursing and light-hearted humor with deep meaning sprinkled in.
Despite the album cover, song titles and more-floral lyrics, her music is worth a listen because of the reflection it shows the younger part of Gen-Z online culture and for the deeper meaning.
Her exploration of relationships through explictives and word play covers a larger message of boldness and the new online wave. “Hot Pink” is worth at least one listen.
