Doja Cat is taking it down a notch. 2023’s Scarlet was a volley of tabloid-grade intrigue that saw the singer, rapper, and producer field accusations of Satanism from observers who read a great deal into her videos and colorful digital footprint. The root of Doja’s fights with fans and casual snarkers then was the polymath’s exhaustion with her own bubbly pop-rap hit parade — radio smashes like “Say So” and “Need to Know.” “I have thrown fits my whole career because I have been making music that didn’t allow me to have a mental release,” she told V magazine that year. Scarlet ditched pop signifiers and taunted haters. At the time, it seemed like the idea was never to look for a battle rap and indie R&B aficionado and self-professed internet troll to adhere to any specific artistic rubric. But last year, Doja stressed that Scarlet was, itself, a detour we shouldn’t pin expectations on. “The point of that album was to showcase anger and how it processes through my mind,” she explained in an interview with Jack Harlow. “It’s sort of my ‘Why I oughta!’ moment …” After Scarlet’s snarling refusal to deliver the dance-pop goods, it’s a surprise to see Doja promote her fifth album, Vie, with the announcement that she’s a “rapper who makes pop music.” (This was a longtime given for a writer prone to loopy word-game sessions like “Get Into It (Yuh)” from 2021’s Planet Her or “Go to Town” from her 2018 debut, Amala.) It appears she’s over the pugilistic productions of Scarlet and its deluxe edition for now.
Vie reconvenes with Planet Her collaborator Y2K and Amala co-producer Yeti Beats. It fills out its core production team with Kurtis McKenzie, who worked on 2019’s Hot Pink, and Jack Antonoff. Displacing the ’90s boom bap and aughts brawlers of her last album is a streak of assiduous ’80s R&B exercises that foreground her gains as a vocalist more often than her gobstopping wordplay as a rapper. The stomping drums, gated reverb, and synthetic horns of lead single “Jealous Type” push away from Scarlet’s provocations and move closer to a succession of 2020s history-project pop albums. Vie greets the year of Miley Cyrus’s and Sabrina Carpenter’s adult contemporary explorations with a trip further down an Oldsmobile Cutlass radio dial to R&B stalwarts like New York’s KISS-FM or D.C.’s WHUR-FM. The Parisian fixations, cooing vocals, and elaborate percussion tracks that cover much of the album honor predecessors at the same auditory intersections like Janet Jackson, Sheila E., and Teena Marie.
Though Doja stops short of deliberately framing Vie as a reaction to the negative energy Scarlet fed off and dished out, the pop designation and the theme of romance suggest a commitment to trying something else. It’s been a comparatively peaceful stretch for her as a result. In the last cycle, Doja bristled at clingy followers and faced questions about then boyfriend J.Cyrus’s past; this time the biggest tiff was with fans who didn’t think the cover art fit the tone of the music before they heard it. Now, her interviews can focus on her interests and influences and not on the tug-of-war between audience desires and a creative’s needs. Like Lady Gaga’s dance-pop comeback, Mayhem, Vie appeals to fans of Doja’s older work while allowing the artist to showcase a unique curatorial eye. But it feels like a measure of fun chaos had to go on the chopping block to kick-start the love movement.
This album pairs a moneymaking pitch — getting Antonoff to lean all the way into the marginal ’80s production aesthetics of his own records and his work for Taylor Swift and St. Vincent — with a dedicated study. The best songs fixate on a delightful music-nerd query: What if sultry, sophisticated Prince affiliates like Vanity 6 and Sheena Easton could flow like the double-time rap pioneers in the N.W.A-affiliated girl group J.J. Fad? “All Mine” salutes Grace Jones’s side-splitting and skull-crushing presence in 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, its almost histrionic falsetto setting up a slow groove upended by a fleeting rap verse: “I do the things these bitches think of but they don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t do / If I dream, if I think big, I can go, go, go, go, go.” “Mine” adopts the yearning sexual politics of ’80s soul until the traditionalism chafes. Imagine Patti LaBelle’s smoldering 1983 ballad “Love, Need and Want You” — “My one desire / Is keeping you satisfied” — pausing to remind its love interest that he’s dealing with someone who can buy the entire street he lives on. “Make It Up” is a trappy update on R&B’s apologetic, often masculine beggin’-music tradition where Doja references gay sex roles for a twist: “I’m a submissive top / I’ll buy you flowers.”
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Vie finds Doja’s typically unorthodox vocals shadowboxing with the showy melisma of the classics. She has the chops for this time-travel initiative. She vanishes fitfully into past pastiche, delivering the right affectations for the glossily robotic tones of funk made in the late-20th-century synthesizer and drum-machine boom. Highlights like the roaring high note at the climax of “Jealous Type” were not in her skill set before. Vie crafts the kind of song that allows her to flex these muscles, and the writing and raps can be almost naggingly straightforward by proxy. It’s as if campy, lovey-dovey platitudes — “Talking ’bout our love is easy / Loving you was never secret,” “Lipstain” whispers — are just as crucial to the performance of ’80s culture as all the clashing colors, pointy shoulder lines, and iconography on loan from sophisti-pop and city pop this cycle. Vie’s vision of the era it’s working with — clouds of synth goo and inescapable saxophone — is ultimately limiting. The story of a decade that kicked off with Donna Summer’s Grammy nominations in multiple genre categories is that, actually, there weren’t any rules or formats Black women needed to heed. Janet Jackson’s (second) new jack swing touchstone, Rhythm Nation 1814, dropped the hair-metal banger “Black Cat” two tracks before the maudlin, orchestral “Come Back to Me.” Grace Jones could be a model, a murder barbarian, a reggae legend, or whatever she saw fit from day to day. Vie employs these signifiers to slingshot Doja Cat closer to pure pop peace and quiet. The feel for what pop should be is dialed in and specific. It’s the ’80s of rushing through verses to get to the massive hook refitted for the 2020s when unraveling attention spans have renewed interest in that race to the chorus.
You can track the shift in Vie’s approach looking at two SZA features. The hook in Planet Her’s “Kiss Me More,” which floats on a bouncy Yeti beat, is almost an afterthought, a base we cycle back to in between cartoon-character affectations from the zany rapper-singers. The duo reunite on Vie’s “Take Me Dancing,” an exuberant dip into the Alexander O’Neal and Cherrelle or Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam pocket of airy love songs itching to knock you down with a refrain and repeatedly back the car over you. It is nearly all buildup and wind down from a gorgeous post–Paisley Park refrain, a practice that pays dividends in this song and also in “One More Time” — imagine Morris Day of Purple Rain and the Time producing ’80s cheer team staples. But the familiarity of the song structures and the vocal approach weigh the album down as it marches on to occupy some of the same real estate as Doja’s peers in pop and rap. (Cardi B’s Janet-sampling “Principal,” FKA Twigs’s Eusexua dance break “Drums of Death,” and Gaga’s “Killah” are all circling the same influences. It’s very crowded at the ’80s-revival party.) Vie delivers a few of the most believable throwback anthems of the year. But by the time you get to the closer “Come Back,” where Doja and Antonoff really go for that verbose Taylor-or-one-of-the-Haims flow, you wonder why someone who last topped the “Billboard Hot 100” with the nonconformism and Christian provocation of Scarlet’s “Paint the Town Red” is going about it so predictably this year.
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