Bow Down to Doechii

Doechii is tired, but she doesn’t have time to relax. We’re standing in the lobby of the Civilian hotel in midtown on a freezing December afternoon, and after a brief introduction, we’re already on the move. The rapper doesn’t walk; she strides, her arms crossed over her chest and heels click-clacking on the pavement as we head to Masseria Caffè & Bakery for coffee. She woke up early this morning for an appearance on “The Breakfast Club,” where she told Charlamagne tha God about her new girlfriend, and now she has to catch a flight back to Los Angeles in a few hours.

At Masseria, despite the frigid temperatures, Doechii orders an iced caramel latte with “two times the sweetness.” She turns to me. “Ever been to Maison Pickle? I just had some last night — a sweet, spicy pickle,” she says. “I was like, Oh my God. This is the best thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.”

It’s a bold statement for someone who has been achieving a lot of personal bests lately. The week we met, she’d gone viral twice. First, for an intricate self-choreographed performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in which she rapped a five-minute medley of two songs from her mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal while dancing alongside two other performers, all literally connected to one another by interwoven braids. Then, a jazz-infused NPR “Tiny Desk” set that showcased the artist performing her already speedy “Nissan Altima” at a quicker tempo to an arrangement played by an all-Black, all-femme, all-braided band made the rounds online too.

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.”

When Tyler, the Creator first listened to Doechii’s song “Catfish,” in which she raps about a “freaky li’l, sneaky li’l, creepy li’l wack bitch,” he said he felt jealous. “I heard that record and I’m like, Oh, I’m nothing. I need to get punched in my fucking face so I can do this,” he told me. They eventually collaborated on “Balloon,” from Tyler’s most recent album, Chromakopia. “She was not going to let it just be whatever,” Tyler said. “She held her own.”

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.”

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.

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.”

Candid songwriting is high on her hierarchy of needs: When she gets the urge to record, “it feels like when you’ve been holding your pee for a really long time,” Doechii tells me. Outside of the studio, she’s open-minded and resistant to being categorized as only one thing. Last year, she received comments on TikTok from fans demanding that she never get any “cosmetic surgery.” She replied by saying she’d already gotten some tweaks. Doechii also likes to wear visible cosmetic face tape around her temples because, as she said on TikTok last year, “it’s cunt.” “People make comments to me like, ‘Oh my God, please never touch your face. If you did that, I just wouldn’t be able to support you.’ I’m thinking to myself, They have no idea that I have Botox and filler and whatever, and you love exactly who I am now.”

This winter, rumors began circulating online that the rapper must be an “industry plant,” despite her having released music and YouTube vlogs since high school. As a teen, she posted videos of herself having her makeup done by her sister, sitting with her friends in class, and ranting over someone who confronted her about selling fried chicken at school (a business supported by her mom, who would help her cook and deliver the food). “When people aren’t familiar with the history of an artist these days, they get suspicious,” she tells me. “I’m pretty detached emotionally from it because I understand where it’s coming from. And to be honest, once you get any conspiracies around your career, that’s just confirmation that I’m going somewhere and I’m doing something right.”