This Is Doechii’s Moment
At the end of her sprawling, impressive third mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, Tampa rapper and singer Doechii receives a warmly encouraging voice-mail from a woman who invokes the story of Abraham and Lot, sometime Biblical neighbors whose shepherds quibbled over a shared plot of land until the friends parted ways amicably, the former leaving for Canaan and the latter fatefully choosing Sodom. “Everybody can’t go where you’re going,” the title track and closer advises, half acknowledging the display of versatility that has just taken place and half teasing greater heights yet to come, like a Marvel-movie post-credits scene in which a hero or villain flaunts a consequential new power.
Doechii is in rare air enjoying the classic rap come-up: well-placed co-signs, guest features that enrich and sometimes rescue the singles they’re housed in, television spots that convey both effortlessness and practiced physicality. Alligator, borne out of the artist’s pledge to “let go of whatever pressures came with making a debut album,” yielded three Grammy nominations for Best New Artist, Best Rap Performance, and Best Rap Album. Doechii’s the eighth woman ever to be nominated for the last one and the first since Cardi B’s historic Invasion of Privacy win in 2019 to break back into that boys’ club. Alligator’s reverence for the trappings and cadences of ’90s rap plays well with the kind of arbitrators who’ve put all three of Nas’s King’s Disease albums in the running for trophies. But Doechii’s graceful subversions of tradition are just as exhilarating as her plentiful references to hip-hop’s past. Gender roles and sexuality grow slippery in the confines of her mixtape not just because she raps about sex with women and falling for men on the DL, or that there are verses on Alligator an M.O.P. fan could appreciate, but because even the quips are trying to deconstruct expectations. “These niggas ain’t cunt,” “Nissan Altima” huffs, letting you conjure your own image of the offending parties. All the while, support from Top Dawg Entertainment, the label that helped launch SZA and Kendrick Lamar, relays a sense that the West Coast hip-hop factory’s latest charge teeters on the verge of her own Ctrl and/or good kid, m.A.A.d. city moment.
Doechii’s aesthetics draw up a world where the preexisting hangups about women and queer people’s roles in hip-hop and relationships don’t matter.
In an era when rappers itch for multi-hyphenate status enough that even Kendrick Lamar is rhyming about his dream of being an executive, Doechii centers hard-won lyrical dexterity in several of its favorite forms. She’s a delightfully unpredictable presence, capable of occupying the shape a song needs. She elevates the awful JT hip-house team up “Alter Ego” with sharper, moneyed raps and a gorgeous sung coda that calls back to legendary R&B and house divas; she delivers a shot of adrenaline to Katy Perry’s otherwise dead-in-the-water Crystal Waters rehash “I’m His, He’s Mine.” On Ab-Soul’s resolute “I, Myself, and Me,” she’s the sweetener for his workmanlike singing; on Banks’s “I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend,” she juxtaposes screaming rage and disaffected rhymes, like Kelis making a medley of “Caught Out There” and “Bossy.”
Doechii’s a theater kid, and the attendant ease in pouring oneself into an alluring character or line reading is, like Chance the Rapper gleaning a trickier sense of timing from his spoken-word beginnings, a great boon in this field. Her performances on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and NPR’s Tiny Desk series are works of delicate precision. Running through the lovelorn mixtape favorite “Denial Is a River” on the former show decked out in braids connecting her to two backup dancers closely miming her moves, Doechii drew your attention to subtle gestures — like the two women leaning back to give the third the slack to twerk — while slowly unspooling a narrative yarn. It looked like a photo from the Chicago artist and sometime Solange collaborator Shani Crowe springing to life.
Tiny Desk showcased the full breadth of the Florida phenom’s capabilities as she led a boisterous, seemingly all-Black-femme band through over a half-dozen Alligator cuts. Mirroring recent live sets, she bunched nostalgic East Coast hip-hop gems like the post-Busta “Catfish” and the coffeehouse-rap warmup “Boom Bap” together but made sure you got a whiff of the ’99 Missy Elliott airs in “Hide N Seek.” Putting her stamp on time-tested flows amid scenes depicting the private worlds of Black women, Doechii rejects the hip-hop paradigm that categorizes music made by women in the space as either fundamentally intellectual or sexual. Her music is nevertheless earning respect from heads who draw the distinction. The bookish uniforms at Tiny Desk might toss a bone to listeners pining for the spirit of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, but candidly raunchy Trina raps are just as much a point of reference.
In the midst of a windfall of attention, Doechii radiates poise and balance. These qualities shine in interviews in which Alligator’s most devil-may-care utterances — like the carnal affirmations in “Denial Is a River: “I like pills, I like drugs / I like getting money, I like strippers, I like to fuck” — are exposed as vestiges of a darker time in the artist’s journey. The mixtape was crafted on the way to a personal epiphany that inspired her to get sober, as she explained in a recent Breakfast Club talk. The notion that the person on the record feels profoundly different from the one now performing and promoting it all year is riveting, and the show could have asked about following in the footsteps of Gucci Mane as a sober rapper contending with past selves every time they touch a stage. But this crew, of course, leaves no sexual innuendo remotely unturned, so the hosts seemed more interested in hashing out the kinesiology of a sapphic line from the self-professed “trap Grace Jones” in “Nissan”: “She munchin’ on the box while she watching Hulu.” The conversation revealed an artist resisting easy categorization but also the struggle to figure out how best to perceive her.
The hip-hop industry and culture that put Isaiah Rashad through the ringer about bisexuality after he was outed has a softer outlook on same-sex attraction in women, so Cardi B, Janelle Monáe, and Azealia Banks precede Doechii’s candor about paramours of more than one gender. The Kinsey-3 chorus of “Nissan” is as gruff as it is fluid: “Wake up, A-cup, get your tits sucked / In my makeup, face-fuck, get your bake up / Fake bluff, fake tough, niggas dick suck / Put your sticks up for the motherfuckin’ princess.” The toplessness and pansexual affirmations accompanying Monáe’s The Age of Pleasure — home to the lavishly preening, Doechii-blessed “Phenomenal” — rankled some who felt it sought attention rather than liberation. Not even the Dungeon Family–affiliated movie star and sci-fi author escaped the accusation of using sex to sell music. The trad-rap pedigree and forthright religiosity of Alligator conveniently shielded it from such complaints. But this sometimes makes remarkable lyrical feats feel a touch tried and true, like playing into the very old-head sensibilities that put it in contention for the same trophy as the Common and Pete Rock album, The Auditorium Vol. 1. The story in “Denial” about dating a man who turns out to have a secret boyfriend calls back to decades of suspenseful relationship raps, which rarely approach this subject without a hint of revulsion. So the phrasing of the narrative twist — “I open up the messages then had to hit the zoom / Turns out the girl was really a dude?” — left room for the song to be misread as an heir to the transgressive storytelling of EPMD’s “Who’s Booty.” Addressing the last line in Rolling Stone, Doechii explained that she was picking apart her own assumption that the cheater was straight, not engaging in garden-variety rap transphobia. This feels like progress in a year when J. Cole offered a sincere public apology for making Drake and Kendrick Lamar mad but had nothing to say about the degrading swipe at trans men in “Pi,” a track from his Might Delete Later, which is nominated for the same Best Rap Album award as Alligator and Auditorium.
Doechii’s audiovisual aesthetics draw up a world where the preexisting hangups about women and queer people’s roles in hip-hop and relationships and the overarching communities where they take place don’t matter, because truth and talent are paramount. She’ll outdo herself if an album reins in the mildly unwieldy sprawl of the mixtape, making sure not to dip into overly reverent Grammy-bait pablum, and if she avoids the classic Atlantic Records meddling the Katy Perry song smells like. The success of the “Some Cut” and “No Scrubs” descendant “What It Is (Block Boy)” with Kodak Black last year says Doechii could crush it as a pure R&B artist; “Balloon” — the queer bestie night-out jam off Tyler, the Creator’s Chromakopia — points to bubbly pop records on the horizon. All the while, each new showcase for her raps feeds the hunger for an official debut album on par with those of her TDE predecessors. The 2020s are stuffed full of rappers pining for the same kind of adaptability. But the voice-mail at the end of Alligator is right. There are only so many artists splashing through that many lanes lately without hydroplaning.
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