Among her panoply of onstage appearances over the last year, the one that cemented Doja Cat’s Main Pop Girl status didn’t initially look like a Doja Cat performance at all; had Grammy Awards host Trevor Noah not announced her name, people might not even have recognized her. Covered head to toe in black latex, Doja appeared silhouetted in a row of dancers, just barely lit by lasers. “I’ve been preparing,” she purred. “Grammys, welcome to Planet Her.” She then launched into one of her many live reimaginings of “Say So” — this one with sex-robot choreography and a glitchy EDM breakdown.
Given that ultra-polished performance, it feels like divine comedy that the super-low-fi “Mooo!” was what got RCA to sit up and pay attention to Doja. Before then, the label wasn’t exactly sure what to do with her: Was she a rapper? An R&B singer? A pop star? “I would play her for people all the time, and it was strange to me how some people didn’t seem to get it,” says songwriter-producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the former head of Kemosabe Records, over email. “It’s like people weren’t listening with their ears but were more concerned about how many followers she had. I don’t know how it happened, but she just got better and better, and one day, she was like, totally there.” (In 2014, Kesha sued Gottwald, alleging sexual assault and emotional abuse, among other claims; Gottwald filed his own defamation and breach of contract suit against her…
