Over the course of the past seven years since she first exploded into stardom with “Mooo!,” Doja Cat has proven to be a musical chameleon, equally willing to dive into bluesy R&B as she is aggressive battle rap. Yet with her new album, Vie, she insists she’s making a pop album. If that’s true, though, her effort warrants a look at one of the biggest questions facing modern musical discourse: Just what the hell is pop music in the first place?
For years, the answer has appeared to be: Black music with a white face. This isn’t exactly a shocking revelation. It’s a major plot point in Dreamgirls, it’s the argument that has cropped up again and again with each subsequent generation of “transgressive” hyper-sexy pop stars — the Madonnas, the Britneys, the Xtinas, the Arianas, the Mileys, the Taylors, and Justins Timberlake and Bieber. It’s even jumped entire oceans, as we now debate the merits of Koreans appropriating Black culture through their own maximalist lens.
Doja’s very existence, though, throws a kink in the narrative. The daughter of a white Jewish graphic designer and a South African actor and dancer, Doja has unwillingly become emblematic of the friction inherent to the entire pop music category. From the outset, her rap chops have been questioned. She herself maligned many of her fan-favorite works like “Say So” and “Kiss Me More” while on the campaign for Scarlet, her defiant attempt to wrestle control of the narrative away from chronically online fans’ conspiracy-cooked noodles.
Everything from Doja’s vocal talents to her very Blackness has been dissected and debated by the very fans who first elevated her, then turned on her when she embraced her own self-conception as “a rapper who makes pop.” So, who better to throw up a mirror and force those same fans to confront the origins of the sounds they reduce to mere background music? Vie doesn’t exactly set out to do this; By all means, Doja and producer Jack Antonoff seem to be paying respectful homage to Doja’s musical influences. But in doing so, the album highlights the folly of classifying music by color in the first place.
The overarching sound of the album is the funk-based offshoot of 1980s R&B that was, according to music historian Dan Charnas, never accorded an official title by the recording establishment powers that be. Alternatively described as electro, roller disco, synth funk, or even boogie, it’s the sound that you heard all over in the 1980s — at least, if you grew up Black in the inner city (or with parents that did, such as those of us who heard these records booming from car stereos in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Minnesota, and more).
It was the sound defined by Kashif, as pioneered by Prince’s work with The Time, codified in songs like George Benson’s “Give Me The Night.” Cameo and Zapp, Evelyn “Champagne” King, Cheryl Lyn, D Train, Carl Carlton, and others crafted songs with both swing and soul, heavy bass, brash drums, and blaring saxophones embellishing synthesized melodies throughout the decade, but radio programmers couldn’t get with the sounds of so-called “race records” — or just “Black music” — in the wave of a backlash against “disco” (a reminder here that Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night saw white fans bring records to destroy that that didn’t strictly fit the event’s description).
And so, we saw those sounds filter out into more palatable avenues, into more modern works like Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” and later, Mars’ own 24K Magic and Silk Sonic project with Anderson .Paak. With Vie, Doja thoroughly revitalizes the sound and recaptures ownership of it. What would have been classified as R&B a decade or so ago and wouldn’t even have made it on radio playlists in the decade the sounds were minted are redefined as “pop” music via a rapper who was derided as a pop star, whose pop bona fides were questioned when she turned back to rap.
In explaining her album title, she said, “I feel strongly about the meaning of the word ‘vie,’ because without life, there is no love, and without love, there is no adventure. This is an adventurous album, with homages and nods to the ’80s, ’70s, and ’90s, I wanted to give my own personal modern twist.”
So, hearing those post-funk chants on “Aaahh Men!” or those chunky bass licks on “Take Me Dancing” featuring SZA means more than just a good beat to dance to. The digitized 808s on “Happy” and the swinging snare on “Jealous Type” are smoke signals to the ancestors, to the ones who never got their credit or the recognition. Doja is using her pop star status to shine a light backwards, to show her fans where it all comes from and what it actually means.
Vie is out now via RCA Records. Find more information here.