Switched on Pop - Doja Cat’s Satanic Suite

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

For the first time in 2023, a rap song is at number one on Billboard's Hot 100: Doja Cat's “Paint the Town Red.” It’s her second number one single after the disco inspired “Say So.” But the ubiquitous and lighthearted bop didn’t accurately reflect Doja’s divisive persona, an extremely online meme lord, and sometimes troll, with a history of riling up internet controversy.  Doja Cat recently called out her fans for their parasocial obsessiveness, losing 250k instagram followers in the process. Simultaneously, religious conservatives have accused her of Satanism for her playful use of illuminati imagery at her 27th birthday bash. But rather than recoil, Doja Cat is clapping back at criticism by embracing the devil.  On “Paint the Town Red” she’s following the playbook of Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” and Sam Smith and Kim Petras’ “Unholy,” all of which use demonic imagery to spark religious controversy while also commenting on artists’ indiscretions and the hellish nature of the attention economy. In her satanic suite — “Paint The Town Red,” “Demon,” and “Attention” — Doja Cat’s turns online flame wars into musical gold.  More Listen to The Allusionist with Helen Zaltzman, the best and funniest podcast about language Read the history of the loon sample on Pitchfork by Philip Sherburne Songs Discussed: Doja Cat - Paint The Town Red Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby Lil Nas X - MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) Sam Smith - Unholy (feat. Kim Petras) Doja Cat - Say So Doja Cat - Kiss Me More (feat. SZA) Doja Cat - Woman Doja Cat - Demons Daddy Yankee - Gasolina Kelis - Milkshake Kendrick Lamar - HUMBLE. Bernard Herrmann - A Narrative for String Orchestra (From "Psycho") [Arr. J. Mauceri] John Williams - Main Title/John Williams/Jaws - From The "Jaws" Soundtrack Lil Nas X - MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) Doja Cat - Attention 808 State - Pacific 202 Nicki Minaj - Anaconda Calvin Harris - Prayers Up (feat. Travis Scott & A-Trak) Dionne Warwick - Walk on By Doja Cat - Paint The Town Red - Slowed Down & Sped Up Doja Cat - Vegas (From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack ELVIS) Beyoncé - Naughty Girl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a rap song is at Number one on Billboard's Hot 100, it's Doja Cat's Paint the Town Red. Yeah, bitch, I said what I said. I'd rather be famous instead. Given the chart dominance of hip-hop over the last 20 years, that's kind of a remarkable stat, Charlie. Yeah, I actually built a database of all the Hot 100 rap songs in history. There have been 99 now. Doja Cat is now the 99th song to go number one, which is a song predominantly featuring rap.

Do you want to know what the first one was? Desperately. It's not good. Oh, dear. It's not Ice Ice Baby, is it? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ice Ice Baby for 19. Oh, no.

I know, I know, I know. A song with a lot of controversy. Controversy is going to be a big part of our conversation today. With Doja Cat, you know, she's just scored her second number one single. She previously went to number one with her more disco pop influence song, say so. And now with Paint the Town Red, the second single off her upcoming album, Scarlet, she's finding ways to turn her own personal controversy into musical gold. She's doing it in the same sort of musical continuum of Lil Nas X.

That's Lil Nas X's Montero, call me by your name from 2021. And I think that this musical continuum, and was picked up by Sam Smith and Kim Petrus in 2023 with their song Unholy. What we're talking about here is, of course, devil worship, using devilish imagery to spark online religious controversy, also to comment on an artist's own perhaps indiscretions or bold personality, or maybe even at times the hellish reality of being a celebrity. But I think Doja takes this idea of playing with devil imagery a lot further.

She sustains this demon metaphor throughout the first three releases off of her new project. A satanic suite, if you will, Charlie. Well, this is interesting because I feel like we haven't checked in with Doja Cat in a minute. I don't recall her being this sort of openly provocative, but maybe I'm wrong.

Can you give me sort of a prissy of the Doja Cat story thus far? Frankly, I think provocation is what we're going to see throughout her entire career. If you recall, she really, came on the scene in 2018 with her song Moo, which is kind of a joke song where she dressed as a cow in a homemade music video that went absolutely wildly viral. She went far beyond that, though. She became a major pop star. In 2018, she had an album Hot Pink that went to 10 on Billboard's 200. And then, of course, as I mentioned, her song Say So was a enormous hit. We did an episode on it about how it sort of draws from the world of chic and disco.

Right. She put out her 2021 album, Planet Her, and the music was way popier with hits like Kiss Me More and Woman. With her sound, Doja Cap became one of the most in-demand pop stars of late. I mean, she's been featured alongside artists like Ariana Grande, Megan the Stallion, Lil Nas X, we mentioned earlier. And she was a featured musician in Baz Luhrman's Elvis with her rendition of the song, Vegas, that we broke down, I don't know, a year or so ago. But for a lot of folks, I think, unfortunately, she's better known for being sort of an internet troll from time to time. She's had a whole litany of online controversies. To name a few, before being a star, it was discovered in her Twitter history that she'd used an anti-gay slur for which she later apologized.

During the pandemic, she downplayed the severity of COVID in an online video and then went to a celebrity party when others were not going out. And she also in the past tried unsuccessfully to co-opt and reappropriate an alt-write meme into a song. Most recently, though, she snapped back at Celebrity Stan Culture and said on Twitter in a now deleted message, it was called Twitter then, it's now X. She said, my fans don't name themselves. If you call yourself a kitten or kittens, that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house. And some of her fans were furious. She lost over 250,000 Instagram followers from these remarks.

by basically disparaging her fans for being too engaged, we should say, in her celebrity life. But perhaps the most absurd of all these controversies is that there have been critics that have said that she's possessed by the devil due to a series of shocking visual changes in her life, which people read like breadcrumbs of a larger conspiracy. First, she shaved her head and her eyebrows in the summer of 2022. In October of that year, she playfully used Illuminati imagery at her 20. 27th birthday, which was themed after the film Eyes Wide Shut. In January, she went to Paris Fashion Week, covered head to toe in red crystals, inspired by Dante's Inferno.

In May, she showed off her giant back tattoo that has the skeleton of a bat and the sort of wings flay out over her shoulders. For all of this, sensationalists on social media have called her satanic and demonic. But rather than combat her critics, she's taking it. that identity on fully. Now in her, quote, demon era, her music video for Paint the Town Red features her embracing the Grim Reaper, riding Baphomet and embodying the persona of a hellish blue demon. And she's let this cover all of her music. She's literally changed her old album covers to be sort of coded in a blood red hue. And it all represents a larger musical

change. She's leaning more into a harder rap sound because she is multi-hyphen it. She's a producer, she's a singer, but she's also an excellent rapper. And we hear a lot of that in her most recent singles. So in this episode, we're going to talk about how Doja Cat is embracing this demonic turn in her music and lyrics and what she might be trying to say to us. And to start, let's return to paint the town red. I don't care. I paint the town red. Okay, paint the town red.

What does paint the town red even mean? Where does that come from? Okay, that is a phrase. I've got this one. That's a phrase that means going out and having a good time. Where does it actually come from, though? I am stumped. I actually couldn't figure this one out for myself either,

but I am fortunate to be friends with the brilliant Helen Zaltzman, who hosts the best and funniest podcast on language. It's called The Illusionist. I figured maybe she could help give us clarity on the origins of the term, paint the town red. Hello, pals. It's your friend Helen Zaltzman from The Illusionist. We find ourselves in one of my least favorite linguistic situations

where the explanation of something is, well, we don't know. There are some attractive tales that might be absolute Bolo. This seems to be people's favorite. In 1837, in the English town of Melton Mowbray, a place famous for its pork pies, but also the following event. One night, the notoriously chaotic aristocrat, the Marquess of Waterford, whose nickname was the Mad Marquist, had been out at the races with his buddies.

They all got steaming drunk, and then on their way to town, they arrived at the toll gate, refused to pay the toll, naughty. There was some renovation happening, so they grabbed some red paint, and some brushes, and painted the toll house and the tollkeeper, and then went on a rampage through town, painting several buildings red and a wooden swan, and any police officer who tried to intervene, got beaten up and then painted red. So quite a literal interpretation of the phrase, but not well-sourced historically. Also, historical, accuracy-wise. Also, that was 1837. The phrase, Paint the Town Red doesn't appear in print

until 1883 in the US. So it's not hugely likely that it would have originated in the port pie capital, Melton Mowbray in England, and they're not appeared in print anywhere until in the US in 1883. So it probably did originate in the US later than this supposed painting of the town red. But why nothing quite so fully formed as the Mad Marquess's Red Paint Rampage could be the red glow of fireworks or bonfires or a riverboat stoking its engine to go super, super fast. Or it could be something as simple as a reference to people's skin getting flushed red with booze, but that's a human face getting painted. red from within, not a town.

So the mystery continues. Sorry. Helen doesn't just have the best podcast online, which is also the funniest. And I think what I learned from her is that we don't know where this term comes from, which means that I think it's also up for interpretation. I like how Doja Cat is using this idea of painting the town red. It's not just she's gone out on the town having a good time. But if she is embodying this demonic persona, perhaps she is leaving her red,

stain everywhere that she goes. Right. Paint the Town Red. Red is the color of the devil. I like it. But what about the music? Like, how deeply does this reference go? I think this goes all the way through the music. You can hear it in this double chorus. The first half of the chorus is wrapped. Here we have the side of Paint the Town Red, which is her saying, listen, I say what I said. I recognize that I'm a controversial figure and I kind of don't care. going to go out and have a good time.

And then when she sings the second half of the chorus, she's literally using the language of her critics saying that she's the devil. I like how she changes up her voice. Maybe we can use an extended metaphor and it's like she's been demonically possessed and keeps changing her voice from her rapping voice to her singing voice. And I think throughout the rest of the episode we'll also see that she doesn't just rap and sing. she really changes the way that she uses her voice in any given moment to evoke what she's saying.

And I think that this sung chorus has a great example of how she alters her voice to make things fit. The narrative, we have these rhymes that they just don't sing that well. And so she maybe does a little bit of a curse of singing, if you will, to make them fit in a little bit better. Right. So our N-rhymes are rebel, pedal, settle, devil. They're not very beautiful words. No, they're slant rhymes, but her delivery is convincing. Devil.

Rebel. Tadda. I mean, this can't be the first time devil and rebel have been rhymed together. I'm pretty confident, Charlie. Oh, no, no, no. I'm sure. I mean, what are the rhymes with devil? Bevel, you know?

Level. Level. Revel, actually there's quite enough. Quite a few. Okay, but let's keep on moving how she plays with this narrative of being a devil in the way that she deals with controversy.

Let's go to her first verse. Please. Here, my happiness is all of your misery. I put good dick all in my kidneys. This small gel don't come with no jealousy. My illness don't come with no remedy.

Here, it's like she's taking on that criticism of her fans being too engaged in her life. and saying, you know, my happiness is all of your misery. But what is she doing? I think she's flexing here. She's flexing her rapping skills. She's being quite bragoditious. She's stringing together a whole series of the same N-Ryme over and over.

Misery, kidney, jealousy, energy, penalty. She's flexing. And if that N-Rime starts to get perhaps a little bit saccharin, you need a change-up. I really like what she does at the end of the verse. You can't take that bitch nowhere. I look better when. No hair, ugh.

Ain't no sign I can't smoke hair, ugh. Every time she says, ugh. It's almost like the criticism of all of her fans. I can't believe you're doing that. The way that she sings it is so convincing. Yeah, if we talked before in the podcast about a rapper like Jay-Z giving these gutter old grunt between lines. Doja Cat is doing a version of that. That's just a little more disgusted.

Ugh. You can't take that bitch nowhere. But it's smart because it does, not only does it create this sort of percussive bridge between the lines, it also, as you say, it's like sort of communicates her kind of being fed up with all this drama surrounding her. She may be fed up with it, but it's also the source of pretty much all of her lyrics here. She's having fun with it. And the end of her second verse, she really embraces her demon personality. I'm doing things they ain't seen before fans ain't dumb but extremists are

I'm a demon lord Fall off what I ain't seen the horse Call your bluff better sight the sores Fame ain't something that I need no more Fans ain't done but extremists are I'm a demon lord She really takes on being The number one internet troll

And I love the following line I'm a demon lord Fall off what I ain't seen the horse So what horse did you have to get up? upon is she being that elevated, or as the horse disappeared and she's just floating through the sky like a demon, go either way. That line seems intended to create maximum controversy, because now you've got, I'm a demon lord, I feel like that's really deliberately trying to inflame someone who's religious.

It's right there. The flames are being stoked. And that's part of the whole thing. She's a very online person in her world of music. It doesn't really matter what certain people of faith are going to. say about her music as long as it gets her a bunch of attention. And that's actually a little different than, say, Little Nas X, because I feel like with Montero, the controversy was all around the imagery of the song, right? The music video, his blood-filled sneakers, I think, that he was selling.

Right. He was dancing on the devil. But the song itself didn't really have any, like, devil references, as I recall. There's a reference to Eve and Adam, and of course, and the song is, of course, explicitly about queer love and sex. And that was certainly enough to embroil a group of religious conservatives. I'm not faced. Don't know you to sin. If you've been in your garden, you know that you can. Right.

In Doja, though, the references are a little more on the nose. Yeah, explicit. I'm a demon lord. And if you aren't buying it in the way that she's singing it, all you have to do is listen to the sped-up and slow-down versions. Whoa. Just to be here, those the official sped-up and slow-down versions? That's wild.

That slow-down version is pretty demonic. Pretty demonic. So we've established that she is a great troll to the trolls, and she buries this actually in the music and a really wonderful clue. We have spent this whole time talking about this very fun song without acknowledging its underlying sample. Oh, finally. Finally, I clocked this immediately, but I felt like I didn't want to be the first one to bring it up. I don't want to be that guy, you know.

But yeah, this is a. sample from Dionne Warwick's recording of Bert Backerack and Hal David's Walk on By. If you see me walking down the street and I start to cry each time we mean walk on by. How cool to hear this song in this Doja Cat track. I mean, first of all, Charlie, we did a whole episode last week about Jimmy Buffett and I, And I mentioned, you know, Bert Backrack as another great that we lost in the year 20, 23. So it's cool, you know, probably not intentionally, but like cool to be paying homage to him. I think I said that right.

Amage. You did. You see that email we got that said I've been saying homage instead of homage. So I'm trying to say, I'm trying to say homage. But people say an homage. Okay. So maybe you have an homage to something, but you pay homage to. But you pay homage.

Pay homage. Oh, my God. I'm messing it up already. I don't know. We need clarity. Someone sent me another email. Everyone, everyone needs to weigh in on this. How about this?

Paying. We need to call Helen. Paying tribute. Yeah, let's get Helen back here to work this out. Okay, what are we talking about? Paying tribute to the legacy of Bert Baccarac. I also really love that this is giving Bert Baccarac a posthumist number one hit. Indeed.

Someone known for creating devilishly, complicated pop songs, Charlie, with weird time signatures and strange harmonies. Yeah. This one actually is a pretty conventional song, I would say, for the most part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's kind of cool because I feel like the original Dionne Warwick version is really a song about like, it's saying walk on by if you see me because I don't want you to know what a mess I am, you know?

Like, don't see how sad I am after our breakup. just walk on by. But I feel like Doja Cat is kind of flipping the meaning, and it's like, walk on by because I've got no time for you. Right. There's nothing to see here. I don't need you. She transforms the meaning,

and she even transforms the harmony in the original. The chords are going back and forth between a minor 4-7 and a minor 5-7. But Doja-Cat re-harmonizes the sample, and it becomes the root. The chords shift back and forth between a one-seven and then up to a two-seven and back and forth and back and forth. So the meaning has changed, but also has sort of the harmonic ground on which we're standing.

But I think that there's yet another reason why she might be quoting Dionne Warwick, who, of course, is way more than just one of the most celebrated, and charting artists of all time. She has also a bit of an internet phenom herself. Reuters and the Guardian have called her the queen of Twitter. Really? Do you know about this? I guess not.

No. DeN. Work has the most fun Twitter, now X, account. I asked our producer Rianna to pull together some of her best tweets. Here's a smattering of them. No, I will not be egging Wendy Williams' house. It is cold outside. I'm always tweeting while wearing a black vintage sequin gown, as divas do. That's good.

Hi, I'm Gladys Knight, and instead of taking that midnight train to Georgia, I won't walk on by, but we'll say a little prayer for you. I'm excited to officially take on the role as CEO of Twitter. This has been in the works for months. I love that. So, wow, is she writing these or is this like a social media intern? Because these are gold. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

She knows what she's doing. She is winning the internet. And so it's almost like Doja is citing, you know, a true hero of not just music, but also internet meme world. So this whole sample has layers of meaning for me. We have Doja Cat, an online meme lord herself, dragging her trolls, embracing the demon lord moniker, flipping the meaning of a popular sample to tell her critics to walk on by, a sample featuring yet another great artist. who has been dubbed the queen of Twitter. It's all fun in games to me. I don't think that there's any real demon worship here.

But if she's leaving you some doubt, on her other singles, she takes this devil imagery to a whole another level. We'll get into it right after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough.

Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the best. power and being unapologetic in their pursuits.

I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. In the wake of her success with Paint the Town Red, Doja Cat has released yet another song off her upcoming album, Scarlet. This one is called Demons. This is a much harder-hitting song, straight-ahead rap song. No singing here. and she goes all in on the devil imagery.

In the music video, she's dressed up as sort of a crossover devil cat. It looks like it's in the film Poltergeist or Exorcist. It features the actor Christina Ricci, who of course is of Adam's family, Casper and Sleepy Hollow fame, so she's got a lot of the horror cred. And I feel like she totally personifies a demon in the way that she uses her voice. I joked earlier that it might sound like at different times she's possessed by some kind of demonic cat-like figure. Every time that she wraps, she has a new way of using her voice. And I love how she shows us off at the very top of the song.

She cackles. It's always an unsettling way to start your track. And she jumps right in addressing her demons in a very deepens in a very, direct kind of voice, almost like a screechy cat-like voice. And the second time through, her voice gets really distorted and aggressive. But in contrast, when her verse comes in, she's light and airy, like a sly, quiet cat voice. And then fast forward to her second verse, and we get this much more direct vocal, like a strutting cat-like voice, if you will. She makes a pretty funny nod to her song, Moo, she is now a cash cow.

She is now a cash cow. You are mad at me because I am all they slap now. I can nap now. And she has done so well that she has time that she can nap now while acknowledging that people are only just catching up to her skill saying lots of people that were sleeping, say I rap now. her whole narrative wrapped up into a verse. This voice that she's using here is really wild, too. It's almost sounds like a glitching computer or something, or like an AI that's gone awry.

It's one of the things I like about Doja Cat's songs. If you don't know what you're listening to, you might think that there are three featured performers on the song. Right. It's a little reminiscent of what rappers like Nikki Minaj do with these different vocal personas. Well, careful, Nate, with the Nicki Minaj comparisons, it's one that Doja Cat's not always so happy about herself.

I stand corrected. Here, Doja Cat is using them, I think, in a way that maps to this, you know, demon imagery. It's like she's possessed by all these different people inside of her. I feel like the underlying production is reinforcing that feeling of demonic possession. I mean, this is some dark stuff. The opening instrumental has this terrifying distorted 808, some kind of horn, maybe even a trumpet doubling on top of it, and this string sample that is rising and climbing,

this eerie kind of unpredictable way that feels like it's coming from a classic horror movie. And the whole thing is built off of this very dissonant figure, the minor second. Root, minor second root. Yeah, exactly. that sound for me is the indication that you are making a song that is going to go hard. And it's used all over the place, like Daddy Yankees gasoline and Calais's milkshake. And Kendrake Lamaar is humble. That song goes hard, Charles.

They all do. What for you about that figure, the little minor second? Why does it give us this feeling? I mean, there's a tension with that particular interval because the notes are so. so close, like if you play them at the same time, it would sound really jarring, right? There's like, right, a dissonance there. When you move up to that minor second,

you know, it feels a little ominous. I'm singing it now and I'm realizing it's also like the soundtrack to Jaws too, you know, so there's a lot of tension in that interval. Yeah, I feel like this sound is so, embedded in our cultural memory from film. Jaws, definitely. I also think of psycho. Okay, okay. We'll give it to you, Charlie. Okay, just a little bit. I mean, it's not as good as my example. It's not as crystalline, but yeah, I guess, I guess there's some minor seconds in there. Okay, fine, but you know what song

does have a lot of minor seconds that I think is very relevant to our discussion? Noddy Girl by Beyonce. That's a great song, but no. Okay, what is it? Just a day You hear me Would a call to your place Montero And yes Unholy

If you want to Evoke Going hard Making a song That has some Devil imagery in it You gotta use This little figure

Yeah, you do And I think you're right I think it probably comes From Jaws From just all of this cultural memory of this sound This very

Close little melodic thing That just doesn't Sound quite right Right And Charlie you know when you did that montero episode you also drew a connection to this also exoticism that we might associate with the sound as well and and for for better or worse a certain fear of the unknown of the other

of whether that's like a middle eastern other an arabic other like that sound may bring up those associations and and cause us to to have this sort of geographic and cultural gap that we experience. Yeah, I think we all have these subconscious ways of hearing these sounds that can contain some underlying biases for sure. I think in the case of Doja Cat, though, she may have picked it up in her collaborations with old Nas X. She did a song with him called Scoop that features the same melodic figure.

I feel like I'm catching the vibe of Scoop in Doja Cat's third and final song that we're going to listen to today. It was actually the first single off for New York. project called Attention. It's a similar harpy-like figure, that same minor second quality. And it even features a loon call. Quick sidebar. I love a great loon call. There is a spectacular article by Philip Sherbourne at Pitchfork. I think it's from 2014 about the history of the loon call, which you brought up Nikki Minaj. You can hear the loon call in Anaconda. Oh, there it is.

It even plays a part in Calvin Harris' song, Prayers Up with Travis Scott and A-Track. The Loon Call goes all the way back to the late 80s in a bunch of Ibiza hits, like 808 States Pacific State. See, I know this is a long sidebar, but I love the loon call because, you know, I grew up in Maine, and Sherburn thinks, though, that this loon call is completely misappropriate, and I agree, like, it was a popular sound in Abiza dance club,

hits, it was probably thought to wrongly be some kind of like tropical bird. The sound came from a popular synthesizer of the 1980s called the Emu Emulator 2 that was a sampler that had basically a preset that sounded like a loon. Charlie, you'd never need to apologize for a loon digression, okay? I'm a lunatic. I am always here for loon. Any bird-related content in general. I'm a big fan you do you do love birds you had you had an entire sidebar of an episode traveling through scotland discussing different shorebirds and seabirds shorebirds right you got seabirds seabirds seabirds right bills petrels uh ganitz turn it's a deep cut of the podcast that's true wow deep cut I was going to go to Beethoven's fifth being potentially based on the call of the yellow hammerbird.

We covered that. Okay, you got to get us out of here. We've gone too far. Yeah. Okay. Lewin Kahl grabs our attention, just like Doja Kat, who is talking about the attention economy, all of the expectations of celebrity, and I think continuing to lean into the satanic, the demonic, etc. Let's hear how she does this in attention. I love what she does in the post-chorus there.

She's singing, it needs, it seeks affection, so sweet, hungry, it fiends attention. Feens attention. What is it in this lyric? I think the entire attention economy, fan culture, everything. Like, you're hungry for this attention that I give you and that I create. And I love the use of the word. fiend here because fiend on the one hand is slang for desire, fiend's attention. But fiend is also Satan, the devil. Fiend is the antagonist. It's a clever little wordplay. And she's doing it in that

raspy, sort of sultry cat voice. But when we get to the verse, she totally flips up her vocal. It's one of the better examples of stop text painting. Rather than saying stop, and the music stops. Yeah. She's saying, look at me. And her voice is bare. There is no reverb on it. It's very direct.

You just feel like it's her right on a microphone right in front of you. Look at me, look at me. And then are you paying attention? Yes. Look at me, look at me. Spotlight. It's a cool moment.

Right on her. Yeah, I like that. She's forcing you to... Pay attention. To pay attention. And also to sort of maybe even be in her shoes a little bit. What does it feel like to just have

everything focused on you like that? And of course, she's talking about all of the expectations that we have for a performing artist, especially female performing artists. She once again is going right for the jugular of her critics. Talk your shit about me. I can easily disprove it.

It's stupid. You follow me, but you don't really care about the music. Talk your shit about me. I can easily disprove it. It's stupid. You follow me, but you don't even really care about the music. I mean, I feel like she's speaking for our show right here, Charlie. You know, people don't care about the music.

They forget about. I mean, that's because that's what we're all about. You know, we're all about listening deeply to the music. Okay? Right. Right. So I appreciate artists who stand up for that aspect of criticism, you know. And that is the point of the song, Attention.

She's pointing out some fundamental truths about the expectations of being a pop star. She plays on that line she was in the first verse. Look at me. Look at me. I'm naked. Vulnerability earned me a lot of bacon. She knows the game that she has to play. She says, you know, I share my body and all my...

vulnerabilities in order to become this cash cow. And of course, like all entertainment stories from the rise at the top, everybody just wants to see them fall right on their faces and see the devastation. Pretty self-aware of the sort of media cycle and the expectations of a pop star. Yeah, this is a track that probably demonstrates the most kind of depth and complexity of any of the Doja singles we've had so far in her career. This is not Kiss Me More. No, and it's an important element in this demonic triptych that we've been listening to because It shows how aware and meta this actual conversation is.

And of course, it comes back to the idea I think that, well, Satan isn't real. And really what it is is us looking to scapegoat people and to demonize them and to kind of shuffle our own fears and anxieties into these satanic figures. And Doja Cat is like throwing that a little bit back at us. And as you said, kind of like making us inhabit what that actually feels like to be shamed and like to feel that. that vulnerability a little bit. Yeah, I feel like as much as she's saying, leave me alone as a person, just let me be Doja Cat. She's also playing with the idea of,

am I the devil? Or am I just a person going through all this stuff and do you relate to that in some kind of way? I'm really excited to see where she's going to take this costume, this devil worship from here on Scarlet. I have no idea what to expect. Did it O'Chic. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz,

edited by Art Chung, engineer by Brandon McFarland, illustrations by Ira's Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, our executive producers Nashak Kerwa. Remember for the Vox Media Podcast Networking at production of Vulture. Tune in next Tuesday for a brand new episode and tell us what you're hearing in these Doja Cat tracks

on our social media at Switched on Pop. Until next Tuesday. Thanks for listening.