Doja Cat
Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini, known professionally as Doja Cat, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Regarded as the "Queen of Pop-Rap", she is known for her versatility, live performing skills, internet personality, and stage presence. Billboard named her "one of the world's biggest pop stars" and "one of the defining pop stars of this era", and Time listed her as one of the world's most influential people in 2023.
Doja Cat began making and releasing music on SoundCloud as a teenager. Her song "So High" caught the attention of Kemosabe and RCA Records, with which she signed a recording contract prior to the release of her debut extended play Purrr!. After a hiatus from releasing music and the uneventful rollout of her debut studio album, Amala, she earned viral success as an internet meme with her 2018 single "Mooo!", a novelty song in which she makes humorous claims about being a cow. Capitalizing on her growing popularity, she released her second studio album, Hot Pink, in the following year. The album eventually reached the top ten of the US Billboard 200 and spawned the single "Say So"; its remix with Nicki Minaj topped the US Billboard Hot 100.
Doja Cat's third studio album, Planet Her, spent forty-one weeks in the Billboard 200's top 10 and became the 10th best-selling album globally of 2021. It produced the top ten singles "Kiss Me More", "Need to Know", and "Woman". Her fourth studio album, Scarlet, adopted a hip-hop-oriented sound and peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200. Its lead single "Paint the Town Red" topped the Hot 100, the Billboard Global 200, and numerous charts internationally. Her fifth album, Vie, marked a return to her pop roots and also peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200.
Doja Cat is one of the best-selling female rappers of all time, with over 34 million records sold between 2018 and 2022. In 2024, Billboard ranked her as the 24th top woman artist and 2nd female rapper of the 21st century—five years after her first charted record. Since 2020, she has won hundreds of accolades, including a Grammy Award from 19 nominations, six Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, six MTV Video Music Awards and eight iHeartRadio Music Awards.
Early life and education
Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini was born on October 21, 1995, in the Tarzana neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Her mother, Deborah Sawyer, is an American graphic designer of Jewish heritage, and her father, Dumisani Dlamini, is a South African performer of Zulu descent, best known for starring as Crocodile in the original Broadway cast of the musical Sarafina! and the 1992 film adaptation. The two had a brief relationship after meeting in New York City where Dumisani performed onBroadway, but he was too busy on tour to spend time with Amala and her brother. He said that he left his family in the U.S. for South Africa out of homesickness in the hopes that they would join him there. He has also claimed that he has a "healthy" relationship with his daughter and that her management team had tried to block all his attempts to contact her out of the fear that they "might lose her". Nevertheless, Dlamini has said on multiple occasions that she is estranged from her father, stating that she "never met him" and later accused him of being a deadbeat to her and her brother. During a 2025 interview with Angie Martinez on her podcast, Doja Cat revealed that she has three additional half-siblings from her mother's side.
Soon after her birth, Dlamini moved from Tarzana to Rye, New York, where she lived for five years with her maternal grandmother, an architect and painter. At the age of eight, Dlamini returned to California with her mother and brother to live at the Sai Anantam Ashram, a commune in Agoura Hills. Its spiritual director was jazz musician Alice Coltrane. The family went on to practice Hinduism for four years. Dlamini wore head-covering scarves and sang bhajans while at the temple, saying that she felt like she could not "be a kid" during her time there.
Her family then moved a couple miles north to neighboring, Oak Park, California, where she started attending dance lessons and experienced a "sporty childhood", often skateboarding and visiting Malibu for surf camps. Dlamini and her brother were also subjected to racial prejudice as some of the only mixed-race children in the area.
As she grew older and moved away from the ashram, she attended breakdancing classes and joined a professional poplocking troupe, with whom she competed in dance battles throughout Los Angeles while still attending high school. Her aunt, a vocal coach, had given Dlamini singing lessons to help her audition for Central Los Angeles Area New High School No. 9, a performing arts high school in Los Angeles. She frequently skipped school to participate in online chatrooms. After becoming discouraged about her education and career path, Dlamini claims that she realized in eleventh grade that "performing and music was all ever cared about." She eventually dropped out at age 16 while in her junior year, attributing this decision to her struggles with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, saying that "it felt like I was stuck in one spot and everybody else was progressing constantly."
Career
2012–2017: Career beginnings and record deal
Doja Cat has described life after dropping out of school as "messy", claiming that she slept on the floor and spent "all night and day" browsing the internet, looking for beats and instrumentals from YouTube which she downloaded and used to create her own music. After becoming fascinated with internet culture and websites like eBaum's World and Myspace, she taught herself to sing, rap and use GarageBand while at home without a job, frequently making music and uploading it to SoundCloud. In late 2012, "So High" became the first permanent upload on her SoundCloud account. Doja Cat began her career in the Los Angeles underground hip-hop scene, performing at parties and cyphers, and connecting with rappers such as Busdriver, Ill Camille and VerBS, the latter of whom claims to have helped hone her craft and find her first gig. It was during this time that she met producer Jerry "Tizhimself" Powell, who had stumbled upon her SoundCloud account. He introduced her to record producer Yeti Beats, who invited her to record at his studio in the neighbourhood of Echo Park, which also served as "an oasis of sorts for Doja to escape from the turmoil at home". Yeti Beats then connected her with Kemosabe Records, an imprint of RCA Records, where she signed under label executive Dr. Luke and his publishing company Prescription Songs at the age of 17. This deal also came with a temporary artist management partnership with Roc Nation.In August 2014, Doja Cat released her debut EP, Purrr!, described as "spacey, eastern-influenced R&B" by The Fader. "So High" was repackaged and released as her solo commercial debut single prior to the EP's release, and was later featured on the Fox series Empire in the third episode of the show's first season. In mid-2015, Doja Cat temporarily signed to OG Maco's label, OGG. Following the signing, in late 2016, Maco and Doja Cat collaborated on the song "Monster", from Maco's 2017 mixtape, Children of The Rage. She had started experiencing writer's block, which led her to decline American singer Billie Eilish's offer to feature on what would later become her popular 2017 single "Bellyache". Doja Cat would stop releasing music for a while amid what she describes as a "creative limbo", which was influenced by her record labels not paying her much attention, as well as the effects of "finding herself" and smoking too much marijuana.
2018–2019: ''Amala'' and "Mooo!"
Her first major commercial release in four years, Doja Cat released the song "Roll with Us" in February 2018 following a brief hiatus. The following month, she released "Go to Town" as the lead single from her debut album, with an accompanying music video. "Candy" was released as the album's second single that same month. The track would later become a sleeper hit after a "dance challenge" on the video-sharing platform TikTok went viral in late 2019. The single consequently charted in countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States, with the latter having the song peak at 86 on the Billboard Hot 100, making this her first solo entry on the chart. On March 30, 2018, Doja Cat's debut studio album Amala was released through RCA and Kemosabe Records, and included the three singles. Its release was largely uneventful, as it was ignored by critics and failed to chart in any market. Doja Cat has since expressed strong disdain toward the record, claiming that it doesn't entirely represent her as an artist and that it isn't a "finished album" since she was constantly partying or high on marijuana during its recording. She claims it was also rushed in order to meet deadlines from the record labels who paid it "almost no support".In August 2018, Doja Cat self-published the homemade music video for "Mooo!", a novelty song with absurdist lyrics in which she fantasizes about being a cow. The video promptly garnered viral success as an internet meme, attaining over three million views in one week. Due to popular demand following this viral success, the single version of "Mooo!" was released onto digital platforms later that month as the lead single from the deluxe edition of Amala. This was followed by the release of the second single, "Tia Tamera" featuring Rico Nasty, and its accompanying music video in February 2019. The full deluxe edition of Amala was released on March 1, 2019, and featured the bonus tracks "Mooo!", "Tia Tamera" and "Juicy". The success of "Mooo!" is believed to have "irrefutably proved" to her record labels that Doja Cat was a marketable artist, which led them to start paying more attention to her.