Doja Cat's Route to Success through TikTok
by Marissa Cardenas
Doja Cat’s success relies heavily on social media, specifically TikTok, to the point that it brought her into the Billboard Hot 100 more than once without a feature.
If you’ve stuck with Twitter culture, you know that Doja Cat’s 2018 green-screen-DIY music video “Mooo!” went viral across social media. Like other one-hit-wonders (eg. Blurred Lines, Ice Ice Baby, Macarena, etc.), we thought her fame would be over after that.
However, thanks to TikTok, Doja Cat has skyrocketed back into the charts.
Since its initial launch for markets outside of China in 2017, TikTok has garnered 800 million active users worldwide. This app is essentially like Vine, the discontinued 6-second video sharing application from 2013, where people made comedy skits, dances, or anything creative. Following this style, TikTok can record up to 60-second videos where its users perform challenges, skits, lip syncs, and most importantly: dances.
Haley Sharpe, a 16-year-old from Alabama, posted a choreographed dance video on December 11th to Doja’s R&B bubble-gum dance track “Say So,” off of the singer’s second studio album Hot Pink (2019).
As of this week, “Say So” is ranked at 73 on the Hot 100 Billboard Charts.
The layered harmonies behind the chorus with simple guitar strumming won the hearts of the teens, which makes sense considering the song’s cutesy storyline. Throughout the track, Doja questions whether her crush is into her, repeatedly asking why won’t they just confess and “say so.”
The simplicity of the dance made it replicable and led to its popularity.
The original TikTok video trended with 6.6 million views, 600k likes, and led other people to copy the dance; using the song a total of 13.9 million times (based on TikTok’s library).
Another user named Talia Levinger choreographed another Doja song on October 23rd, lifting “Candy” into Hot 100 territory, at the 87-spot on the first week of December 2019, after its debut in March 2018.
Outside of the Billboard charts and inside of the TikTok challenge of the month, there is currently a “Cyber Sex” lyric challenge--another song off of Hot Pink. The challenge is a cringy way to flex how cute and lonely you are. The additional challenge is showing simultaneously showing off your crush (or the mishaps of the challenge) at the same time. Basically, TikTok tweens start the video saying who they’ll send the video to, such as their crushes or exes. Then, they’ll send each lyric sentence for sentence with absurd amounts of Instagram stickers, bitmojis, hearts, filters to their target.
I wanna touch on you
You see me in my room
Wish you were here right now
All of the things I'd do
I wanna get freaky on camera
I love when we get freaky on camera
Then, after finishing the verse, the video creator will post their crush’s reaction.
The reason why her songs find so much success on TikTok is from their composition. Doja Cat’s brand is fun, catchy, and edgy. Where “Say So” is a cute innocent dance challenge, “Cyber Sex” is a flashy competition where teenagers compare how much sex they have. Doja’s content also works because of how suggestive it is while being masked by a fast beat. “Say So” and “Candy” allows kids to ignore the lyricism and focus on the choreographed dances. Comparatively, it is similar to the 2006 club single “Promiscuous” by Nelly Furtado. In the song, Furtado was asking if her producer “would still respect [her] if [he] hit it” or that she “can see [him] with nothing on,” all while playing at the middle school dances nationwide. Likewise, Doja takes these “risky” song elements but presents it to a different generation of teenagers and kids: teenagers on the internet.
However, recently, Doja Cat has been the subject of some public controversy. Almost three weeks after “Mooo!” dropped, a tweet from 2015 that Doja Cat direct tweeted to Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt calling them both a homophobic slur resurfaced. After Twitter users called her out (for saying this snarky comment but also replying with “lmfaoooooo” to users), Doja defends her tweet a day later stating:
I called a couple people f****ts when I was in high school in 2015 does this mean I don’t deserve support? I’ve said f****t roughly like 15 thousand times in my life. Does saying f****t mean you hate gay people? Do I hate gay people? I don’t think I hate gay people. Gay is ok.
After the backlash, she posted a now-deleted tweet of an apology from the notes app stating that she has said these “horrible derogatory and hateful words towards people out of ignorance,” but also telling fans to “not look at her as a roll model.” This is ironic considering how teenagers now may look up to her, considering how popular her music is right now. Both apologies were later deleted until she posted a polished version on Twitter.
Through all of this, she ended up coming out on top with three songs to chart on the Hot 100: “Juicy” featuring Tyga, “Candy,” and “Say So.”