Doja Cat

Doja Cat Artistfacts

  • October 21, 1995
  • Amalaratna "Amala" Zandile Dlamini is a Los Angeles singer and rapper who records under the name of Doja Cat. She was raised by her Jewish-American painter mother, Deborah Sawyer, and South African actor and composer father, Dumisani Dlamini, who is best known for co-starring in the 1992 musical drama film Sarafina!
  • Doja Cat derived her stage name from her love of cats and her favorite strain of marijuana. "I was heavily addicted to weed and weed culture, so when I began rapping I thought of the word 'doja' and how it sounds like a girl's name," she told Dazed.
  • She started her music career in her teens by making GarageBand tracks for SoundCloud. Dr. Luke discovered Doja when she was 17 and signed her to his Kemosabe Records label.
  • Her commercial breakthrough came when "Mooo!," a song inspired by the shirt she was wearing, became a viral sensation in 2018. Doja parlayed that buzz into the Hot Pink album, which spawned the hit singles "Say So" and "Streets."
  • Doja Cat explained her writing process to V magazine:

    "I start mostly with a beat. I never really write a lyric and then take it to the studio. But when I hear a beat, if I hear a melody, if it's interesting enough, I'll just start mumbling over s--t and sometimes I'll get in my feelings and want to write about some shit that makes me feel a type of way. And those are probably the most fun songs but usually I just start with a beat and that's it. And I do that with singing - like mumble with singing, I mumble with rapping."
  • Doja Cat created controversy when in March 2020 she downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 on Instagram live. She received backlash after claiming that coronavirus was only a "flu" and that she wasn't scared of it. A few months later, Doja admitted to catching the virus, saying, "I'm OK now. It was a four day symptom freak out but I'm fine now."
  • A young Alexis Haines, née Neiers, used to babysit Doja Cat when she was a child growing up in California. The former star of E!'s Pretty Wild, recalled to Rolling Stone, a "brilliant, very talented" and "wild" kid who used to rap on MySpace.

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