THE NEW YORK TIMES: Doechii has the charisma, imagination & drive to become a superstar

There is a heady insularity to much of the music made by Doechii, the 27-year-old Florida rapper who had a breakout moment at this year’s Grammys.

Her first viral hit, “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” which became popular on TikTok in 2021 and earned her a deal with Kendrick Lamar’s former label Top Dawg Entertainment, is a nostalgic ode to lonely adolescent hours whiled away in her bedroom.

Several songs on “Alligator Bites Never Heal” — the raw, rangy mixtape that won best rap album in an upset — flip the sound of Doechii’s shallow, labored breathing into rhythmic hooks. Her most recent single, “Anxiety,” is essentially an expressionistic musical rendering of a panic attack.

None of that exactly screams “party.” But Doechii effectively turned the 5,500-capacity Theater at Madison Square Garden into an electrified rave Monday night, when her Live From the Swamp Tour made its sole New York City stop.

Throughout a relentlessly energetic hour-and-a-half set, Doechii rapped and vamped exuberantly, inviting an adoring audience to let loose and emphasizing her music’s more extroverted impulses.

Her DJ and hype woman, Miss Milan, mixed Doechii’s tracks into crowd-pleasing interpolations — pieces of songs from Beyoncé, Charli XCX and even Michael Jackson — that helped sustain an escapist, clublike atmosphere. Anxiety, at least for the night, had left the building.

Doechii’s style of rapping is at once laser-focused and cartoonishly animated, driven by dexterous wordplay and sudden pivots into entirely different flows, intonations and characters.

A quintessential example is “Denial Is a River,” the humorous but self-lacerating single from “Alligator Bites” that unfolds like a conversation between Doechii and a milquetoast therapist (“We’re gonna try a breathing exercise, OK?”).

During the live show, “Denial” was one of the most satisfying and elaborately staged numbers: It began with a comedic, silent-movie-inspired video outlining the track’s melodramatic plot, then featured Doechii acting out a choreographed drama complete with a spotlight and feather boa.

When, in the middle of the song, she took an accidental tumble down a slide on the side of the set, she barely missed a beat before jumping back into the track’s complex rhythm.

That was one of many moments that demonstrated that Doechii has the charisma, imagination and drive to become a superstar, even if she does not yet have an entire set’s worth of first-rate material.

Her most upbeat, menacing tracks — the tongue-twisting, strobe-lit “Nissan Altima”; the growling boast “Catfish”; the high-energy taunt “Alter Ego” — hit hardest in the room. Slower numbers like “Slide” and “Stressed” temporarily stalled the momentum.

Several stylistically disparate duets that she recorded with other artists — like “What It Is,” a singsong 2023 collaboration with Kodak Black, and “ExtraL,” a somewhat mismatched pairing with K-pop star Jennie — felt like diversions from Doechii’s otherwise distinct musical path.

Still, the staging and styling showed a sharp, cohesive vision. Clad in a preppy corset and later a white lingerie-inspired two-piece, Doechii climbed up and down a set that resembled a turntable and two oversize speakers.

The show was structured as a series of “lessons” and had a loose school-days theme, which mainly served as an invitation for Doechii to strike acrobatic poses on a classroom desk that glided across the stage. (It was also a family affair: The only two dancers were her younger twin sisters.)

At one point, during a performance of the in-your-face “Crazy,” she invited up some honored guests — including actress Julia Fox, model Anok Yai and up-and-coming musician Ravyn Lenae — and strutted across the desks where they sat, from which they could only gaze up at Doechii like an untouchable idol.

“Easy, breezy, beautiful, erratic,” she spit on “Boiled Peanuts,” one of several tracks in the set that mention the pressure she felt from her label to craft another TikTok-friendly smash.

Doechii raps with candor — and some audible eye rolls — about the modern demands of virality. That divide between pleasing the algorithm and following her own unruly muse is one of the most compelling tensions driving her music, and it will be interesting to see how she navigates this crossroads in the future.

Many of the songs on “Alligator Bites” feel more like tossed-off, oddball snippets than a conscious attempt to write hits — and that is a large part of their appeal.

On “Denial Is a River,” Doechii expresses a refreshing disillusionment with being known for making “TikTok music.” But earlier this year, when a clip from “Anxiety,” a track she self-recorded in 2019, began to gain popularity on social media, she rerecorded it and added it to the deluxe edition of “Alligator Bites.”

Although it has become her highest charting single to date, “Anxiety,” which is built around a too-obvious sample of Gotye and Kimbra’s 2011 smash “Somebody That I Used to Know,” is less sonically distinct than the mixtape itself.

Live, though, she reimagined the song as a kind of devilish seduction, writhing atop the desk while a man sat submissively in its chair — yet another moment that displayed her commanding star power.

Thwarted by Madison Square Garden’s strict 11 pm curfew, Doechii’s encore was unfortunately rushed; she asked fans what they wanted to hear, then had to cut “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” short.

Luckily, though, she had time to bring out the song’s antagonist, her mother, whom she asked the crowd to address as “Miss Lisa.” The audience, full of Doechii’s apt pupils, obliged.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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