Previous, Doja Cat has had a complicated Relationship to the type of artist she is and what kind of music she should do. Almost a year so far after releasing her first No. 1 -Hit “Say So”, she tweeted that she was “tired” of it. Just a few months before she released her last album “Scarlet”, a burning rejection to her more polished pop, she referred to her breakthrough album “Hot Pink” and its successor “Planet Her” as “Cash Grabs” and “Mediocre Pop”, haunted their fans by saying they “fell for it.”
On “Vie”, her fifth album she seems to have found some kind of creative balance. Last weekend she told CBS Sunday morning that she is “a rapper who makes pop music”, a nice summary that gives her musical rails with the Pivot Room. As such, “Vie” is a development of Doja’s strong suits as both songwriter and artist at Liberty to toy with Vestiges of Pop’s past, making a record that updates the conventions of the 1980s POP without losing itself in the process.
Doja has a clear estimate for the 80’s Pekstenar -her Marc Jacobs Pinstripe Bodysuit and hair plum at the Met Gala mat introduced this era properly -and she infuses them in “Vie” as if she ranks a vintage shop. The album begins and ends with blowing saxophones as if they openly flog the idea of pastiche. And yet Doja continuously loses the well as she adapts it to her own aesthetics and moves fluently between sweet harmonies and smooth rapping in classic doja form.
“Jealous Type”, the album’s leading single, was a suitable table set for “VIE.” Made by the constantly chameleonic Jack Antonoff and Y2K, the funk-popped melody was flagged directly as a song by summer challenger of the Internet, who complained that it would have been Victor it had not been released so late in the season. The same can be said too much of “Vie”, who tips his hat to everyone from Prince and Janet Jackson to Pebbles and Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Over the album’s 15 tracks, Doja fights over day-glo-synthesis and cvertsless drum sounds, stacking song for electric choir and texts so narrow that it makes you wonder why she ever rejected a retro-lending song like “say so” in the first place.
Antonoff is an important ingredient for “VIE”, which produces on nine of the tracks, and it is no surprise that they are the ones who follow most to an 80s sound. Antonoff is a studio technician in the purest sense, and every instrument is period -specific, from the crushing underwater synthesis leading into “Take me dancing” with SZA (set’s only guest) to the “Knight Rider” of the time, which turns for the advancing “Aaahh men!” Of course, references are in abundance; It’s hard not to make comparisons with Jody Watley’s “looking for a new love” on “Dancing” or Jackson’s “Control”, which feels like a general plan for “VIE.” The album only loses its momentum when Antonoff goes back, namely on the sulta “make it up” where she turns to her husband with a reservation: “Did you hear about it? I’m a submissive peak.”
Much of “vie” is about relationship dynamics, whether it attracts a man on the dance floor on the picking “cards” or wonders if she has been cuffed even on the dream -like “service” (“I have only deleted Raya, it must mean that I am your supplier”). On the album “Stranger”, she is eye-catching, diligence between attractive coming and Frank anti-guards: “Girls can’t say he’s good of RIP /” Because he doesn’t look like he likes Dick / But if he liked it I still want him / as a freak I can admit it and he likes it. “
“Vie” can easily cause whiplash when Doja cuts rapvers into pop songs, but it doesn’t feel like patchwork. Doja is a talented singer and rapper, two skills that few have mastered at this level, and she marries her worlds with full command. When she reaches the album’s closing track “Come Back”, there is no doubt that she rightly deserves her place at the top of the pop-rap hierarchy and beats a sensitive balance that requires scope and precision.
There is much of it on “VIE”, a record that reinforces that Doja does not have to fit into a box to become the artist she is supposed to be. It is a view that she herself seems to have agreed with, but but to try (or public) it may have been, and “VIE” is all the better for it.
