DOECHII
With her first full-length project out in the world, Doechii is being talked about in the same breath as some of the world’s greatest rappers. We meet the Floridian ‘Swamp Princess’ in London on the cusp of her global domination.
Words: Emma Wilkes. Photos: El Hardwick
“Everything is where it’s supposed to be,” Doechii says confidently, taking a seat in a corner of an east London photo studio. It’s late October, just two months on from the release of her new mixtape ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’, and hindsight’s gift is that everything that’s led her to this point now feels worthwhile.
“Now that I’ve had time to settle with [the mixtape] and fans have had time to settle with it, I feel very aligned, just like I’m 100% walking in my purpose. My music and everything else just aligns with exactly who I am and where I am right now, which feels like a lesson,” she explains. “So in a way, that kind of makes life feel a little easy. It feels like I’m on a cloud.
Choosing the mixtape format instead of dressing her new material up as a debut album was very deliberate. “It has less politics around it than an album. When you make an album, there’s a different type of expectation for it to be more polished or a little bit more – in my opinion – diluted, but I wanted to be raw, and I wanted it to feel imperfect. I wanted it to feel long and free. It kind of inspired me to go about albums differently and make them just as messy.”
The rapper, born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon, has headed over to our side of the Atlantic for a celebration. It’s the highest point yet on her rapid ascent, starting from her 2020 Dr Seuss-referencing EP ‘Oh the Places You’ll Go’. Things began accelerating with her viral 2021 hit ‘Yucky Blucky Fruitcake’, after which she signed to the legendary Top Dawg Entertainment to release her 2022 EP ‘She/Her/Black Bitch’. The culmination of this is the mixtape. “It feels good to just have music out,” she says. “I’ve never dropped a full-length project. It feels good to share my ideas and my stories in a full-length project, rather than through singles.”
After playing London’s Islington Assembly Hall last night, she’s headed eastwards today for the photoshoot accompanying this feature and for another show at the Village Underground, just a stone’s throw away from where we are now. But while she’s blossoming now, the journey to ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ has been littered with emotional peaks and troughs. “The relationship that I had with the songs before is the same relationship that I’ve maintained now. They’ve always been very vulnerable. They’re very close to me,” Doechii explains. “The project was inspired by journal entries, and so it’s very honest, very vulnerable.”
The reference to alligators in the title of the mixtape was not just a nod to the wildlife lurking in the swamps in her native Florida (the stage on tour was also decorated with swampland foliage), but to the parallels, Doechii drew between herself and the prey that manages to evade the grip of the animal. She’d learned that alligators kill their prey underwater with a ‘death roll’, spinning and spinning with their future meal locked helplessly in their jaws, which simultaneously drowns and is dismembered. Though she envisioned herself not as prey, but as the predator, life was treating her like the opposite. “This past year I’ve grappled with what felt like a relentless death roll in my life… A dance of drowning in my own vices, battling differences with my label and a creative numbness that broke me,” she wrote on Instagram when the mixtape was announced.
It doesn’t always feel that heavy. In fact, one of the mixtape’s standouts is the darkly quick-witted ‘Denial Is A River’, where Doechii runs from her personal traumas in real-time. “People are a little bit worried about you,” a second voice – a squeaky-voiced therapist? – tells her, pointing towards her barely being able to process being cheated on when her career began blowing up. Then, there’s the matter of drugs. “I’m not an addict,” Doechii insists, but then things become clearer. “I like day-drinkin’ and day parties and Hollywood / I like doin’ Hollywood shit, snort it, probably would / What can I say? The shit works, it feels good.”
“The art it comes from, the art of comedy, is about truth,” Doechii says about why she gravitated towards exploring heaviness through humour. “It’s about blunt truth and darkness and making light of it. I knew that I was going to be talking about such dark topics and such serious things and I was like, ‘How predictable would it be for me to talk about these things over a sad beat? Why not just do it in a Slick Rick type of children’s story way?’
“It just comes down to my love for satire but it’s interesting because it’s not necessarily satirical. I guess it is to other people, but it’s actually my real life and it really sucks. It’s not funny to me, but I think that I like doing it because maybe it makes other people digest it better and they can kind of face themselves through my music in a comedic way. It’s easily digestible that way.”
Nowadays, Doechii is sober. She’s quit tobacco, alcohol and even caffeine – “I’m just out here rawdogging life!” she jokes. Evidently, however, it has some bearing on why she’s found herself in a vastly more positive place. “Before, when I was drinking and when I was partying or whatever, I was still creating but the place which I was creating from was different,” she explains. “Over time, you outgrow things, you outgrow patterns, you outgrow different habits that no longer serve you. Where I am now, sobriety is serving me, and I’m creating from a different place – I have no outside influence besides me and my thoughts. It’s like I’m experiencing a different type of high, a high on just life. I know that sounds so corny, but I’m serious!”
“Over time, you outgrow things, you outgrow patterns, you outgrow different habits that no longer serve you. Where I am now, sobriety is serving me, and I’m creating from a different place
Doechii
‘Alligator Bites Never Heal also finds Doechii in a headlock with industry politics. “Label always up my ass like anal beads / Why can’t all these label n***as just let me be?” she spits on ‘Boiled Peanuts’, while references to the confusion of being a “TikTok rapper” are scattered throughout. “Now I’m makin’ TikTok music,” she raps on ‘Denial Is A River’, “what the fuck?”
It’s a point of rebellion because Doechii is not here to serve the algorithm. To do so would be to write to a formula that others can see through, to squeeze one’s creativity to fit a series of checkboxes. With music, she wants to be free.
“I’m not really embracing the popularised formula of hits because I found that that agenda, that formula, doesn’t necessarily work for an artist like me,” she argues. “I’m not against hits. Everybody wants hits, and I’m proud of my hits, and I know I have more to come, but it’s more so about breaking out of this formula of what a hit should be and how hits have to sound like this. That’s the part that I’m challenging in music right now.”
As bemused as she sounds to have her music blow up on TikTok, she’s not entirely against it as a tool for music discovery. “I love TikTok, and I also grew up on the internet, so I’m not against anything blowing up on the internet or marketing your music on TikTok and stuff like that. TikTok is an incredible tool. But I don’t want hip-hop or art to get distracted and lost in trying to make music for a computer. It’s people who are using the computer to consume the music and I think we’re getting confused.
I don’t want hip-hop or art to get distracted and lost in trying to make music for a computer
Doechii
“If it feels too much like a TikTok song, nobody thinks that’s cool. Me and a bunch of other artists are navigating that because the business is like, ‘This is what’s going to be the future and you should do this because it’s what the algorithm wants’. It’s been an interesting thing to try and navigate. But what’s happening now is I’m continuing to stay true to myself. I’m proving that what I do works, and I’m just going to keep being myself over and over again.”
Part of owning that individuality involves bigging herself up. While, of course, there’s stark honesty and vulnerability on show, Doechii knows she can’t be kept down forever. The bravado on display brings some of its most arresting moments, particularly smash hit single ‘Nissan Altima’, on which she infamously declares herself “the hip-hop Madonna, the trap Grace Jones”. Perhaps one of her most important qualities is that she contains multitudes, daring to be all the icons she wants to be at once.
This isn’t mere posturing either – it’s also a homage to some of her most powerful influences. “I do believe that I’m that girl!” she says. “Also, I get a lot of people saying that I remind them of Grace Jones. I also super look up to Grace Jones. I have read her books, I have seen her documentaries, I listen to her music. I take inspiration from her style. Growing up seeing a woman embrace both in her style, her masculinity and her femininity was so huge for me and inspired me so much. And her being dark skinned and just herself and so powerful. And I mean, me and Madonna are both Leos, and so I just feel like, in terms of hip-hop, I am like, Madonna, and I hope to be, I love her to death. I just am basically being cocky and saying I’m that girl and I’m iconic, I feel like everybody, everybody should feel like they’re the shit. Everybody should feel like they are icons. Everybody should feel proud of themselves and powerful.”
Growing up seeing a woman embrace both her masculinity and her femininity in her style was so huge for me and inspired me so much
Doechii on Grace Jones
That sense of confidence, however, hasn’t exactly been omnipresent. “I’ve always had belief in myself and have always known who I am, but I didn’t have the confidence to carry out who I was publicly,” Doechii says. “It’s taken me years to develop myself into the woman that I am, and to get to sit in an interview and say that I’m the best and I’m that girl, it took a lot of falling down. It took a lot of getting beat up. It took a lot of crying and being depressed, and until I couldn’t be depressed no more, and I’m tired of feeling sorry for myself.”
Doechii is out here resisting being pigeonholed at all costs. It’s perhaps not so surprising, then, that when we bring up the word ‘resistance’, she immediately latches onto it. “It’s interesting that you brought that word up,” she considers. “I feel like resistance has been a common theme in my career and in my personal life. I feel heavily inspired by that right now.” Furthermore, while ‘Alligator Bites Never Heal’ is consciously rather scattered in its approach, it comes from a place of self-assurance.
“I am embracing my ability to be a chameleon,” she says. “I gravitate towards any sound as long as I show up as myself.”
