Before Doja Cat would have over 2.64 Million subscribers on YouTube, 816K followers on
Twitter, and more than 4.5 Million followers on Instagram at the time of this recording…
Before Doja Cat routinely started showing up on Instagram Live for hours at a time,
often LIT…
Before Doja Cat began receiving death threats for jokes she made about Cardi B…
Doja Cat has been a big presence in the hip-hop community ever since she began dropping songs
like “Mooo!”, “Juicy”, and “Rico Nasty”.
Her songs absolutely SLAY on YouTube, racking up millions upon millions of views whenever
she drops a new one with her trademarked brand of goofy humour.
It took a lot of hard work for Doja to get the spot that she’s at now, and even though
there are a ton of people out there always trying to knock her off her perch, she executes
complete control over her music and image and it's this level of authenticity that always
manages to push the naysayers away to where they belong, in the….
But how did this kid that bounced around from Tarzana, to New York, to an Ashram, to LA,
find her calling in the music biz?
That’s what we’re here to find out.
What's going on guys?
It's your boy Michael McCrudden back at it again with an UPDATED Before They Were Famous.
You guys seem to enjoy the updates so let us know who is need of one in the comments
down below.
How about Megan Thee Stallion or Saweetie?
I'm stating to wonder if I'm gonna need to make a Where Are They Now?
For City Girls.
Let me know who is next you know where, but for now, let’s start sifting through the
kitty litter to uncover the story of Doja Cat…
Really?
Kitty litter was the best we could come up with?
I'm gonna have to fire another writer.
Alright, lets run the titles!
Doja Cat was born Amala Zandile Dlamini on October 21st, 1995 in Tarzana, California.
Before we go any further, let’s just dig into that first name and find out the meaning
behind it…
Whether her mom lied to her or not, that’s a strong name, but maybe not as marketable
as something like Doja Cat, which we’ll explore the origins of in just a minute.
Soon after being born, Doja almost immediately moved to the Bronx in New York with her family.
Her father, Dumisani Dlamini is from Durban, South Africa.
He’s an actor, dancer, composer, and even a successful film producer, having produced
South African films like “Drum” and “Homecoming”.
Her mother, Deborah Dlamini is Jewish American and a visual designer for clothing brands.
She also spent time pursuing her own artistic designs as a painter.
With heritage like that, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Doja comes from an artistically
inclined bloodline, so her ending up as the uber-talented musician that she is probably
shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.
Growing up, Doja spent a lot of time taking dance classes but her true passion was singing,
a secret she tried keeping to herself by only ever singing in her room when she was alone.
At the time her musical influences ran that gauntlet from Jamiroquai, to The Fugees, and
Deangelo, to Erykah Badu and Pharrell.
When she was 9 years old, her mom bought her an Amy Winehouse CD that had a huge impact
on her.
She then started exploring music on her own and discovered acts like Lil Kim, TLC, PARTYNEXTDOOR,
and Drizzy Drake.
Outside of music, she was always watching something with a goofy sense of humor, whether
it was classic Disney Cartoons, Sesame Street, or even Jim Carrey movies like “The Mask”.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that even if she didn’t realize it at the time, Doja’s
subconsciously was absorbing all of this great influences and mixing it with the wild and
crazy humor she loved from movies.
Which probably came to play a big part in defining the music she would make later on
in her life.
After spending years in NYC, Doja and her family returned to California.
Back on the west-coast her family moved into an Ashram which if you don't know is like
a spiritual temple.
There Doja found to be a very difficult lifestyle.
She told Billboard:
“I’d just go to temple all the time and I’d wear this scarf on my head and… it
was very cult like.
I felt really trapped.
When we moved to the suburbs, that’s when it felt like a free-for-all.
I was skating every day, staying out, sneaking out, and it was just a crazy time.
We moved from the suburbs to LA and I picked up break dancing when I was 10.
“
Doja’s early years in dance were spent in ballet and jazz classes, but once in LA she
started working more on her hip-hop and pop-locking skills.
In LA she attended school at…
And while there, she was in crews competing in “dance battles” across LA, the stories
of which I assume is what the classic film series: “Step Up” is based off of.
Not classic?
People around here are telling me those aren’t great films, but any film series to give Channing
Tatum his start in movies is okay by me.
I mean it could of stared Kevin Federline for christ sakes.
For a brief period of time, at around the age of 14, Doja decided to try her hand at
YouTube by posting makeup tutorial videos with the goal of becoming a makeup guru.
I couldn't find any of her old YouTube videos but I did find this.
I don't know how many Amala Dlamini's are out there but seeing as that girl call her,
her twin I'm assuming that was for her.As she mentioned, her mom pretty quickly shut
those dreams down.
Not trusting the YouTube space at the time, she made her daughter remove all of her videos
and who can blame her?
I remember when YouTube was an embarrassing place to post content.
Doja didn’t let this keep her down for long, she pretty quickly moved onto her next dream,
making music full time.
In the 11th grade, Doja dropped out of school to pursue this goal.
Once out of school, when she wasn’t hanging out in trap-houses she otherwise lived a pretty
low-key lifestyle, spending a lot of time alone in her room, making music for a year
straight.
She would spend all day laying on the mattress on her floor and using a computer with a built-in
mic to record songs in Garageband over instrumentals that she would stumble upon on YouTube.
Despite her name being what she refers to as a “high-thought”, Doja has actually
been sober for over two years now.
Drinking & Porn.
I've quit one of those, can you guess which one?
Even though she isn’t smoking or doing drugs anymore, at least we still get Instagram Live
videos where she isn’t afraid to express her love after having had a few drinks.
Doja got into the habit of making a song, posting it to SoundCloud, leaving it up for
a week or so, only to then take it down after feeling insecure about how it turned out.
Eventually, things began to click.
In 2013 she released her debut single “So High” onto SoundCloud and while it didn’t
blow up immediately, she did see it get a “repost” and that was all the encouragement
she needed for her not to delete it.
From there it slowly began to bring her in a new audience.
The song went from 12 views to 12 thousand views, and now it has over 5.2 Million listens
on the platform!
Ever the diligent worker, Doja kept developing her sound and style while posting her music
online and working local shows in LA, growing her audience.
“So High” picked up enough steam to catch the ear of record label RCA Records and the
song found its way onto the “Empire” soundtrack when Doja was still just 18 years old!
By 2014, Doja was signing a deal with RCA and releasing her debut album: “Purrr!”.
That’s with 3 r’s and an exclamation point…
After that release, Doja’s buzz began to die down a little bit.
She fell back into the safe-haven of making music alone in her room and was struggling
to come up with a fresh new sound.
It was around this time that her boyfriend at the time bought her a surprise gift that
him, who knows if the world ever would have got “Mooo!” or “Juicy”?
There’s no doubt that Doja’s talent is the reason she is where she’s at, but sometimes
we all just need a little push, you know?
Thanks to feeling reinvigorated in a musical sense, Doja would hit on her first taste of
mainstream success after dropping the viral hit video for “Mooo!”
Sensing where the world was headed, Doja knew that if she was able to combine a banging
track with a memeable video, she would have an instant success on her hands, and boy did
she ever do that.
The inspiration for the song apparently came from the outfit she wears in the video.
After she had brought it on tour with her and was trying it on for her fans on Instagram
Live, she had an epiphany that a whole song about wanting to be a cow could be a big hit.
Sometimes it’s easy to confuse genius with lunacy.
It’s a fine line, that’s all I’m saying.
“Mooo!” got co-signs from the likes of Chance the Rapper, Katy Perry, and Chris Brown
and the video is currently sitting at over 68 Million views on YouTube at the time of
this recording.
But of course, as soon as someone makes it big in this world, there’s a few hundred
thousand of us looking to tear them down.
With a goofy sense of humor like Dojo’s it was only a matter of time until “Cancel
Culture” focused its wandering eye on her.
Social Justice warriors managed to located some old tweets of hers from high-school that
used some offensive and homophobic language.
Most of us probably would have said something about how we were different people when we
were younger – you know, less wise to the ways of the world but Doja took another route.
She doubled down on her language, often using those same derogatory terms within her “apology”
to the people she offended.
So yeah, that just made things a whole lot worse.
At the very least, as the years have moved on she seems to have learned from this experience.
The internet may have tried to cancel Doja, but she just kept on kicking out new tunes
and great music like her hit song with Rico Nasty, “Tia Tamera”, and, of course, “Juicy”.
Both videos have fallen in-line with “Mooo!” as viral hits.
Tia Tamera has 41 Million views and “Juicy” has over 101 Million at the time of this recording.
As for the rest of her story, well I think we are gonna have to wait and see because
this is Before They Were Famous.
My name is Michael McCrudden and we post biographies here on the daily.
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