Much ado has been made about Doja Cat’s fourth studio album, Scarlet, being an intentional swerve away from pop and toward purer hip-hop. Part of what distinguishes Doja’s flow is her ability to weave fluently between not just singing and rapping, but various subgenres, and while the album certainly places a premium on her rapped verses, it also cycles through a number of stylistic approaches. If there’s a notable difference between Scarlet and Doja’s past releases, then, it’s that the songwriting feels aimless, almost incoherent.
Scarlet unfolds with Doja trying out one stylistic mode for two to three songs and then moving on to the next. The infectious opener “Paint the Town Red” is arguably the album’s most pop-forward moment and functions as something of a bridge between Scarlet and 2021’s Planet Her. And “Demons” and “Wet Vagina” sport menacing beats that support Doja’s provoco-trap approach and are effectively teeth-baring even if they aren’t very boundary-pushing.
Later, though, Doja opts for a pair of Kendrick Lamar-type beats with “Love Life” and “Skull and Bones,” the former evoking the minimalism of Section.80 and the latter the jazz-rap of To Pimp a Butterfly. But with the exception of “97,” which boasts a Flying Lotus-esque instrumental to match Doja’s sharp lyrical game, she lacks Lamar’s skill for wordsmithing.
The foregrounding of Doja’s spitting—unlike her past efforts, there are no guests on the album—invites a certain scrutiny. Sometimes her bars land, like the final verse of “Fuck the Girls (FTG)” or parts of “Wet Vagina,” where there’s palpable energy and momentum to her flow. But her verses on “Shutcho,” “Love Life,” and “WYM Freestyle” feel stilted and forced. Scarlet is a fairly slow-paced album, which doesn’t allow for the elastic, athletic delivery that we’ve come to associate with masterful hip-hop.
Perhaps holding Doja to this traditionalist expectation is a bit unfair, because she does plenty of interesting things with her voice throughout Scarlet that don’t involve rapping fast or dexterously. She’s always been an endlessly playful, teasing presence on the mic, and that continues here: On “Demons,” she’s mischievously faux-naïve, as if she’s batting her eyes but knows better, and on “Often,” she mostly pulls off an Erykah Badu-esque ethereality.
Elsewhere, the way Doja delivers hyper-sexualized lines like “I put good dick all into my kidneys” on “Attention” and “Stick it up me in the livin’ room, here’s ya ticket” on “Gun” is with a seasoned comedian’s deadpan. The ad-libbed asides that crop up throughout—“Let me finish my root beer” is particularly memorable—are also consistently winning.
Doja invites comparisons to rap’s ’90s Mount Rushmore by name-dropping 2Pac on “Paint the Town Red” and pointing to A Tribe Called Quest and Nas with old-school drum programming and attempts at narrativized recitation. But since her strengths lie more in cadence than substance, applying these conscious rap and boom-bap forms feels like a mistake. The production sprawls out on songs like “Balut,” but she doesn’t always know what to do with that open space. She’s more at home on melodic, narcotized pop-rap numbers cuts like “Gun” and “Go Off” that you could slot next to anything on Planet Her.
On a thematic level, Scarlet is largely about sex, fame, and toxic stan culture. Doja’s patently irreverent musings on these topics are diverting and humorous, but they’re not served by being presented in such self-serious stylistic trappings. As a result, the album winds up being an uneven grab bag of tracks that aspire to high-brow West Coast rap and down-the-middle pop—the work of a talented MC in search of the right tonal balance.
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