Doja Cat Artistfacts

October 21, 1995
Amalaratna "Amala" Zandile Dlamini is a Los Angeles singer and rapper who records under the name of Doja Cat. She was raised by her Jewish-American painter mother, Deborah Sawyer, and South African actor and composer father, Dumisani Dlamini, who is best known for co-starring in the 1992 musical drama film Sarafina!
Doja Cat derived her stage name from her love of cats and her favorite strain of marijuana. "I was heavily addicted to weed and weed culture, so when I began rapping I thought of the word 'doja' and how it sounds like a girl's name," she told Dazed.
She started her music career in her teens by making GarageBand tracks for SoundCloud. Dr. Luke discovered Doja when she was 17 and signed her to his Kemosabe Records label.
Her commercial breakthrough came when "Mooo!," a song inspired by the shirt she was wearing, became a viral sensation in 2018. Doja parlayed that buzz into the Hot Pink album, which spawned the hit singles "Say So" and "Streets."
Doja Cat explained her writing process to V magazine:

"I start mostly with a beat. I never really write a lyric and then take it to the studio. But when I hear a beat, if I hear a melody, if it's interesting enough, I'll just start mumbling over s--t and sometimes I'll get in my feelings and want to write about some shit that makes me feel a type of way. And those are probably the most fun songs but usually I just start with a beat and that's it. And I do that with singing - like mumble with singing, I mumble with rapping."
Doja Cat created controversy when in March 2020 she downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 on Instagram live. She received backlash after claiming that coronavirus was only a "flu" and that she wasn't scared of it. A few months later, Doja admitted to catching the virus, saying, "I'm OK now. It was a four day symptom freak out but I'm fine now."
A young Alexis Haines, née Neiers, used to babysit Doja Cat when she was a child growing up in California. The former star of E!'s Pretty Wild, recalled to Rolling Stone, a "brilliant, very talented" and "wild" kid who used to rap on MySpace.
Doja Cat once lived at an ashram in California run by jazz great John Coltrane's widow, Alice Coltrane. Doja's mother designed banners for the John Coltrane Festival, so she grew up wandering in and out of festivals before she ever started making beats in her childhood bedroom.
Doja's songwriting process usually starts with a melody. She described it to iHeartRadio as needing a melodic "bed" before she can place words on top, explaining: "What is the beat saying to me, and how do I say something back to it?"

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