What both artists understood implicitly is that social media has effectively collapsed the barrier between a hit song and a viral meme, and that fame from such successes is currency you can parlay into a lasting career if you spend it wisely. Essentially Doja Cat had pulled off a small-scale version of Lil Nas X’s success story several months before “Old Town Road” hit the internet. The song spawned a #MooChallenge that had people all over Twitter and Instagram shaking their asses in cow costumes, and less than two years later the original music video has racked up more than 66 million views on YouTube. Regardless of its artistic merit, “Mooo!” turned out to be an extremely savvy release. Whenever I start to feel like the song’s breakout success is symptomatic of our cultural decline, I laugh at a line like, “Bitch, get out of my hay” and conclude that I’m taking “Mooo!” way more seriously than Doja Cat ever intended. It was the kind of joke song that felt like a stroke of genius when I let myself get swept up in its giddy headspace and like Idiocracy coming true when my mood was less generous.
Along the way she interpolated both “Old MacDonald” and Kelis’ “Milkshake” while throwing shade like “You a calf bitch, you my daughter” and “Got milk bitch? Got beef? Got steak ho? Got cheese?” In the lo-fi video, she wore a cow costume while dancing against various green-screened backdrops. “Mooo!” found Doja goofily crooning and talking shit about life as a bovine over a minimal jazzy hip-hop loop, backed by her own voice harmonized into a twinkling hook. The music was solid, too - as bright, shiny, and engaging as you’d hope for from an aspiring pop star, with the range to pull off both the neon trap-pop party “Cookie Jar” and the sensuous chopped-and-screwed “Wine Pon You.” But what captured people’s attention was a lo-fi novelty track and video she supposedly threw together in 12.5 hours, in which she proclaimed, “Bitch, I’m a cow/ Bitch, I’m a cow/ I’m not a cat/ I don’t say meow.” From opener “Go To Town” (a celebration of cunnilingus) to self-explanatory closing track “All Nighter,” her whole persona was in place on Amala. She’d already released a major-label debut album called Amala earlier that year, a colorful collection of gleefully sexual songs that blurred any remaining distinctions between pop and rap. She has managed to make lightning strike more than once.įirst it was a lark called “Mooo!” that significantly raised Doja’s profile in the summer of 2018. It’s a cyber sex reference (the song is literally called “Cyber Sex”), but the rapper and singer born Amala Zandile Dlamini has a pretty strong handle on breaking the internet in the more traditional sense of the phrase, if such a phrase can be called traditional - that Kim Kardashian-on-the-cover-of- Paper virality that sends social media networks into a frenzy.
“Let’s break the internet,” Doja Cat sings on the first song from her recent album Hot Pink.
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