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This Is Doechii’s Moment
The delightfully unpredictable artist is capable of anything.
At the end of her sprawling, impressive third mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, Tampa rapper and singer Doechii receives a warmly encouraging voice-mail from a woman who invokes the story of Abraham and Lot, sometime Biblical neighbors whose shepherds quibbled over a shared plot of land until the friends parted ways amicably, the former leaving for Canaan and the latter fatefully choosing Sodom. She elevates the awful JT hip-house team up “Alter Ego” with sharper, moneyed raps and a gorgeous sung coda that calls back to legendary R&B and house divas; she delivers a shot of adrenaline to Katy Perry’s otherwise dead-in-the-water Crystal Waters rehash “I’m His, He’s Mine.” On Ab-Soul’s resolute “I, Myself, and Me,” she’s the sweetener for his workmanlike singing; on Banks’s “I Hate Your Ex-Girlfriend,” she juxtaposes screaming rage and disaffected rhymes, like Kelis making a medley of “Caught Out There” and “Bossy.” So the phrasing of the narrative twist — “I open up the messages then had to hit the zoom / Turns out the girl was really a dude?” — left room for the song to be misread as an heir to the transgressive storytelling of EPMD’s “Who’s Booty.” Addressing the last line in Rolling Stone, Doechii explained that she was picking apart her own assumption that the cheater was straight, not engaging in garden-variety rap transphobia.
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