Doja Cat vs. The Arena Tour
On Doja Cat's Scarlet Tour
On November 29, I attended Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. My friend Brendon Holder, author of the newsletter LOOSEY, was also in attendance so we linked up afterward to chat about the tour and Doja Cat’s polarizing new era.
Ira Madison III: Okay, so Doja Cat has been doing the most this year… At first I was like, are we actually gonna go see this show? Or more likely… are we gonna see this show and only put the videos on close friends lol.
Brendon Holder: Same. But the charts don’t lie… everyone was saying that she was cancelled and yet somehow secretly streaming enough to make “Paint The Town Red” go #1! I was just so curious to finally see her headline a tour. It’s been a long time coming with many delays so I was willing to take that risk and post on main. Were you mostly excited to hear her new stuff or the old?
Ira: I’m a fan of Scarlet. But my initial interest in the album waned a bit. Except for major songs like “Agora Hills” or “Fuck the Girls (FTG)” or “Wet Vagina,” I mostly listen to Hot Pink still. Which is a perfect record. It’s disappointing she’s disavowed it and we get so little of it on this tour, but I will say she absolutely blew me away. From the concert’s intro alone (“WYM Freestyle”), where she came out in a red robe and then revealed a gag worthy, superhero-esque muscle body body suit (custom Natasha Zinko) underneath, she had stage presence and most of all: swagger. There’s no denying she’s a star.
Brendon: Yeah, her stage presence was the most captivating aspect to me. Not everyone has that! There was something very raw, very rockstar, early Eminem about it that works in direct opposition of what she established on Hot Pink.
I felt as though the production, the stage, couldn't really keep up with her. It could have just been Barclays but the stage didn’t really magnify her. I appreciated her effort to narrate the show through “acts” but the overall creative direction was confusing as fuck. And no outfit changes!
Ira: Yeah, those acts were confusing as hell. There were five. And none of them seemed particularly distinctive from one another. The lack of outfit changes for herself or even the dancers made the act structure feel superfluous. Also the decision to front-load the set with Scarlet songs and then backload it the rest of the album was a choice I didn’t love, it didn’t really show a progression of her artistry or an arc. It really just seemed like, “I like this album better and here’s the shit in the middle I don’t care about as much.”
I saw her at Coachella in 2022 and I felt similarly about the order of her set list. She was also let down by the stage there. Apparently the visuals were amazing via live stream but in person, you could barely see Doja most times and the screens that were supposed to show her and her dancers had distracting, powerpoint graphics on them. Seeing such a larger than life personality be swallowed by her stage was unfortunate.
Brendon: I found myself searching for winces of the pop-girlie that was paramount during the Hot Pink and Planet Her era. It was still there in some acts but I was pleased to see how well she embodied the hard-rap persona she taunted when first revealing her ambitions to do a “rap only” album. I would say, sonically, the Scarlet we got was different from the Scarlet she promised but I do admire her commitment to progression, it’s something I’ve wrote about before.
Scarlet was originally supposed to be called Hellmouth which is fucking love. I do feel like the one outfit we got, the hard-rap opening, her swagger gave me what I thought Hellmouth would give.
As suffocating as the hype and press was for this album, I do feel like this era kind of came and went quickly. Similar to you, I listened to the album for a week and then stopped. I forgot we had tickets. We’ve seen artists like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Harry Styles carry whole eras and keep public attention off the back of only one #1 single. Why do you think Doja hasn’t been able to do that this time around? She ran that “Say So” single to the ground, we know she’s capable of it!
Ira: I think largely because of her public persona. Aside from the prickliness with her fans, we also can’t ignore her messy relationship with J. Cyrus, who was accused of emotionally abusing and harassing fans via Twitch. Though Taylor managed to weather a similar (maybe more so) messy relationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy this year (she dumped him though, Doja is still dating J. Cyrus). Then there’s the time Doja wore a shirt with an Neo Nazi alt-right comedian on it. She flirts with with controversy often but maybe after Kanye West we’ve grown tired of artists in their enfant terrible eras. We want showmanship and professionalism.
Overall this wasn’t my favorite era, but I do appreciate how Doja is growing as an artist. And on stage the showmanship is definitely there. The bitch is a star! I’m intrigued to see where she goes next sonically and as a pop star. Is she really tired of being a pop star or was this all a put-on for this era?
 | A guest post by
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this cross-post was neat, cool to learn about another writer :) just subscribed to brendon's page!
My favorite thing about Scarlet: She has bars for everything critics have tossed at her over the past few years.
My least favorite thing about Scarlet: Everything EXCEPT the weird neo-nazi shit!
I'm a huge Doja fan. Even as a rapper, she has pop star presence—the likes of which we haven't seen since the early aughts. The bar is so low for what is "legendary" and "iconic" these days. But I had to unfollow her on social media so her personality and antics wouldn't ruin my love for her as an artist. I don't think she's done with pop and I love a reinvention. I think of this as her version of a Riri - Rated R era. Pending she doesn't do anything more egregious, I'm still excited to see what's next. 😬