The rapper from Tampa is about to be everywhere.
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Her voice in the chorus is low and full until her words start to slur in the next verse.
The next track, Bitch Im Nice, fades in.
Its faster, and her rhymes are sharper.
She whips her head around and looks at me.
Its my most cocky villain self just flexing my shit, she says with a cheeky smirk.
Doechii is at the precipice of one of the most exciting times to be an emerging artist.
Over the line Doechii, why dont you introduce yourself to the class?
users flashed old yearbook photos of themselves before revealing what they look like today.
By March, she was signed to Top Dawg Entertainment, and her fourth EP is expected in August.
Every day since her signing has included a business meeting or gig.
I only had a few days to prepare for it.
I learned the dance the day before, she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
I feel like Im moving so fast.
Doechii is dressed casually in a sleeveless magenta maxi dress with her hair tied up in a head wrap.
Sorting through colors, she picks a shimmery gold.
When she speaks, her judgments come quickly and without caveats.
Trends die, platforms die, but not good music.
Youll never catch me doing fluff.
Born Jaylah Hickmon, Doechii grew up in Tampa, Florida.
In the sixth grade, she decided to become someone new.
It literally just came to me, she says when I ask how she came up with the name.
Jaylah mightve been getting bullied, but I decided Doechii wouldnt stand for that shit.
My whole attitude was different.
She waltzed into her classroom wearing a tutu and never looked back.
In the ninth grade, she set her sights on the Howard W. Blake School of the Arts.
The school wasnt in her district, so she had to audition for its magnet program.
She made the best of her four years there.
They let the performing-arts kids get away with a lot, she says, laughing.
I was never really in class.
I would just be in the practice rooms playing piano, going over classical choir songs, dancing.
I did everything but be in class.
Doechii doesnt dream; she plots.
She started posting covers and a few originals to a YouTube channel.
People really fucked with it, she says.
It was the push she needed to go all in.
Not long after, she put out her first song, El Chapo, on SoundCloud.
Doechii sings with a mix of confidence and vulnerability as she effortlessly switches up her flow.
The song gained tens of thousands of streams within a few months.
In late 2019, she hit a wall.
I never really believed in them, she says.
But I thought I needed them to show me something.
For three months, she immersed herself in Julia Camerons 1992 self-help book,The Artists Way.
I realized if nobody was here on this Earth, she says, I would still be making music.
For a long time, religion had made it more difficult to understand that she was bisexual.
Her sophomore EP, 2020sOh the Places Youll Go, was me letting go, she says.
Before, I didnt even acknowledge I was gay.
I was low-key closeted, but not really.
I just felt like I didnt need to talk about it in my music.
Really, it was more about me being scared to accept the fact that I like coochie.
After it blew up on TikTok, she started getting interest from multiple labels.
I flew her out the next day.
Id always manifested working with an all-Black team, she says.
All of the other labels were trying to undersell me, thinking I was stupid.
TDE came to me correct.
She likes being difficult to pin down she learned it from Minaj, her biggest artistic influence.
you could play with it.
(Doechiis DMs proved otherwise.)
I love her to death, but she destroyed me, she says.
She knows negative attention is part of the bargain, but still, she has her limits.
So I better have been who I wanted to be and said what I wanted to say.
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