An Exposé on Doja Cat's Life Before Hitting Fame

 Doja Cat is an American singer and songwriter who began her musical career by making and releasing songs on SoundCloud. She became a musical sensation when her song "So High" caught the attention of Kemosabe and RCA Records.

Doja Cat has amassed over 755k YouTube subscribers, 131k Twitter followers, and more than 1 million Instagram followers. She became a renowned meme sensation after releasing the music video for her song Mooo!, which has received over 56 million views on youtube.

With songs like "go to town," "juicy," and "tia tamara with Rico Nasty, which have amassed more than 23 million views on YouTube, Doja showed the world that she is here to stay. Doja Cat was raised by artists and moved around a lot as a young child while living in New York City and Los Angeles, at one point even staying at a hindu ashram.

She was born in Tarzana, lived in Rye for a while, then relocated to the ashram where she spent around four years.

Doja had a few different dreams before music. From aspiring to be a dancer, participating in local competitions, to aiming to be a beauty expert, even starting a YouTube channel at the age of 14. Although given what's happening with James Charles right now, it would definitely be best if she didn't go down that path, but when Doja discovered music and began to write songs, a label took notice.

Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini professionally known as Doja Cat went from Tarzana, Los Angeles, where she was born on October 21, 1995, to the Bronx, New York, very soon after. Her Jewish American mother Deborah works as a visual designer for clothing companies and once had a successful career as a painter. Her father, Dumasani, is from Durban, South Africa, and is an actor, dancer, composer, and successful film producer. Doja became interested in art at a young age, attending performing arts school, learning the piano, and taking dance lessons from childhood into her teens. Doja's grandmother was also an artist, so it seems that creativity runs in the family. 

She enjoyed singing but was always too shy to perform in front of others, so she would sing quietly to herself in her room. She credits a variety of musical inspirations, ranging from her mother's listening to erica badu and pharrell to the fuji's, jamiroquai, and d'angelo. 

Later, she discovered hip-hop, fell in love with Lil Kim TLC, discovered Party Next Door, and discovered Drake. Doja cherished watching Disney classics and was a huge fan of The Mask by Jim Carrey and also Elmo in Grouchland.

She also enjoyed playing GameCube games, with her favorites being Crash Bandicoot and SSX Tricky. Doja was a child who frequently relocated. She spent her first five years in New York before returning to California.

When she was eight years old, one of her babysitters participated in rap battles on Myspace because it seemed to be a trend at the time, and young doja was interested. She then set up an account and started rapping at other Myspace users.

Doja finally relocated to spend four years at a spiritual monastery known as an ashram. She gained knowledge of hinduism and was impacted by the local culture there. She also stopped skating at that time because there weren't many venues to do it.

Doja started uploading cosmetics tutorials to youtube when she was 14 years old with the intention of becoming an expert in the field. Although she once went to someone's home to do their cosmetics, the client never paid her.

Doja ultimately decided to take down the videos and move on to her next goal when her mother started to worry a little about her.

Ballet and jazz courses dominated her early dance battle years, but around the age of 10, she began to focus more on hip-hop and pop locking, which she pursued throughout high school. She even joined dancing crews and participated in competitions all across Los Angeles.

Doja made the decision to quit school and pursue music full-time in the eleventh grade. She claims that, even when she was paying attention in class, she wasn't interested in going to school. She was more absorbed in the music and dancing. She never held an actual job throughout her life, other than singing. After quitting school, she led a rather quiet life, spending most of her time alone in her bedroom writing music for a full year, save from the occasional trip to a trap house to record songs. 

She started recording into Garageband, a YouTube channel, while listening to instrumental music she found on YouTube. She did all this while in her bedroom which has only a mattress on the floor and a PC with a built-in microphone. She chose the name "doja cat" because she had a lot of cats in her life, thought "doja" sounded like a cute girl's name, and she was using a lot of pot at the time. She claimed that it was merely a thought. 

Her first song, appropriately titled The Introduction, was eventually removed after being posted online for a week. After that, she would upload songs to the internet before taking them down because she was insecure about the way she sounded. But she actually dropped So High, her debut single, on Soundcloud in 2013. 

She was somewhat upset when the song only had two views at first, but when it eventually reached 12 views and one repost, it gave her the motivation she needed to keep trying. She interpreted that as a hint that at least some people were interested in hearing her perform, and the song gradually gained popularity naturally online, going from 12 views to thousands to nearly 6 million plays today. 

Doja continued refining her aesthetic while performing at local venues in Los Angeles, publishing songs online, and building an audience. When a label representative heard So High, it eventually made an appearance on the Empire soundtrack. In 2014, when Doja was just 18 years old, she signed a deal with RCA Records and released her debut EP, purrr! She must have been drawn to animal motifs from a young age. She even performed as Asher Roth's opening act that year, but after that, her notoriety gradually faded. 

She was having trouble finding her voice as she fell back into the rhythm of writing music by herself in her room. Then, after receiving a midi keyboard from her then-boyfriend, she began creating beats and rapping over them. Although she continued to become an underground sensation on Soundcloud, her first taste of big-time success came after she released the peculiar but undeniably intriguing video for her song Mooo!

Doja was aware that releasing a song had the ability to both showcase her talent and

She could direct people toward her if she was also memed.

Chance the rapper, Katy Perry, and Chris Brown all contributed to the song, and the video currently has over 56 million views on youtube.

However, shortly after she rose to fame, cancel culture emerged, eager to put out the flame of the internet's newest shining star. As social justice activists often do, they searched for some previous tweets from Doja that didn't make sense in the present. 

While she did tweet and use some homophobic words when she was a high school student, it was her reaction to the incident that eventually made things worse. Throughout the apology, she continued to use the same words for which she had received criticism previously. a risky move that didn't really work.

and she continued to release quality songs even as the internet sought to kill off doja.

As a result of her collaboration with rico nasty on the song "tia tamara," which has received more than 23 million views on YouTube, she found herself in 2019 with one of her biggest hits to date.

She continued touring and releasing new music while her 2018 album, Amala, was released in deluxe form.