Doechii is too big for your small screen

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Doechii channels a panoramic relationship to her own thoughts and voice on the new mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. / John Jay

Virality stoked an insatiable hunger in the effervescent Tampa rapper Doechii. After the 2021 cut “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” amassed millions of tags on TikTok, she finally found herself playlisted by Spotify, and all she could think about was the next stage of her breakthrough. “I was like, OK, how do we get more? Let’s get merch! What’s the next step?’ ” she told Rolling Stone that May. The duality of being first forsaken by the internet and then overpowering its confines through sheer talent and willpower form the heart of the song, which outlines the basis of a zany charm: “I’m all alone on the deep dark web,” she raps — but also, “Doechii is a d**k, I never fit in / Overly cocky, I’m hyper-ambitious.”

She wouldn’t be alone for long. Her ambition drew many suitors, and when the esteemed Top Dawg Entertainment announced that it was signing Doechii in 2022, “vision” was the word of the day. “Hearing Doechii, I knew immediately this woman is a star. Her talent is boundless, fluid and authentic,” Moosa Tiffith, TDE’s president, said in a press release. “We are committed to her limitless vision.” Having substantiated itself as a premier destination for developing talent, an indie hub for artists like Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Isaiah Rashad, the Carson-based imprint seemed built to accommodate the outsized imagination of a viral star with her sights set on expansion. “I want to create a new vision, a new lane, and so much music,” she said when the signing was announced, adding, “Everyone is invited to the Doechii dominance,” as if unveiling her reign in a dynasty.

Her limitless vision is fully harnessed on her long-awaited debut TDE full-length, Alligator Bites Never Heal, a dominant showing that feels like blowing straight past the next step in an evolutionary process. Billed as a mixtape for what seem like strategic reasons, it is imbued with the madcap energy of a rapper on a promo run, but it is far too meticulous and hyper-competent to be anything other than a completely mapped-out statement of purpose — not a showcase, but a ribbon-cutting. At once unleashed and composed, the project’s grasp of both chaos and control is exhilarating. Pop now often requires a certain chameleonic skill set as a prerequisite, but this tape reveals Doechii to be something more: a polymath too immense to be captured in nits and little pink hearts. In bites of activity with the stagecraft and physicality of a one-woman play, the tape makes light work of her vision quest, never sacrificing its sense of fun in pursuit of legacy-making. Panoramic and bursting with ideas, it considers virality’s relationship to new stardom, and how Doechii refuses to be minimized by those dimensions.

Many rappers breaking out in this moment feel specifically geared toward the ephemerality of platformed stardom. They are bottled within the forum that birthed them — be it TikTok, or Instagram, or SoundCloud, or YouTube — and unable to push outward into other spaces. It isn’t simply about inability to find an audience; there is a scalability issue. Doechii’s music seems to defy those limitations. It is not microcontent; the internet cannot contain her sound, or her personality. On the intro track of Alligator Bites Never Heal, she cheekily imagines the inscription on her tombstone were she to die prematurely without realizing her promise: “TikTok rapper, part-time YouTube actor.” The tape seems to spend its runtime proving the shallowness of such a characterization, and she paints herself as much larger than online life: “Twitter fingers get your whole life logged out.” On a song called “Catfish,” she shrugs off those who can’t embody their avatars IRL: “Log ‘em off the web and every gangsta’s giving actress.” Beneath the surface, there is the idea that some are defined by their virality, while, for others, virality is merely an extension of being attention-worthy. For Doechii, “TikTok rapper” is just the jumping-off point for a much wider exploration of the many facets she embodies in her songs. This is a record that sounds like creative freedom: loose and versatile, flitting between fitful, mischievous spells of rapping and smooth, balmy singing, as if trying to boogie-board along all the folds of her cerebrum. When she raps, “Do you wanna take a ride on my ego trip?” on “Bullfrog,” it doesn’t really feel like she’s asking.

Perhaps that freedom was hard-won. Throughout Alligator Bites Never Heal, Doechii insists that her labels are reluctant to let her do her thing. (Maybe that explains why it’s been two years since her only other TDE release, the EP she / her / black bitch.) “Wristwatch, drip-drop, labels want the TikToks / Now I’m making TikTok music, what the f***?” she snaps on “Denial Is a River.” “I need a cleanse, need a detox / But we ain’t got time to stop, the charts need us.” Whatever “TikTok music” is — to me, it is any song specifically engineered for short-form loops, reducing music to sound bites or backing tracks for fun-sized visual media — it is clear she is actively pushing back here. The vexation you can hear in her charged bars seems to have given her a clarity of purpose. There are other roadblocks in her path, too — a struggle to manage her growing responsibilities, an ex destroying everything she owned, getting sucked into the pill-popping party culture in Hollywood — yet she never sounds overwhelmed, instead relishing the challenge of paying off the long buildup to a hyped debut.

If the powers that be at TDE were worried about direction or execution, they wasted their energy. Doechii has long shown herself to be an exceptionally reflective artist, carefully considering what she wants to be doing at any given moment, and she takes a few opportunities here to poke fun at anyone who thought otherwise. She tells “fake activists” to relax a bit, likely a reference to the controversy surrounding her platinum Kodak Black collaboration “What It Is (Block Boy)” from 2023. “Boom Bap” laughs off those who felt that single strayed too far from their image of her as a rappity-rap savant — and in truth, it feels unduly constrictive to label her as anything at all in this moment. The sheer ground covered on the tape is astonishing — from “Boiled Peanuts,” which seems to channel “Woo Hah!!” Busta Rhymes, to the screwed-up Baduizm of “Skipp,” the storytime rhymes of “Denial Is a River” and the blurry psych soul of the title track, all pit stops along a victory lap full of gobsmacking lyrical feats and stunts that feel like showing off. There is a reductive impulse to think of the performances as "schizophrenic" — a characterization Doechii is aware of, rapping, on “Nissan Altima,” “They like ‘Doechii, you delulu, you a loose screw’ ” — but the turns are too calculated. This is not a fragmenting of the psyche, or even the embrace of alter-egos as a kind of rap LARPing; it is a peeling back of her psyche’s many layers.

Doechii has openly cited Nicki Minaj as an influence, one whose legacy could be heard clearly in “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” and she has a theatricality that can mirror both her wig-wearing forebear and the most ambitious scion of her label, Kendrick. But there is a centeredness to the exhibitionism on Alligator Bites Never Heal that unifies its freewheeling approach. Nicki, somewhat unfairly, had to deal with bad-faith criticism of her attempts to straddle rap and pop, and her flamboyant character work often navigated and exaggerated that bifurcation. Doechii has benefited from Nicki’s efforts, and where Nicki was externalizing thoughts pointed outward, Doechii seems to be having conversations with herself out in the open, a crucial difference that keeps her from sounding divided in pursuit of too many ends. Worlds exist in which attempting to corral this many ideas ends in mayhem; look no further than the late-career work of the artist formerly known as Kanye West for an example of a ringmaster losing control of the circus. But unlike Ye, who is mostly in conversation with the many images of himself in the public, Doechii’s ideas all feel filtered directly through a single point. When she raps, “Suffer loss of vision but I’m focused” on “Skipp,” it is one of many reminders that her internal compass is that pointed flow of hers.

Presumably, Alligator Bites Never Heal’s unwillingness to move in a straight line is a big part of why a project this accomplished is being sold as a mixtape. Not that it really matters — regardless of categorization, it is among the most judiciously constructed records released this year, and also one of the most resourceful and aspirational. Maybe that’s the point, that no designation can really do it justice. But it’s head-scratching to imagine anyone hearing this and thinking that she has lost her way. Since the tape’s release, Top Dawg has compared it to Section.80, the pre-debut that teased an artistic quantum leap for Kendrick Lamar, but that doesn’t feel quite right to me. Section.80 was Kendrick emerging from the chrysalis; Alligator Bites Never Heal is an artist already in mid-flight. I keep coming back to Moosa Tiffith’s description of Doechii upon signing — “boundless, fluid and authentic” — and struggling to imagine a more perfect encapsulation of those attributes, or how this is the precursor to her arrival and not the arrival itself. In songs shunting the internal pushback she received, Doechii makes a note to self: “Stick to the plan and ignore ‘em, I can’t acknowledge it.” Apparently, they came around. Sometimes seeing the vision simply means trusting the process.