It’s Doja Cat’s World Now, and She’s Making It Weirder: Interview
Written by SOURCE on September 13, 2021
If Doja Cat’s performer-host-nominee showcase at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night didn’t make it clear enough, she is always moving.
When we connect on Zoom just days before her hosting gig at the VMAs, during another busy rehearsal week, Doja explains that she’s just woken up. She’s alert, though, and with all that she’s been balancing as of late, she’s laser-focused on bringing her whole vision, as it ties into her third studio album Planet Her, to life.
Outside of hosting this year’s show (where she pulled off some of the night’s most memorable looks and brought home two awards for both Best Art Direction and Best Collaboration), performing what she says was her biggest festival set to date only a week before, and riding the high of her June album, the chart-topping artist has added yet another accolade to her rolodex of Planet Her-era milestones: Doja is now a musical face of Pepsi.
Appearing in the company’s latest commercial for the Pepsi-Cola Soda Shop, featuring her own refreshing reimagination of Grease’s “You’re The One That I Want,” Doja has now become a piece of the company’s storied musical lineage. Michael Jackson did it. Britney Spears did it. Beyoncé did it. And now, Doja Cat is letting Pepsi into her atmosphere.
“It’s very hard to process at first, and I feel like my success has been very slow,” Doja tells Complex. “And to see things happen this way—the fact that I got Pepsi just really solidified something—but it’s hard to see that sometimes. Because I’m constantly on the road and constantly working, you don’t really get a chance to realize. I mean, some people ask you, like, ‘Are you feeling it yet? Has it hit you?’ And it’s like, sure, but I’m just too busy to really get in my head about everything. But it’s a really beautiful opportunity. I’m so happy to have been offered this, and just looking at all the people who’ve done it before. I’m not that, but you know, I’m told that.”
As she continues her remarkable Planet Her run of Hot 100 successes, television appearances, and nostalgic soda-sipping, Doja took some time to explain to Complex what her latest partnership means to her. She also spoke about the importance of making things a little “weird,” the lessons she’s learned from her latest album, and why the next planet she conquers might just be in the galaxy of acting.
