Rise to Fame
The breakthrough was a cow costume and a lo-fi joke. 'Mooo!' (2018) clocked 100 million YouTube views before most people knew her name, and the absurdist energy wasn't strategic, it was just what she did. She'd taught herself to rap and produce on GarageBand after dropping out of high school at 16, got signed to Kemosabe/RCA at 17, then spent five more years in relative obscurity. Hot Pink (2019) started building the base. TikTok finished the job, and 'Say So' hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2020. She went from meme to pop star in about eighteen months, which is roughly the time it takes most artists to figure out their social media strategy.
In the Spotlight
The 2020 chatroom scandal, videos of her in Tinychat rooms allegedly frequented by white supremacists plus a resurfaced song with a racial slur in its title, should have buried her. It didn't. She apologized and kept releasing music, scoring her first solo #1 with 'Paint the Town Red' in 2023. Her fifth album Vie debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200 in September 2025. She's dating Joseph Quinn and headlining world tours. The controversy didn't disappear; it just became part of the texture of a career that's too commercially successful to cancel and too deliberately weird to fully domesticate.
Side Notes
Her father is Dumisani Dlamini, a South African Zulu actor best known for the 1992 film Sarafina!. She has said she never met him growing up. Her mother is a Jewish-American graphic designer. At eight, the family moved to a Hindu ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains for four years, where she learned classical Indian dance and sang temple hymns. After that, she competed in pop-locking battles across LA. The stage name 'Doja' is cannabis slang. The combination of that biography and that name is exactly what you'd expect from someone whose debut viral hit was a song about being a cow.