Stomach bug can’t hinder powerful Doja Cat during Dallas ‘Scarlet Tour’ show
If Doja Cat was under the weather Thursday night, she sure didn’t show it at American Airlines Center.
The 5-foot-3 rapper and singer flexed her vocal muscles throughout a 90-minute show in front of about 14,000 mostly older teens and men and women in their 20s and 30s.
Doja Cat — real name: Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini — was about an hour late to the stage because of a stomach bug, as she explained during an apology early in her set.
“I really thank you guys for waiting. I really appreciate it,” she said. “I’m not feeling great, but it’s only a stomach issue.”
Of course, her fans weren’t bothered a bit as they screamed with approval and sang along proudly for most of the night.
This was the 10th stop on her 24-city Scarlett Tour, her first arena tour as a headliner. The tour, which started in San Francisco on Halloween, finishes on Dec. 13 in Chicago. She played Austin and Houston on Monday and Wednesday.
On a V-shaped stage that included a massive video screen blocking off one end of the AAC, Doja Cat, who turned 28 last month, wore a skintight purple bodysuit that at first glance made her appear mostly naked. Over her bodysuit, she wore what can only be described as a cross between black leather chaps and cargo pants that tightened as they reached her black stiletto-heeled shoes. Her closely cropped hair was bleached blond and purple eye shadow matched her bodysuit.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn’t make constant wardrobe changes. In fact, she had none, which is a nice change of pace in 2023.
Her band was split evenly on either side of the main stage, including a drummer, guitarist, bassist, keyboardist, and multiple backup singers. None of them was mentioned by Doja Cat, which continues an odd trend of many of today’s pop and hip-hop artists declining to give their musicians a shoutout. Remember The Weeknd’s show at AT&T Stadium a year ago? He not only didn’t introduce his band, he kept them hidden from the audience.
It’s too bad because her band, especially her drummer, provided a head-cracking backbone and pulsing grooves from the opening “WYM Freestyle,” from the digital deluxe version of her fourth album “Scarlet,” released in September.
She performed all 15 songs from the new album, including the show opener “WYM Freestyle,” in which she’s channeling Zack de la Rocha as much as Chuck D.
When she was spitting out rapid-fire lines, her voice was breathtakingly powerful. It demanded your attention and her vocals were clear and concise. When she performed more pop-oriented tracks such as “Agora Hills” her vocals often got lost beneath the music. To be fair, she was also often drowned out by her fans singing along faithfully to every word.
That devotion is impressive for an artist from Los Angeles who has only been on the national scene for five years.
Throughout her show, which was divided into five acts, Doja Cat was joined on stage by a group of well-oiled, topless male dancers and a female dancer in a leotard. The choreography helped express the meaning, spirit, and mood of certain songs, as she seamlessly became surrounded, covered, and carried by them at various moments. During the choreographed moments with her dancers, she captured the appeal of Madonna in the 1990s or Lady Gaga of the 2000s.
Many of her most inspiring moments came when she was singing about self-confidence, self-acceptance, and pride. Whether the topic was hate, love, femininity, online culture, or a combination of them, she gave an assertive voice to many in the audience who were singing her words back to her.
The V-shaped stage was lined with laser lights and fire-shooting capabilities that sent heatwaves up to the nosebleed seats. If that wasn’t enough theatrics, fireworks dropped from above to punctuate a song’s ending, and a massive black spider and detached eyeball also made dramatic appearances.
