By: Macy Dennon

Editor-in-Chief

Doja Cat’s Scarlet Tour started with a spooky array of eyeballs and spiders, as on Oct. 31, she left her fans in awe after her concert at the Chase Center.

On opening night of the tour, fans did not know what to expect when a dancer started to walk across the stage in a red cloak. After a long-striding sequence, the dancer fell into a hole on stage, and from the same gap rose Doja Cat, in a black morph suit and chaps. The scream of the audience was deafening as WYN Freestyle off the Scarlet album began to play. 

The crowd then went crazy when the iconic rhythm of her most controversial hit thus far, “Demons,” started. The dancers, dressed head to toe in red, wore devilish cloaks. The back of the coverings read statements like “this is a joke” and “this is not a ritual” as the cloaked figures spun around Doja, mocking the rumors about herself, while also profiting from the accusations. 

The set and costume design, though simple, screamed Doja Cat in the best way possible. Her background dancers wore zombified street clothes. Throughout the show, the dancers did not miss a beat as they nailed the choreography. Alongside the background dancers was a character that kept entering the spotlight, a woman covered in red that audiences can assume is Scarlet. Randomly appearing in dances and a solo, Scarlet seemingly resembles the media’s image of Doja.

As for the set, a red A mapped the edge of the stage, seeming to reference the Scarlet Letter and the movie Easy A. They expose how lies can truly take up a life of their own, in perfect conjunction with Doja’s controversial reputation. Every aspect of her performance seemed meticulously planned. 

Though her music has been in the public eye for a while, first gaining popularity in 2020, Doja Cat’s latest album has an entirely different sound. Many people on social media speculated that Doja was a Satan worshiper because of her new tattoos and darker look. Doja’s posts with symbols representing the devil and satanic rituals led to people threatening to boycott her music. Her tweets and actions in the press certainly do not clear up allegations, but her lyrics prove them wrong. 

In many of her songs on Scarlet, Doja makes light of these allegations. In fact, in FTG, Doja sings, “I’m yelling 666, I can’t believe y’all thought the line’s that thin,” in disbelief over how many people believed the rumors. In her viral song, Paint the Town Red, the lyrics plainly state, “Fans ain’t dumb, but extremists are.” 

Similarly, a video surfaced in October of Doja writing “I do love you” in red paint, referring to the controversial moment when she said she did not love her fans, showing appreciation for her fans who accept who she is. 

Throughout the Scarlet album and tour, Doja exposes that she is, in fact, not a devil worshiper and that she played all of her haters into boosting her engagement. She frankly is a troll in the most entrepreneurial way possible. 

In Skull and Bones, she sings, “Y’all been pushin’ ‘Satan this’ and ‘Satan that,’ My fans is yellin’, ‘Least she rich,’… And trust me, baby, God don’t play with hate like that…And you could keep on tellin’ yourself it’s all in my tats…And you could keep on addin’ the numbers and doin’ the math.” She is saying that the people who hate on her blame her tattoos for her fame, which are rumored Satan pieces, and that her hits could only be a product of selling her soul. 

Her new look also shocked her supposed fans because a bald head and bleached eyebrows are so outlandish apparently, so much so that they genuinely thought she had joined the illusive Illuminati or sold her soul to the devil.

A video surfaced of Doja writing “I do love you” in red paint, referring to the controversial moment when she said she did not love her fans, showing appreciation for her fans who accept who she is. In her song Attention, Doja realizes that the people who hate on her for changing never really cared about the music but just that she was conventionally attractive, singing that people “follow [her], but they don’t really care about the music.”. Throughout Scarlet, Doja exposes that she is, in fact, not a devil worshiper and that she played all of her haters into boosting her engagement. She frankly is a troll in the most entrepreneurial way possible.