Doja Cat has seemed to make amends with her fans on Thursday after weeks of back and forth between the rapper and her base.
During The Scarlet Experience album listening party event in Los Angeles this week, Doja Cat made an appearance to promote her new album, Scarlet, after a dark and mysterious marketing campaign. The rapper greeted her fans at the event through a glass window, where she wore a hat with ears and horns on it, a long skirt, and a baby t-shirt. The rapper was shown painting on a canvas at one point, but then she took the red paint directly to the glass wall that separated her and her fans.
On the glass, Doja wrote, “I do [love] u,” using a heart. She then began throwing red paint on the glass, as fans cheered her on and yelled, “We love you!” Doja Cat also wrote “thank you” on the glass.
X content
The sweet message comes after weeks of Doja Cat arguing with fans on social media, leading her to lose more than 180,000 followers on Instagram in July. The rapper lost some fans after she weighed in on her fanbase calling themselves “the kittenz.”
“If you call yourself a ‘kitten’ or f*cking ‘kittenz’ that means you need to get off your phone and get a job and help your parents with the house,” Doja wrote in a since-deleted Threads post. When another fan asked her to say that she loved her fans, Doja Cat replied, “I don't though cuz I don't even know y'all.” Several stan accounts dedicated to Doja Cat also deleted their accounts.
In August, Doja Cat said she “feels free” after losing so many followers. “Seeing all these people unfollow me makes me feel like I've defeated a large beast that's been holding me down for so long and it feels like I can reconnect with the people who really matter and love me for who I am and not for who I was.”
The rapper later doubled down on her stance on her fame and fandom in an interview with Harper's Bazaar. She said if a person has never met her in real life, then, “subconsciously, I’m not real to them.”
“So when people become engaged with someone they don’t even know on the internet, they kind of take ownership over that person," she continued. "They think that person belongs to them in some sense. And when that person changes drastically, there is a shock response that is almost uncontrollable… I’ve accepted that that’s what happens.”
Despite the controversy, Doja Cat went forth with releasing her latest album, Scarlet, on September 22 — which she said is a major departure from her last two pop albums. The rapper debuted two singles from the album, “Paint the Town Red,” and three other promotional singles including, "Attention,” “Demons,” and “Balut.”
