Whew, boy, we listened to this fucking thing right in the nick of time, huh? After that Grammy performance, there is an entire slice of America—those who don't give a shit about new music but are made aware of new music through the award shows and late-night talk show appearances, basically—who are now at the very least of aware of this up-and-comer's existence, if not nominal fans. I didn't watch the Grammys because I never watch that swill, but it was fascinating to hear the next morning about this hungry young woman who fucking brought it the night before, and realize that this was the same person who our ramshackle album club was currently covering.
Sometimes we tackle the rising stars months too late, and the reviews struggle to play catch-up. Sometimes Record Club is prescient and we manage to cover the potential stars before they truly make it big. This might be the first time that we're listening to a new star at the same exact time that they are blowing up. Like, I saw multiple Reddit posts this week, on the front page, about Doechii. I bet you $100 that when I ask my father-in-law tomorrow if he's ever heard of Doechii, he'll say he caught her performance on the Grammys, and it was "pretty good." Reddit and Butch are not sure-fire ways to judge popularity, but they do in a pinch. Doechii is a shooting star, and RC is on the ground watching the trail she leaves in the night sky at just the right moment.
This means that the review turns from "is the album good" to "is the album good enough to warrant this exposure." A subtle difference, I'd argue. The latter question probably more restrictive, since any ol' album can be good, but it's more difficult, in my opinion, to be good and popular. This has more to do with my general disdain for the common music listener who doesn't give a shit about what they listen to. The sheep. It works against Doechii, in my totally pretentious opinion, that everyone seems to love her this week. The gut reaction is that everyone is wrong, and so it's up to Doechii to prove me wrong.
She mostly delivers. Look, the thing that worked at the Grammys, and similarly works on the album, is that she doesn't care about looking or sounding cool, and that, in turn, causes her to be mostly cool anyway. It's the theater kid paradox. If you're an average theater kid, then you care, and your peers make fun of you for caring, because it's not cool to care. Coolness, to the youth of today and of yesterday too, means not caring. So if you care, then you're a dweeb. Unless you're really good at what you do. Then caring is cool. Talent wins the day. Average thespians are fine, great thespians are the coolest motherfuckers on the planet, despite the fact that they care so goddamn much. Doechii, we can see on this album, cares a lot, and is good at it, and is cool.
There is no suave icy distance or ironic remove evident at all on Alligator Bites Never Heal. Doechii is all in. The bravado of the previous generation's hip hop is absent, and replacing it is a bracing honesty and brash self-awareness. The clearest example of this is "DENIAL IS A RIVER," in which she takes what might typically be a cool-as-shit rap song's themes, like taking drugs and fucking and partying and feeling powerful, and slicing them up with the counterweight of her therapist. Getting signed to a label isn't something to celebrate, but rather a bandage to cover being screwed over by some fucking dude. The drugs and strippers aren't leading to good times, but rather low self-esteem. Doechii makes her first victory lap feel like something she needs a breathing exercise to grapple with.
We take her at her word that this is all true and autobiographical, and I don't doubt that it is. But there's also the artifice of theater here too. She's grappling with the drug use that is NOT substance abuse, but she's doing so while dancing around in her underwear on national television. This is mental health as art, and art as mental health. And she's all in! Doechii doesn't break character once. It's impressive how much I love this shit that is also undeniably so goddamn lame. The theater kid paradox. I've always been a sucker for it, and I'll continue to be a sucker for it, even as I get decades removed from my time in a ragtag college theater troupe, and my only interactions with the idea is via the next big pop star rapper.
I'd be lying if the therapy-speak didn't get to me sometimes. It annoyed me when I was getting my master's with a bunch of wannabe therapists, and it annoys me now. Does Doechii use the phrase "holding space" at any point on this album? Feels like the type of artist who would. I think this is something the young people do these days. They pretend that self-care means using pop psychology terms that they learned from TikTok. Doechii doesn't go overboard, but she dabbles, maybe a bit too much for my liking. Where's that one interlude where she's like "I got be an entertainer, a teacher! I gotta pay rent!" That annoys me. I'm not calling her a liar, I'm just saying that, c'mon, ya already hit us with your therapist song, we get it, you're working shit out. Didn't she say toward the beginning that she's a YouTube star? Is that true? I hope that's not true. You don't have to be everything to everyone. That's not healthy. Just be a fun performer. That's really all I need.
THERAPIST: But don't you usually write album reviews in which you are speaking to your therapist?
JOE: Yeah, I guess I do. I forgot about that.
THERAPIST: And what, it's only cool when you do it?
JOE: Well, I don't actually see a therapist. This is just a bit.
THERAPIST: Who's saying that Doechii actually sees a therapist either? Who's saying that's not a bit too?
JOE: C'mon, get real. If there is one thing I am absolutely certain about Doechii, it's that she regularly attends therapy.
THERAPIST: Is there something wrong with that?
JOE: Hell no! Therapy is awesome!
THERAPIST: And yet you yourself feel that you don't need it.
JOE: I mean, it would certainly help. But who has the time or energy (or money) these days? Not me. Let me just type away at my blog and explore my feelings that way.
THERAPIST: Let us hope that speaking to your fake therapist is just as helpful for you as rapping to her fake therapist was for Doechii.
JOE: Thanks, it is. I like being able to present arguments from two different sides. I like discussing things with myself, taking those thoughts out of their brain prison and presenting them on the page like this.
THERAPIST: Gives you a bit of emotional distance from the subjects that you don't feel as confident about, too. You can bring up a point of discussion and say something like, ya know, "I don't feel strong enough to make this point out loud, I was just talking to my therapist about it in private, that's all."
JOE: Yeah, true. Like I don't know if I'd have a lot to say about Doechii's place in the pantheon of hip-hop music.
THERAPIST: Because you are still learning the ways of hip hop.
JOE: It's been years now since I started making an honest effort, and I'm getting there, but it's a gradual process, and I'm being patient.
THERAPIST: You're doing your breathing exercises.
JOE: Sure?
THERAPIST: Okay, but surely even you have thoughts about how Doechii might compare to other rap artists that you're familiar with.
JOE: Yeah, I guess the quick line "tell me you won't kill my vibe" in "HIDE N SEEK" was a pretty obvious reference to the Kendrick Lamar song.
THERAPIST: And the therapist stuff in the aforementioned "DENIAL IS A RIVER" definitely has the same feel as "Swimming Pools (Drank)."
JOE: See, I was thinking more of a reverse Eminem type thing, like "Guilty Conscious" but with the inner monologue helping instead of tempting. But you're right.
THERAPIST: Doechii even has a non-album single called "WHAT IT IS" featuring rapist Kodak Black, which I know is something you took issue with when Kendrick Lamar purposefully pulled the same stunt a year prior.
JOE: We don't have to talk about cancel culture this week.
THERAPIST: That's fair, we do seem to cover that a lot in these sessions.
JOE: I'm almost reluctant to bring up something Rachel brought up last week, since the hullabaloo last week centered around a sort of broadly defined "cancelling" of the artist... but if we could just put all of that to the side for a second, I'd like to point out that her point about "needing to make genre inspirations explicit weakens the comparison" was a good one.
THERAPIST: Since Noga Erez kept name-dropping Kendrick, but Doechii sounds a lot more like Kendrick, while being a lot more implicit about it.
JOE: Not that this sounds too much like good kid, m.A.A.d city or whatever. There are songs that sound like Missy Elliott. There are songs in which Doechii sounds like Jay-Z. This is most likely just what happens when I'm in the beginning stages of learning a genre—the extremely charismatic artists sound more similar than different.
THERAPIST: Wait, why are we still doing the client/therapist bit? This is starting to feel like something you could've just written in the review proper.
JOE: I don't know. Probably to underline the main takeaway from Alligator Bites Never Heal. The idea that Doechii feels and sounds like a pretty self-reflective artist, and that style might tend to attract listeners who see themselves as similarly self-reflective. When I googling around to try to find a video of Doechii's Grammy performance, I stumbled upon a video from some old white guy who claimed that he was a therapist, and the video's title was something like "a REAL therapist gives his TOP THOUGHTS about Doechii's Grammy WIN" or some bullshit like that, you know how these dumb YouTube videos be.
THERAPIST: But see, that feels like something that would appeal to you, based on what we're doing right now.
JOE: It both did and didn't. I think it's fascinating that Doechii is the artist who is getting the "what does a therapist think" treatment, and I do think the reasoning behind that goes beyond the basic fact of her popular song featuring the voice of a so-called therapist. But it felt a little grimy too, that some dude who knows basically nothing about Doechii beyond how she presents herself in her music and the press is going to stare into a camera and attempt to "therapize" her.
THERAPIST: And yet here you are with a therapist.
JOE: I'm therapizing myself, not Doechii, there's a difference.
THERAPIST: Something you find yourself doing in many of these album reviews, it seems.
JOE: What else is music criticism than an exploration of the self?
THERAPIST: Um, there's probably a lot more to it than that, but I understand that that's what you believe it is, especially after 314 weeks of this bullshit.
JOE: Oh well. You know what Doechii always says: "They don't make statues of critics."
THERAPIST: This reviews makes me believe that that's true.
GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5
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