In 2023, Doechii announced she was three years into her five-year plan for becoming one of the biggest names in music.
“I want to be in my Sasha Fierce era, the top of my game with still a long way to go – but I want to reach my prime and never leave it.”
The Florida-born rapper and singer had scored a couple of viral hits – most notably Persuasive, an ode to marijuana that ended up on Barack Obama’s summer playlist – but nothing that had crossed over to the mainstream charts.
But jump-cut to 2025 and Doechii is a Grammy Award-winning “woman of the year”, who’s about to play one of the most hotly-anticipated sets at Glastonbury Festival.
It’s hard to identify the turning point. Some people say it was her mesmerising performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last December.
With her hair carefully braided to her backing dancers, she delivered a meticulously-choreographed performance of Boiled Peanuts and Denial Is a River – a cartoonish character piece, in which she confides to her therapist that her boyfriend’s been cheating on her with another man.
Others pinpoint her Tiny Desk Concert, released on YouTube two days later. The 15-minute set bursts with joie de vivre, simultaneously soulful and fiery, as the star rattles through jazzy, full-band recreations of her mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal.
She won even more fans at the Grammys in March, where she won best rap album, making her just the third female artist to win in the category.
In her speech, she spoke directly to young, black, queer women like her: “Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you, to tell you that you can’t be here, that you’re too dark or that you’re not smart enough or that you’re too dramatic or you’re too loud.”
She capped off her win with an ultra-physical performance that referenced Michael Jackson, Missy Elliott and Bob Fosse – and ended with her pulling the splits while being held aloft by five male dancers.
With three “star-is-born” performances in just four months, Doechii became the most talked-about new rapper of her generation… just like she planned.
Doechii was born Jaylah Ji’mya Hickmon in Tampa, Florida and raised in a “heavily Christian” single-parent household by her mother, Celesia Moore.
A studious kid who loved writing poetry, she invented her alter-ego at the age of 11, after being viciously bullied in school.
“I was in a position where I thought about killing myself because the bullying was so bad,” she told Dazed magazine in February.
“Then I had this realisation: I’m not gonna do that, because then they’re gonna all get a chance to live and I’m gonna be the one dead.”
“Jaylah might’ve been getting bullied, but I decided Doechii wouldn’t stand for that,” she recalled in an interview with Vulture.
“And then,” she told The Breakfast Club, “I went to school in a tutu and I started doing music.”
As a teenager, she spent four years at Tampa’s Howard W. Blake School of the Arts, after winning a place on the choral programme by performing Etta James’ At Last.
The school unlocked her creativity, allowing her to take classes in everything from nail design and hair, to ballet, tap, cheerleading and stage production. However, it was gymnastics that left the biggest impression.
“The way that gymnasts train is really, really tough. It’s brutal and hard and difficult,” she told Gay Times.
“But at some point in my gymnastic career I learnt how to embrace and really love pain. To view pain as me getting stronger and better. That caused a deep discipline that has never left me.”
“Even though I was aware , I didn’t feel as comfortable until I started surrounding myself with more gay friends at my school.
“Once I had gay friends it was like, ‘OK, I can be myself, I’m good, I can feel safe, this is normal, I’m fine.’ I have those same friends today and will have them for life.”
That’s not all they gave her: Those same friends convinced Doechii to give up her ambitions of becoming a chorister, and start writing and releasing her own music.
Initially called iamdoechii, she uploaded her first song to Soundcloud in 2016, and self-released her debut single Girls two years later.
It already bore the hallmarks of her best work: Rhythmically and lyrically dextrous, and chock full of personality.
“Taking nudes / None of them for you,” she chided over a mellow electric piano, before the beat switched up and her rapping became more frenetic. By the closing bars, she barely had time catch breath as she listed her accomplishments.
The lines were more prophecy than reality. Doechii had a solid following on YouTube, but she was still working at Zara to make ends meet.
In 2019, she was booked for a showcase in New York City and hopped on a bus – without the money for her return trip.
“And then I had to call one of my mom’s
Content adapted by the team from the original source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crk6e166vl4o
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