Until last week I had never heard of Sam Hyde, the alt-right comedian whose face launched a thousand “WTFs” when it appeared on a T-shirt the musician Doja Cat was wearing in a selfie posted recently. I’ve looked into the matter and wow, he is unsavoury. In fact he is a freak. Alongside various homophobic, racist and antisemitic rants as part of his act on stage, one of his most unwatchable offences is a video in which he “goes mental and gets removed from [a] hotel after being given Brit sweets.”
To Doja Cat, then, who thinks her fans are hysterical: “miserable hoes” with no lives of their own who should shut up, delete their "stan" accounts and help their parents around the house. Her new album, Scarlet, makes much of her relationship with the zillenial girlies who once worshipped her but then decided she wasn’t woke enough. (Her previous album we gave four stars). Her boyfriend is a wrong’un, apparently, and years ago she was accused of “stripping for white supremacists” in an internet chatroom. She denied the allegations. Several fans recently suggested in a comment thread that too few of her friends were people of colour. Doja Cat wrote in reply "I don't need to convince you that I have black friends".
The latest incident isn’t really about a t-shirt. Or about racism. It’s about the toxic hypocrisy of the fans, who celebrate a 27-year-old for rapping about being dominated in the bedroom while slamming her for not being Mother Teresa. “I can’t even enjoy her music in peace [because] she is always doing something,” said one person after Sunday’s selfie.
This isn’t a situation like Roger Waters wearing a Nazi-style uniform
That “something” is known as pushing buttons, and artists have been doing it since time immemorial. One may even argue it's their primary mission – more so than creating something beautiful. Doja Cat’s lyrics could hardly be considered aesthetic (“play with my p**** don’t play with my emotions” isn’t exactly Tennyson) but they are incisive and hard hitting, so why shouldn’t she be, too?
We may never know why Doja Cat wore a Sam Hyde T-shirt showing the comedian sporting bleached blonde hair and carrying a gun through the woods. But surely no one is foolish enough to believe it’s automatically an endorsement of the man and his ideas. As an avid student of Doja Cat’s lyrics and social media presence, I think it’s more likely to be an ironic critique of what some would call "white trash".
This isn’t a situation like Roger Waters wearing a Nazi-style uniform, or Dua Lipa’s collaborator DaBaby telling crowds at concerts that AIDS kills people in three weeks (DaBaby has since apologised for the comments). Doja Cat (who is of black and Jewish descent) probably saw the T-shirt and thought it was funny.
Every time a frustrated, sanctimonious fan voices their disappointment, it reminds Doja Cat exactly why she behaves the way she does: to scare the fans out of a cult of personality that she never asked for and to ridicule the confected outrage that holds her to account for rules she never agreed to. A 2-day-old comment on one of her photos that’s already garnered more than 2,000 likes says: “Literally anything u post makes people unbelievably mad it's like a superpower”. It is indeed. With that, she’ll wear whatever she likes.
