Doja Cat has absolutely no time for ‘disrespectful’ people still mocking Britney Spears’ breakdown
Doja Cat has a stern warning for those still making Britney Spears jokes (Getty/Mauricio Santana)
Pop sensation Doja Cat has hit back at the problematic speculation that she’s ‘having a Britney moment’ after people compared their shaved heads.
The Grammy-winning artist found herself the subject of ridicule when she buzzed off her hair in August last year, with trolls making comparison to when Britney Spears shaved her head in 2007 during a highly-publicised breakdown.
While the rapper was quick to shut down the haters making fun of her new look, Doja hasn’t been impressed by people who continue to trivialise Spears’ mental health struggles – and in a new interview with Variety, she made those sentiments known.
“It’s so incredibly disrespectful for people to be minimising what Britney went through and make a joke out of something that was very serious and a big deal in her life,” she began.
“Every time I see a comment like that, I can’t compute what’s happening, other than it’s just an awful thing”.
Spears’s breakdown was one of the contributing factors that led her to be placed in a notorious thirteen-year conservatorship that restricted almost all of her financial, physical and reproductive autonomy.
Doja – whose real name is Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini – went on to explain that she couldn’t wait to shave her hair off, purely for reasons of practicality.
“When I shaved my eyebrows off and I shaved my head, I remember thinking, ‘Get this shit off of me,’ because I needed to change something,” she continued.
“I wasn’t working out and wasn’t really taking care of myself in the way that I wanted to. I was like, ‘I need to do something,’ so I just chopped it all off. And I could see the shape of my head. I could see my whole face. I can see my ears, now that I don’t have a wig that’s glued to my forehead.”
Doja also teased the musicality of her next album, which per Variety, will be landing later in the year.
“I know that I’ve done a lot of pink and soft things, a lot of pop and glittery sounds,” she said, “but for this next era, I’m going in a more masculine direction.”
Doja has firmly cemented her status in the cultural zeitgeist, with her recent fashion weeks looks drawing praise for their gender-bending artistry.
Her third studio album, ‘Planet Her’, meanwhile, was the fifth-most-streamed on Spotify on a global basis in 2022 and the second biggest for a female artist. She was also named as the number one female artist in Billboard’s year-end rankings for the Hot 100.
The rapper is up for five Grammys this weekend, including Record of the Year, Best Pop Solo Performance, Best Rap Performance and more.
