Given the Zoom fatigue of the past two years, you can’t blame Doechii for having her camera off during our conversation. Still, despite the possible interview burnout she’s experiencing, her energy is palpable: Our faceless face-to-face chat flows freely from new music to her zodiac sign to who would win in a fight, Junie B. Jones or Lilo from Lilo & Stitch. (“Junie B. is gonna swing first, and it’s gonna catch Lilo off guard,” she rationalizes. “Lilo do got hands, though.”) Even in life’s most tiresome moments, she’s effervescent.
It’s been a whirlwind year. In March, the Tampa-bred 23-year-old (given name Jaylah Hickmon) inked a deal with Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE), becoming the label’s first female emcee. This summer, she made her solo network TV debut on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, performed at the BET Awards, was named to XXL’s 2022 Freshman Class of rising hip-hop artists, earned an MTV Video Music Award nomination for “PUSH Performance of the Year,” and earned a spot on Barack Obama’s annual Summer Playlist (“Persuasive”).
It’s easy to wonder, given her rapid rise, how Doechii stays centered. The answer: love and faith.
“If I didn’t have my fiancé, my family and my faith, I would probably have spiraled a long time ago,” she tells SPIN. “[Family and friends] just remind me of who I am. They ground me and they remind me of what’s real. Music is important, but it’s really not that serious, you know? It’s about love, it’s about family, it’s about friends. … They remind me, ‘girl, you’re from Tampa.’”
In “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” Doechii describes herself as “a Black girl who beat the statistics.” When discussing that lyric in particular, the artist details her experiences witnessing her single mother unexpectedly become pregnant with twins. (“I stepped up to a lot of pressure at a young age,” Doechii explains.) Coupled with disparaging comments geared towards her as a dark-skinned woman, young Jaylah was forced to grow up and find herself faster than anticipated. However, she never let the pain break her down — it only made her stronger.
“Through my experiences as a dark-skinned girl, [people are] constantly reminding me of how lucky I should ‘feel’ to be in a space with them,” Doechii says. “‘You should be grateful that you’re here, ‘cause girls who look like you don’t get this far, especially with that mouth, with that attitude, with that confidence.’ It still kind of does aggravate me when people try to make me feel like that, but now I’ve curated the space [to be myself].”
As she continues to evolve, Doechii makes a personal pledge to keep her faith and fearless individuality intact. After “suppressing who [she] was for a long time,” she’s no longer letting self-sabotage hold her back from success. “Now I know for a fact that my creativity is limitless,” she affirms. “I’ll never run out of ideas, and I will forever be creative as long as I am alive and experiencing God. … I have a beautiful family, I’m healthy, I know who I am, I know what God is to me, I’m at peace.”
“I wanna prove to my fans and my haters that I can still be myself in the midst of a storm, in the midst of any [hard] time in my life,” Doechii continues. “I’m gonna remain true to who I am and who God called me to be. I’m gonna be myself no matter what. I want my fans to feel that same thing.”
