By Clarice Burger
FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini (born October 21, 1995), known professionally as Doja Cat (/ˈdoʊdʒə/), is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Known for her versatility, live performing skills, internet personality and stage presence, she is frequently referred to as the “Queen of Pop-Rap“.[note 1] Billboard named her “one of the world’s biggest pop stars” and “one of the defining pop stars of this era”, while Time listed her as one of the world’s most influential people in 2023.
Doja Cat began making and releasing music on SoundCloud as a teenager. Her song “So High” caught the attention of Kemosabe and RCA Records, with whom she signed a recording contract prior to the release of her debut extended play, Purrr! (2014). After a hiatus from releasing music and the uneventful rollout of her debut studio album, Amala (2018), she earned viral success as an internet meme with her 2018 single “Mooo!“, a novelty song in which she makes humorous claims about being a cow. Capitalizing on her growing popularity, she released her second studio album, Hot Pink, in the following year. The album eventually reached the top ten of the US Billboard 200 and spawned the single “Say So“; its remix with Nicki Minaj topped the US Billboard Hot 100.
Doja Cat’s third studio album, Planet Her (2021), spent forty-one weeks in the Billboard 200’s top 10 and became the 10th best-selling album globally of 2021. It produced the top ten singles “Kiss Me More” (featuring SZA), “Need to Know“, and “Woman“. Her fourth studio album, Scarlet (2023), adopted a hip-hop-oriented sound and peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200. Its lead single “Paint the Town Red” topped the Hot 100, the Billboard Global 200, and numerous charts internationally. Her fifth album, Vie, marked a return to her pop roots and also peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200.
Doja Cat is one of the best-selling female rappers of all time, with over 34 million records sold between 2018 and 2022. In 2024, Billboard ranked her as the 24th top woman artist and 2nd female rapper of the 21st century—five years after her first charted record (2019). Since 2020, she has won hundreds of accolades, including a Grammy Award from 19 nominations, six Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, six MTV Video Music Awards and eight iHeartRadio Music Awards.
TODAY’S ALMANAC
Question of the Day
Advice of the Day
Home Hint of the Day
Word of the Day
Puzzle of the Day
You may pass over a flat piece of ground whose name, read backward or forward, is always the same.
Level
Born
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet) –
- Alfred Bernhard Nobel (inventor) –
- Dizzy Gillespie (musician) –
- Edward “Whitey” Ford (baseball player) –
- Ursula K. Le Guin (author) –
- Manfred Mann (musician) –
- Dr. Ronald McNair (astronaut) –
- Carrie Fisher (actress) –
- Douglas G. Hurley (astronaut) –
Died
- Lord Nelson (British admiral) –
- Jack Kerouac (poet) –
- Fred Berry (actor) –
Events
- U.S.S. Constitution launched, Boston, Massachusetts –
- Lord Horatio Nelson of Great Britain and his men destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar –
- Thomas Edison successfully tested for the first time a carbon-filament incandescent light bulb –
- Columbia ran an advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post for the first two-sided record –
- Margaret Owen set a typing speed record on a manual typewriter of 170 words per minute –
- The Guggenheim Museum of Art, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in New York City –
- Trimline phone was first placed in service, in Michigan –
- Movie My Fair Lady premiered –
- An international agreement redefined the length of a meter as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second –
- Native American saint Kateri Tekakwitha canonized –
Weather
- The temperature in Boston, Massachusetts, was 80 degrees F –
COURTESY www.almanac.com
