When Doja Cat’s Ma Vie world tour kicked off in Auckland last week, some fans immediately complained – not about her voice (pristine) or her band (ferociously funky), but about the lack of costume changes. This is the way of modern pop stardom: spectacle, not music, is what gets phones in the air, with footage that then gets picked apart on TikTok and Instagram.
Doja Cat has been singing about this inanity for years – “You follow me, but you don’t really care about the music,” she spat out on her 2023 track Attention – and in Auckland, she was having none of it. “I’m not your fucking costume monkey, I move at my own pace and break my fucking back out there every night so you can keep your bullshit opinion to yourself,” she wrote on X after the show. “You are not the artist, you are the watcher.”
Doja Cat’s unapologetic prickliness makes for good headlines – the BBC covered the pouting in Auckland, while seemingly every Australian tabloid has blasted her 15-minute appearance at a Melbourne club earlier this week, which abruptly ended after three songs (to be fair, she was supposed to be on vocal rest for a sore throat). All of this could paint a picture of a pop star who hates her fans, which simply isn’t true; Doja Cat just loves fighting on the internet more. As she once put it to Variety, “It’s fun for me. I’m a very messy bitch.”
And she really does break her back out there. On Tuesday night at Melbourne’s Rod Laver arena, she stalks, twerks and writhes around the stage for close to two hours. She is a rare performer who can sing as well as she can rap live, and is able to switch from dreamy love song to demonic screech on a dime.
There might be no costume changes but there are fireworks, hellish flames and one very bold outfit: a messy pink wig, a very high cut leopard print bodysuit, and half a face of dramatic makeup, like a clown who has had to rush off to a Duran Duran concert. Her latest album Vie is hugely 80s inflected and from the concert opener Cards, you can not only hear but also see the era’s inspirations – the playful theatricality of Madonna and Prince, the provocative sexiness of Janet Jackson and, when she pulls her most demonic faces, licks the mic stand and bites off one of her fake nails to throw into the crowd, even a shadow of Ozzy Osbourne. (She’d front a great metal band.)
Much like her hero Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat is a witty and dedicated performer: after a triumphant and jazzy rendition of Paint the Town Red, she turns away and picks her bodysuit out of her bum with a cheeky flick of her leg. Occasionally some syllables get lost in the wall of sound, but whether that is her throat, the mic, the arena’s speakers or the crowd drowning her out, who knows – and it doesn’t have too much impact when everyone is singing along.
Vie sounds even better live, with a fantastically tight band that is heavy on brass, throbbing bass and even keytar; Gorgeous, which could have been a Madonna song 40 years ago or a George Michael song in another life, is a standout with its sax solo. The band really helps the newer songs stand out – One More Time, Take Me Dancing, Aaahh Men! and the closer Jealous Type, the song of summer 2025 – though all the older hits (Wet Vagina, Ain’t Shit, Boss Bitch) benefit from funkier arrangements too.
For almost two hours, every song is screamed back at Doja Cat word for word, and she wraps up with a sweet thank you, laughing in clear delight. Anyone who would complain after a show like this needs to get more than their eyes and ears checked.
Doja Cat’s Ma Vie world tour continues in Brisbane on 29 November and Sydney 1-2 December, before heading around the world.
