Doja Cat has addressed the controversial t-shirt she wore in the fall that featured Sam Hyde – a comedian known for his alleged association with far-right political ideology.
The “Juicy” hitmaker spoke in depth with Ebro Darden for Apple Music in an interview published on Thursday (December 14). While noting she’s not political, the California native said that she didn’t know Hyde was a controversial figure.
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“First of all, I’m not a political person at all,” Doja began. “I feel like when it comes to that sort of thing, I have to back the fuck away. Politics are not something that I wanna sweep into my life. I just want creativity and joy and just sort of the immediate reality of my friends, my family and my music and whatever. You can’t know everything and me wearing a t-shirt of somebody who I thought was funny is ‘an attack on people’? It’s not an attack. It didn’t affect the world in a way where we now have to look behind our backs. We don’t.”
She continued: “And I know that. And me saying that right now, I’m going to get a lot of responses of, ‘Yes it did! It’s going to change everything!’ I also think that I’m way too fucking famous. 100 percent. I’m doing what I can slowly but surely to separate myself from this kind of narrative or whatever this world is that I kind of built. And I’m fine tuning it and tailoring it to what I want out of it. I feel like it doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what some people know.
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“Because there’s fans that I have that know I don’t put any involvement into whatever the fuck that negative shit was. I am more just: funny guy on t-shirt, wore it that day. But I don’t need to explain myself. I don’t need to prove myself to a bunch of people who are just gonna project no matter what I say, too. There’s people who are incredibly dogmatic. It doesn’t matter what the fuck you do, what you say, they’re always going to stand by, ‘That person’s evil.’”
You can watch the full interview below. The shirt convo happens around the 7:30 mark.
The t-shirt in question was featured in a selfie Doja Cat posted to her account in October. After fans got in her comments and dragged her for filth for the post, she deleted it. She then re-uploaded it with the picture of Hyde cropped out, with a new caption: a series of eye-roll emojis.
That didn’t stop the internet backlash, though.
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While Hyde’s Million Dollar Extreme comedy troupe purports itself to be transgressive and subversive in its humor, there have been more than a few instances where Hyde’s humor has fallen on the offensive side. The comedian has been photographed giving a Nazi salute alongside infamous alt-right troll Weev, who also writes antisemitic tirades for The Daily Stormer. In another, Hyde proudly displayed swastikas behind him while performing.
In addition to being associated with 4chan/alt-right-type politics (as this was not the first time), Doja Cat has also been accused of worshiping Satan for the devil-related imagery she has used in both music videos and tattoos. But according to the Scarlet rapper, the narrative is “annoying” and “tacky.”
“I like the idea of: I did it on purpose and it’s this big ruse to make people react,” she said elsewhere in the interview with Darden. “But I also like the idea of: I love this piece of visual art, I like this visual for this sound.
“So I chose that visual and applied it to the sound and people made up what they [want], which is what you do with art. “You interpret it how you want to interpret it. Everybody has a right to interpret how they want.”
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She continued: “But this whole very confident ‘Satanism’ thing is like — I’m sorry, when the fuck did I say that I was a Satanist? Or even go marching outside the church? When the fuck did I say that?
“It’s really tacky and annoying and discredits a lot of the hard work that I’ve put in.”
