Doja Cat review – ignore the headlines, this is a pop provocateur at the top of her game

Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne
The US pop-rapper is a ferocious and cheeky stage presence, backed by a fantastically tight band who bring an 80s funk to her biting songs

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 Ma Vie world tour continues in Brisbane on 29 November and Sydney 1-2 December, before heading around the world.