Released: 2024
In a game that still goes long on respect, you imagine being told that Variety had named you Hip-Hop Disruptor of the Year for 2024 might not have been the trophy that went up on the wall first. But still, even given the perpetrator and the category, the notion was an absolute bullseye. From Tik Tok to a triple Grammy nominated mixtape in three years, Doechii was now as she triumphantly proclaimed, creatively valid and musically very affirmed.
The process from which the work in question, her second mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal, was as disruptively unorthodox – at least by linear industry standards – as the gong suggests. Constructed from a stream of consciousness jams each lasting an hour, The Swamp Sessions would eventually line up into a loose concept album that promoted vulnerability from a position of mental strength, their creator backing up the haters with “I am nobody’s prey; I was born to be the predator.”
If personalities are meant by definition to be fractured and fractious, Nissan Altima was the charge sheet. With a jaw breaking, don’t try this at home flow the rapper asserted dominance over anybody who’d ever looked at her body and wanted to use it as a vessel, the price high (Or low) depending on a whim. “I’m the new hip hop Madonna/I’m the trap Grace Jones” she declared amongst the avalanche of disses and uber potty mouthed rhymes, and you didn’t need to read a hundred and twenty year old magazine to know that this was a brag that might one day soon come true.
The Voice Of Unreason 