While Sunday (April 14) was the coldest night of the first weekend of Coachella 2024 — with many attendees keeping warm by wrapping themselves in silver emergency blankets — you wouldn’t have known it by looking at Doja Cat.
Closing out the festival as its Sunday night headliner, the rapper performed a lot of her show while wearing a white fur two-piece outfit, looking hot in every sense of the word despite the fact that temperatures were in the high 50s and a biting wind was blowing across the polo field.
No matter. With the performance, Doja squashed debate about whether she was a big enough star to headline Coachella — not by pandering to the audience, but just by embracing her signature strangeness. Think playful wigs, a mud pit, a fake Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, dancing yetis and other elements presented with total dedication to the bit. This performance happened upon an industrial, multi-tiered stage rig built from scaffolding and multiple walkways jutting out into the crowd, a setup upon which Doja and her crew of dancers prowled.
Altogether, they not only filled the space — a significant task on a stage that size — but made it their own. The performance (which was very short on crowd banter) was a touch theatrical, but never felt inauthentic, ultimately functioning as either a reminder of or introduction to Doja’s charisma, talent and oddball sensibilities.
But it wasn’t a greatest-hits set, with Doja totally avoiding smashes like “Woman” and “Say So,” and instead focusing on more recent material, much of it — “Demons,” “Fuck the Girls” “Acknowledge Me,” “Gun” — from her 2023 album, Scarlet, and its deluxe edition, Scarlet 2: CLAUDE, that dropped earlier this month. With the performance, Doja became only the second Black woman to headline Coachella, following Beyoncé’s landmark Beychella set in 2018.
Below, find five of the best moments from her Coachella 2024 headlining show.
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The Props
That aforementioned Tyrannosaurus skeleton came out toward the end of the show as Doja performed “WYM,” with a crew of puppeteers making it chase her around the walkways that went out into the crowd, having no clear connection to the song but adding another dash of kooky fun to the show with its presence. The final flourish was when, during the show-closing “Wet Vagina,” the satellite stage was transformed into a mud pit, into which Doja and her dancers crawled and got themselves dirty. Leave it to her to do innuendo in a way that was striking, cool and happily messy.
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The Live Debut of ‘MASC’
Doja released her newest track, “MASC,” just 10 days ago, with the ballad about maturity (“Boy, we way too grown for this sh–“) getting its live debut about midway through her performance. The song’s collaborator, Teezo Touchdown, came onstage to perform his part, rapping into a microphone embedded into a bouquet of flowers and wearing white football pads outfitted with his signature spikes. While his appearance was brief, the pair had chemistry and both of their voices sounded true to the song.
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The Guests
In addition to Teezo Touchdown (and the aforementioned T-rex), Doja brought out 21 Savage to do a verse on their January collaboration “n.h.i.e.” and A$AP Rocky to do his part on their recently released track “URRRGE!!!!!!!!!!” While these moments were exciting, none of the guests lingered onstage for all that long.
But the guest appearance that went on for awhile and also made Doja look the happiest was the aptly named The Joy, a five man a cappella group from South Africa. The Joy surrounded Doja during the show’s first few songs, with its members — who, like her, were dressed all in white — singing in Zulu and in gorgeous five-part harmony. At one point, she just stood in the middle of them and seemed to soak in their sound, closing her eyes and flashing one of her biggest smiles of the show.
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The Hair
Doja started the performance on the satellite stage jutting out from the main area, appearing in a full hazmat suit. It was a striking look that didn’t last long, as she removed the hood to reveal a long (like down to her knees) nearly white blonde wig. This hair and this color of it would become motifs of the show, with Doja performing with a cadre of dancers wearing head-to-toe long white blonde fur suits, looking like glamorous yetis and causing a lot of white hair to swing around during their group performance of “Demons.” By this time, Doja was wearing just a bikini also outfitted with white blonde hair, and then removed her wig to reveal her bleach-blonde, tightly cropped hair. During the rest of the show she’d appear in a white fur bikini (despite the frigid temperature), a floor-length white fur jacket and other complimentary outfits made of plastic and other shiny and furry materials.
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The Outfits
In addition to the aforementioned hazmat suit and fur bikini, Doja also wore another bikini outfitted with the same long white blonde hair that her initial wig was made from. Another outfit was a two-piece shorts and top set that looked to be made out of clear plastic, and given the chill factor, one couldn’t help but feel a bit relieved when she and her tightly choreographed crew of dancers all put on floor-length (seemingly faux) fur jackets, with Doja’s in white and the dancers’ in black. A long segment of the show performed from the top of the scaffolding found her in reflective tights, a shimmery belted bodysuit and boots — and of course, the show ended with her simply covered in mud.
