Doechii Says Tradition in Hip-Hop Is Important, First Rap Song Was a Diss Track

TDE’s newest rising star sat down with Apple Music’s Ebro Darden for a conversation about her young career and her critically-acclaimed mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. Doechii credited her love of golden era rap music as a major influence on the direction she decided to take.

“When people are listening to this project, they’re really witnessing me reconnect with my roots,” she explained. “I learned how to rap through boom bap beats, through classic beats. My first rap that I ever made was a diss track.”

The 26-year-old then revealed that she taught herself how to rap “through battle-style rapping” and talked about how sobriety has helped her remember why she fell in love with the genre in the first place. “With me kinda coming back to myself — I’m recently completely sober: no nicotine, no alcohol, no smoking, no nothing — I just kinda re-fell in love with Hip-Hop, and I realized that there is a sense of tradition in Hip-Hop that I really want to represent and bring back.”

She added, “There is importance in tradition. I feel like it is important for us to uphold the heart of Hip-Hop, which is lyrical composition, it is skill, it is wittiness, but it is also talking about our feelings, being honest about what we’re going through and connecting us as people.

“I feel like, especially in the time of an economic recession, people need to feel things right now and we need to talk about it. And we need to do it through rap, which is why I chose the sonical direction that I chose.I wanna take us back to this classic space in Hip-Hop and just remind people of the traditional roots of where this started — and do it in my way and push it forward.”

The Florida native recently announced the Alligator Bites Never Heal Tour with the first date being Friday, Oct. 11 in Atlanta.

You can watch the full interview here.