In the Everglades, the Floridian swampland where humidity blankets the back of your neck like sweat, mosquitos cry in your ear after sucking your blood, begging for more. The water below you snaps back with 80 pearly whites, and the Spanish moss obscures you from seeing more than 20 feet ahead in the marsh. However, in this repugnance, one can find a lush splendor in the green mangrove forest and the dozens of endangered species which make their home in its salt and fresh waters.
This beauty and unpleasant reality pervades Doechii’s late summer release ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL. In this wet, hot, and muddy album, Doechii invites the listener to the swamp in her most confessional release yet.
The fumes that emanate from her marshy home smell of decay and decomposing matter. Her intimacy with and apprehension towards death is expressed in “STANKA POOH,” which Doechii begins, “Let’s start the story backwards/I’m dead, she’s dead, just another Black Lives Mattered.”
Lacking levity, her lyrics sink in the muck, dragging the listener with them. Intrusive thought bubbles of methane emerge from the bottom of the swamp with an anxious pop as she questions: “What if I die a Taurus?/What if I die on purpose?/What if it wasn’t even worth it?”
Doechii struggles with self-worth and expectations while maintaining a calm flow. Never once does she falter, letting the creeping fear jump out of the water and pull her under. Instead, on “CATFISH” she asserts “I’m the hardest rapper, this yo’ [explicit] training day.” Doechii is the alligator, the self-proclaimed “Swamp Ruler.”
While she swamps the rap game, Doechii still has time to reflect on her career. Starting with 2019’s Oh The Places You’ll Go, she debuts her therapist alter ego that helps her overcome problems in song.
On “DENIAL IS A RIVER,” Doechii sits down for another therapy session to break down how fame leads to drugs, and how drugs deplete one’s self-worth. After divulging her addiction, her therapist leads her in a breathing exercise with which Doechii ends the song prematurely—hyperventilating in a panic attack.
Continuing her confession on the interlude “BLOOM,” a voice memo of Doechii and an anonymous counselor reveals that Doechii is not always the gritty, flawless rapper persona she exudes.
She says, “You gotta make sure your bills are paid, but you gotta make sure you have fun and time for you, time for your friends. And like, I just constantly feel like I’m neglecting parts of my life.”
Her partner in conversation responds, “Nope, nope, God made a day twenty-four hours. It’s not a lot of time. Because, you, you just can’t do it all in one moment. There’s past, present, and future. You gotta put pieces in places, it’s 24 hours.”
Like most ambitious people, Doechii struggles with staying on top of everything. Creating an efficient schedule is hard, especially when that schedule requires sessions in the studio, a national tour, and hundreds of media interviews (all for the point of staying relevant in the pop-culture conversation). Luckily the more one practices, the easier it gets—the motivation and grind start to arise from within.
Her rant is an expression of annoyance that her rapping talent is not taken as seriously as a hook and sample that goes viral on TikTok and makes it to the top 40.
“Life is just like a bike, it don’t move unless you pedaling,” Doechii sings on “WAIT,” reminding us that we are only as strong as we let ourselves be, and that the grind to change one’s life comes from within. On this album, Doechii’s strength comes from shedding her alligator scales and sharing her desires and insecurities. She reveals, “I might look fly in the matrix, I hope I’m sticking my landing.” Doechii acknowledges that while she is “that girl,” achieving a niche “it girl” status through her groovy singles “What it Is” and “Persuasive,” she still feels insecure about her place in pop culture and the rap industry, hoping that she’s stuck in the collective consciousness.
And Doechii has made her mark. On “BOOM BAP,” a playful interlude, she acknowledges the absurdity of her accomplishments, playing with the title of her viral song “What It Is.”
She rants, “You know exactly what it is, the choir gon’ sang ‘What It Is’/Top one hundred, what it is? Número uno, what it is? / Favorite song, what it is? / Turn me on, what it is? / Even the moms know what it is, but y’all n***as can’t see what it is.”
Playful and curt in her response, Doechii explains how a single song going viral can suddenly result in a shift of expectations. Doechii is a rapper, but her viral song does not contain any rap in it. Her rant is an expression of annoyance that her rapping talent is not taken as seriously as a hook and sample that goes viral on TikTok and makes it to the top 40.
SZA, a collaborator of Doechii’s, expressed a similar sentiment. It’s always the songs that artists spend little effort on that end up going viral. They would instead prefer that the public and their fans take the time to appreciate the songs that they’ve poured hours of work into.
Doechii does just that. Each song feels like it was made with intention, that the perfect mood was imbued into each song. That may be why there is a consistent, clear but swampy feel carried throughout the album, why the album and its songs did not chart as well as previous singles, or why the album feels confessional in its nature. In an interview with Apple Music, Doechii reflected on the album, ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL. She’s had it “tattooed over her heart for a while.” In a candid clarity, she says “There will always be a situation that will puncture you or wound you, or hurt you, but at the end of the day in a way ironically you will heal and scars will always be there to remind you what happened but it’s kind of like a victory thing.”
