In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
This is more like it. Doja Cat’s “Say So” is not a pop classic by any means. It’s a disco-adjacent TikTok hit that was just kind of bumbling around the top 10 for a while before a superstar jumped on a remix, pushing the song to #1 for a single week — an old cheat-code trick that we’ve already seen successfully employed in this column a bunch of times. Some of the people involved in making “Say So” are not what I’d call great people. But “Say So” is, at the very least, a legit hit, a song that had a shelf life beyond its one week atop the Billboard Hot 100. After this column spent the past two weeks covering evanescent COVID hits that vanished just as soon as they arrived, that’s a real difference-maker. “Say So” feels like a real pop song, like the kind of thing that you might encounter when scanning around a radio dial. That shouldn’t feel like a big deal, but in an increasingly fractured and narrowcast pop-chart environment, it’s an actual achievement.
“Say So” was the major breakout moment for Doja Cat, a figure who emerged from the viral internet-fave ranks to become a real-deal pop star, a designation that she still holds today. The song also stands as the first-ever #1 hit for remix guest-rapper Nicki Minaj, a truly important figure who is probably now the default pick in any conversation about the greatest female rapper of all time, even as she works with fierce determination to undermine all the public goodwill that she ever earned. Doja and Nicki have both cultivated vaguely toxic public personas, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re both transformational pop-music figures, talented and charismatic weirdos who have reshaped the world in their images. It’s only right that this column should get into both of their histories, and “Say So” gives us an opportunity for both deep-dives. As an added bonus, only one of them was on total autopilot when making the “Say So” remix. Again, that’s something.
Since “Say So” started off as Doja Cat’s song, and since she’s the one who didn’t have the option of autopilot, let’s start with her. Amala Ratna Zandile Dlamini was pretty much fated to become an artistic eccentric from the moment of her birth. (When Doja was born, Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” was the #1 song in America.) Doja’s mother is a Jewish graphic designer, and her father is a South African actor and dancer who was in the Broadway play Sarafina! and who starred alongside Whoopi Goldberg in its 1992 movie adaptation. Doja’s parents didn’t have a long relationship, and her father returned to South Africa soon after she was born. He isn’t part of her life.
Doja Cat was born in Los Angeles, and her mother lived in Tarzana, but Doja spent part of her childhood with her grandmother in Westchester, outside New York City. When Doja was eight, she and her mother moved to a Hindu commune in Agora Hills, California. The experimental jazz legend Alice Coltrane, John’s widow, ran that ashram. A few years ago, there was a posthumous Coltrane collection called The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, and its cover art is an image of Coltrane surrounded by little kids in robes. One of those little kids is baby Doja Cat. Doja started studying dance while living at the commune, but she wasn’t comfortable there. A few years later, Doja’s family moved back to Tarzana, and she started going to a performing arts high school. She didn’t last long there, and she dropped out at 16.
Doja Cat kept dancing in high school dance crews, and there’s plenty of online documentation of her old dance battles. There’s also a whole lot of online documentation of the other stuff that she was doing online back then, which is less cute — using homophobic and racist slurs, hanging out in incel chatrooms, inspiring a still-famous NORE tweet about how she was “in racial chatrooms showing feet.” When Doja first got famous, it looked like her edgelord past might end her career, but she never gave that stuff more than a cursory apology. Apparently, that’s just how kids have been living for a while now — all competing to say the most performatively outrageous shit in public forums, generally without consequence. It’s exhausting to think about, but I don’t think it makes Doja Cat an evil person or whatever.
That edgelord bullshit didn’t drain young Doja Cat’s creativity, anyway. As a teenager, she started making and producing music and posting it on SoundCloud. She started with “So High,” a track that she first released in 2012. It’s a slinky, stoned reverie that shows a serious command of melody and vibe. As a singer, Doja brings a jazzy sense of grace, and she transitions into silly, playful rapping so easily and naturally that you almost can’t pinpoint the shifts. When Doja started making music, she connected with the LA rap underground, performing alongside stalwarts like Busdriver. That scene isn’t especially restrictive, but a performer with the starpower of a Doja Cat wasn’t going to stay in that world for long. Through that scene, she met David Sprecher, the producer known professionally as Yeti Beats, and he brought her to Kemosabe Records, the RCA imprint run by big-deal hitmaker Dr. Luke. Doja signed with Luke in 2014, just before his collaborator Kesha accused him of all sorts of abuses, which turned Luke into a pariah within the music business.
A re-released version of “So High” became Doja Cat’s debut single, and she released her Purrr! EP in 2014. After that, she did a bit of touring and recording, but she mostly stayed on the major-label back-burner. Later on, she claimed that she was consistently stoned during that period and that she couldn’t write anything. Finally, Doja released her debut album Amala in 2018. Later on, she claimed that it was rushed and half-assed. Amala eventually went gold, but that didn’t happen until four years after its release. Her single “Candy” picked up some steam, soundtracking an online dance challenge and eventually cracking the Hot 100, peaking at #86 in 2019. But the first song that brought Doja Cat real attention wasn’t on Amala. It was the one where she dressed up as a cow in the video, twerking and sticking fries up her nose.
A few months after Amala came out, Doja Cat posted the ridiculous video for a stupid-fun novelty song called “Mooo!,” wearing a sexy-cow Halloween costume and chanting, “Bitch, I’m a cow.” That video was all over my feed soon after it came out, and it was the first time I found myself wondering who this Doja Cat person was. “Mooo!” never charted, but it definitely made Doja Cat famous. The song was later added to a deluxe version of Amala. So was “Tia Tamera,” a song with the great punk-rap snarler Rico Nasty that got its own TikTok dance challenge. Yeti Beats and Dr. Luke produced the album track “Juicy,” which got a remix with LA rap hornball Tyga and which reached #41. (Tyga’s highest-charting single, 2011’s “Rack City,” peaked at #7. It’s a 10.)
The “Juicy” remix served as the lead single from Doja Cat’s second album, 2019’s Hot Pink. That record presented Doja Cat less as a wacky, funny rapper and more as a sexy pop star who sometimes raps. After “Juicy,” the next couple of singles from Hot Pink floundered. But “Say So,” an album track from that LP, caught fire online when Haley Sharpe, a teenager from Alabama, made up a dance to the song. Various TikTok influencers started doing the “Say So” dance, a relatively awkward and flailing thing. As with so many early TikTok dances, this one involved sort of acting out the lyrics with your hands. “Say So” ended up soundtracking millions of TikTok videos, including one, weirdly, from Laura Dern. Unlike a lot of TikTok hits, “Say So” sounded like an actual hit, which is what it quickly became. Doja Cat shot a sleek, retro-styled “Say So” video, and she gave Haley Sharpe a quick cameo.
Dr. Luke produced “Say So,” but since nobody was checking for Dr. Luke tracks in 2019, he did it under a different alter-ego, calling himself Tyson Trax. The song has all the hallmarks of the hits that Luke made when he was on top of the world — the mathematical precision, the undeniable hooks, the vaguely militaristic sense of economy. Luke tracks are usually pure pastiche, and this one goes for bubbly, funky neo-disco. By accident, then, “Say So” fit in nicely with the 2020 tenor, when Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia album was so heavy with theoretical dancefloor ragers for all the quarantined people who couldn’t actually go out dancing. The guitars on “Say So” evoke Nile Rodgers’ chicken-scratch, and the bass bops along with real flair. Doja Cat’s hook is simple but effective — a playground-catcall singsong from a girl who’s just waiting for some guy to get his shit together and finally make a move.
Doja Cat co-wrote “Say So” with Dr. Luke, Yeti Beats, and her manager Lydia Asrat, an A&R rep who has songwriting credits on a lot of Doja songs. The song’s hook is one of those mocking earworms that sticks in your head even when you don’t want it there. It’s flirty and insistent, with Doja telling this guy over and over that he has to actually act on his attraction. It’s effective without actually being fun, and it’s one of the rare tracks where I prefer the verses to the chorus. On the verses, Doja actually sounds loose and intuitive, like she’s not just hitting the obligatory moves. The second verse, with the “he ain’t never seen it in a dress like this” bit, effortlessly moves into rap territory. Doja plays around with her cadence and intonation — purring one second, mock-authoritatively yelling the next. She almost sounds like Nicki Minaj. In its non-remixed form, “Say So” peaked at #5 on the Hot 100, and then it started to slip downward. But then the actual Nicki Minaj arrived on a remix, and “Say So” instantly jumped all the way up to #1.
This brings us to the part of the column where we talk about Nicki Minaj. There’s a lot to say, so forgive me for leaving vast tracts of lore out of this thing. By the time that “Say So” hit in 2020, Nicki Minaj was a titan in her field. She became rap’s dominant woman more than a decade earlier, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that rap could only have one dominant woman. Nicki clashed with some of the dominant women in rap’s immediate past, and she has since clashed with many of the women, dominant or otherwise, who came up behind her. She also rapped with a frantic theatricality, one that she employed whether she was doing grainy YouTube freestyles or craven pop-crossover attempts. She attained mythic status and nurtured possibly the scariest and most unhinged stan army on the entire internet, a competitive title. She also made banger after banger after banger, coming close to reaching #1 many times but never quite getting there until Doja Cat tapped her for this remix. “Say So” was Nicki Minaj’s 109th entry on the Billboard Hot 100, and it was her first chart-topper.
Onika Tanya Maraj was born in Port Of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, 13 years before Doja Cat entered the world. (Lionel Richie’s “Truly” was the #1 song in America when Nicki Minaj was born. I don’t think Trinidad and Tobago had a singles chart.) Nicki’s parents both sang gospel and worked office jobs, and she later said that her father was an abusive addict. When Nicki was a kid, she lived with her grandmother while her mother moved to the Bronx and went to college. Eventually, Nicki and her older brother moved to New York, living with their mother in the Queens neighborhood of South Jamaica. She’s apparently still not a US citizen. Much like Doja Cat, Nicki Minaj went to a performing arts high school — in her case, LaGuardia, the famous Fame school. After high school, she landed a role in an Off-Broadway play and worked a bunch of different jobs.
In the early ’00s, Nicki Minaj was a member of a rap group called Hoodstars. One of the guys in the group was the son of Full Force member Bowlegged Lou. (Full Force were in this column a couple of times for producing Lisa Lisa And Cult Jam.) Hoodstars never really went anywhere, though they did record the theme music for the WWE wrestler Victoria; it was probably the first time that lots of people heard Nicki rap. After Hoodstars broke up, Nicki continued to make noise as a solo artist. Sometime around 2007, she caught the attention of Lil Wayne, who was on fire at the time. The first time I remember hearing Nicki, she was talking about “you be Harry Potter and I’ll be Hermione” on the “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” freestyle from Wayne’s classic mixtape Da Drought 3. Around the same time, Nicki released her own Playtime Is Over mixtape. That one didn’t include any Lil Wayne collabs, but it did repurpose Wayne’s “Upgrade U” freestyle — the one where he says he just signed a chick named Nicki Mee-naj. In short order, Nicki cranked out two more mixtapes — Sucka Free in 2008, Beam Me Up Scotty in 2009. By the time Beam Me Up came out, Nicki was a boulder rolling downhill.
It took a while for Nicki to officially sign with Young Money, the imprint that Lil Wayne was setting up, but she went out on tour with Wayne in 2009. Drake, another young Wayne protege, was on the same tour, and Nicki and Drake were linked in the public imagination for many years. At the end of the year, Wayne put out the We Are Young Money compilation, and Nicki appeared on “BedRock,” a posse cut that went all the way to #2. (It’s a 7.) Nicki went on an absolute guest-appearance blitz in 2010, bringing a jolt of energy to singles from stars like Ludacris, Usher, and Trey Songz. (“Bottoms Up,” the highest-charting single of Trey Songz’s career, peaked at #6. It’s a 9, and Nicki’s unhinged verse — “Can I get salt all around that rimmm rimmm rimmm rimmm?” — is one of the main reasons.) But the moment that the world had to really take Nicki seriously was when she jumped on Kanye West’s posse cut “Monster.” Lots of people are on “Monster” — Kanye, Rick Ross, Jay-Z, a randomly appearing Bon Iver — and Nicki just annihilates every one of them. Nicki’s appearance on that song is one of the all-time great guest-verses, an absolute moment even if the song did reach full-on smash status. (“Monster” peaked at #18, which feels too low.)
A month after “Monster” came out, Nicki Minaj released Pink Friday, her big-deal debut album. Nicki had been rapping in tons of different voices since her days on the New York underground, and her balance of sneering toughness and theater-kid energy was something that nobody had ever really heard before. She had bars, in the classic rap sense, and she balanced that ability with a wild-eyed, glamorous kookiness that felt entirely new. She was just as comfortable sing-rapping on bright, candy-coated pop songs as she was at double-time punchline shit, which gave her music a lot of reach even if it didn’t give her records much coherence. Pink Friday had tons of hits, and the biggest of them was “Super Bass,” the deluxe-edition bonus track where she threaded the needle between her pop and rap sides, putting on a tremendous technical performance and showing a whole lot of personality over a sugary, EDM-adjacent beat with an endlessly bubbly hook. (“Super Bass” peaked at #3 in 2011. It’s a 9.)
Right out of the gate, Nicki Minaj became a massive arena-level player with tons of narrative threads supporting her stardom. She had the big associations with Lil Wayne and Drake, alongside long-simmering feuds with Lil Kim, whose star waned long before Nicki ascended, and then with Cardi B, who Nicki deemed insufficiently respectful when she went through her own quick ascent out of the New York mixtape ranks. Nicki continued to make all kinds of tracks, but her biggest hits were her most shameless pop-crossover moves. In 2012, for instance, Nicki reached #5 with “Starships,” an EDM-drunk party song that she made with Lady Gaga collaborator RedOne, and then she dropped out of a headlining spot on Hot 97’s Summer Jam show at the last minute when the station’s DJ Peter Rosenberg clowned the song over on the outdoor second stage. (It’s a 6.) A year later, Nicki sampled the shit out of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” on breathlessly horny #2 hit “Anaconda.” (It’s an 8.)
During that stretch, Nicki Minaj was a constant presence on the pop charts — not just for her own songs but also for a long string of scene-stealing guest appearances on singles from Jessie J, Drake, Big Sean, David Guetta, Justin Bieber, and Ariana Grande, among so many others. But none of those songs had quite enough juice to go all the way to #1. Nicki joined Madonna at her Super Bowl Halftime Show and played supporting roles in a few movies. For a single season, she was a judge on American Idol, but it didn’t last because she didn’t get along with fellow judge Mariah Carey. She dated Meek Mill and then Nas. She made great songs. One of my favorite party tracks from that era was “Truffle Butter,” her 2015 Drake/Lil Wayne collab, which reached #14 despite never getting a video. Nicki’s albums consistently went platinum or multi-platinum. She was the kind of cultural force that nobody could write off.
The seams only started to show after Nicki Minaj had already been famous for about a decade. Whenever she perceived anyone as a threat, she went off on that person. She got mad online, for example, when Travis Scott’s Astroworld blocked her 2018 album Queen from the #1 spot. (Queen didn’t have any real crossover hits. “Chun-Li,” its biggest track, peaked at #10. It’s a 7.) In the years before the “Say So” remix, the biggest hit to bear Nicki Minaj’s name was “Fefe,” a 2018 song from the knowingly obnoxious New York rapper and future Number Ones artist Tekashi 6ix9ine, which peaked at #3. (It’s a 3.) Nicki could still rap her ass off during those years, but she didn’t often seem to enjoy the process of rapping. Instead, she radiated imperious resentment, even as her music lost its capacity to surprise and delight. Her online fan army never abandoned her, but she sometimes seemed to take her Barbz for granted. Lil Nas X was a Barb before he ascended to stardom, and Nicki still hasn’t collaborated with him, though it would obviously be a huge deal if she did. Nicki was a foundational figure who had accomplished huge things, but it stopped being fun to watch her do her thing.
It must’ve been a huge relief, both for Nicki Minaj and her fans, when she finally scored a #1 hit, one of the few career accomplishments that had eluded her. Doja Cat was a clear Nicki Minaj disciple, from the comically exaggerated vocal tics to the propensity to talk shit online. The “Say So” remix is a clear case of a big star being thrown onto a big song to make it slightly bigger. It’s easy to imagine that Nicki and Doja never met face-to-face before the remix came out, but at least Nicki makes sense on the song. In her “Say So” lyrics, Nicki utterly abandons the song’s concept to talk about her own magnificence, but what do you want? She’s Nicki Minaj. It’s what she does. She compares herself to Naomi Campbell, Cassie, Lauren London, Lil Wayne, Foxy Brown, Lauryn Hill, and Gordon Ramsay. She makes a couple of vague references to the pandemic, talking about putting her cookie on quarantine and getting dressed just to sit in the house. She attacks a stripped-down version of the beat on her first verse and adds some of her own harmonies on the outro. She rhymes “tell Mike Jordan to send me my new retros” with “used to be bi but now I’m just hetero.”
Nicki remains on autopilot on the “Say So” remix, and I don’t think she adds much to the song. But Nicki still sounds perfectly at home on that track, and even when she’s just cruising, she can still flex with the best of them. In the category of inorganic remixes that were dreamed up in boardrooms, this could’ve turned out much, much worse. And maybe Nicki did us a favor by finally helping nudge Doja Cat into full-on stardom. Nicki tried to do that with many of her younger female peers, and then she often wound up in ugly feuds with them soon after. But that has never happened with Doja Cat. There have been rumors about tensions between the two stars in the past few years, but as far as anyone can say for certain, Nicki and Doja remain cool with one another.
Doja Cat did not take long to capitalize on the momentum of “Say So.” Her Hot Pink album went double platinum. For the MTV EMAs later in 2020, Doja performed a pre-taped metal version of “Say So,” which worked way better than anyone could’ve anticipated. Doja’s original version of “Say So” is still the definitive one, and the Nicki remix quickly faded from memory — the fate of most remixes that only exist to charge a song’s chart fortunes. The “Say So” single is now seven times platinum, but its Spotify numbers have been eclipsed by those of “Streets,” a Hot Pink track that took off and reached #16 in 2021, after yet another viral TikTok-challenge situation.
Doja Cat quickly followed Hot Pink with Planet Her, a full-on pop-rap album that went heavy on the Dr. Luke production. Doja knew how to sell songs like that, and a bunch of Planet Her tracks became hits. Luke thankfully didn’t have anything to do with lead single “Kiss Me More,” a duet with future Number Ones artist SZA that peaked at #3. (It’s a 7.)
With Planet Her and its aftermath, Doja Cat went on the kind of run that recalled Nicki Minaj in her prime. The Weeknd appeared on Doja’s follow-up single “You Right,” which peaked at #11. Two more Planet Her singles made it into the top 10, “Need To Know” at #8 and “Woman” at #7. (“Need To Know” is a 6, and “Woman” is a 7.) In 2022, Doja made it to #10 with “Vegas,” her contribution to the Elvis soundtrack. (It’s a 6.) She also appeared alongside future Number Ones artist Megan Thee Stallion on Ariana Grande’s “34 + 35” remix, which reached #2, and on Post Malone’s “I Like You (A Happier Song),” which peaked at #3. (The “34 + 35” remix is a 7, and “I Like You (A Happier Song)” is a 6.) Even with all those hits, Doja remained thorny. With every new album, she tends to deride the one that came out just before. Late in 2021, Doja pledged that she wouldn’t work with Dr. Luke anymore, even though she was still on his label. That decision hasn’t hurt her. Doja Cat will appear in this column again, and so will Nicki Minaj.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: In 2021, Toni Braxton, someone who has been in this column a couple of times, dressed up as the Pufferfish to compete on The Masked Singer, the vaguely dystopian reality show. Here she is, covering “Say So,” rap part and all:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Why you waiting? Buy the book.
