You ain’t nothin’ but a…

What’s the deal with Doja Cat?

Maybe it’s because I’m still not spending time on TikTok, where she likes to break a lot of her music, but she seems to come and go. She’s on fire for several months, then disappears for a long time, re-sparking my memory when she returns (“Oh yeah, Doja Cat! Haven’t thought about her for a while…”)

But Doja is no stranger to the digital fruits of social media, having been found by producers after posting her music to SoundCloud as a teenager way back in 2012.

And so it is that futuristic digitalism collides with mid-century America on her 2022 single “Vegas,” a song released on the Elvis (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack), the soundtrack to the 2022 film Elvis, which I haven’t seen yet (some friends say I need to; others tell me to skip it).

In “Vegas,” Doja raps over a laid-back, slow-burning groove featuring a sample of Shonka Dukureh’s cover of “Hound Dog” from the Elvis film (Dukureh plays Big Mama Thornton in the film; Thornton was the first to record “Hound Dog,” before Elvis Presley made it hugely popular.

The lyrical content’s essentially about a lousy lover who doesn’t deserve Doja. But that’s not what’s important here.

Like Doja Cat’s musical hero Nicki Minaj, it’s the sample that grabs the listener and yanks their ass out to the dance floor. Like Minaj’s 2022 No. 1 “Super Freaky Girl,” which grabs the listener with its Rick James-sampled ear-worming of James’ ’80s hit “Super Freak,” “Vegas” does the same thing; when Dukureh soulfully belts out “Yeah, ahhh, get it” and “You ain’t nothin’ but a”, you can’t help but get sucked in.

Doja’s rapping of “Fraud, player, ah, get it” brings the classic soul sound into the modern age as Doja and Dukureh play off each other, bringing down the dude over stuttering hi-hats and twinkly synths.

But remember, what stays in Vegas… (You know the rest.)

A slow, menacing end-of-the-night winner.