Alligator Tears
Doechii, the fierce rap visionary from Tampa, just rewrote the rulebook with Alligator Bites Never Heal—a raw, unapologetic mixtape born from defiance and self-discovery. Now nominated for four Grammys, including Best New Artist, this breakout project is a fearless rejection of industry formulas, channeling authenticity and grit.
A new messiah emerged this summer to unapologetically shake things up in the rap and hip-hop world. She takes the form of a white crocodile shedding its skin to free herself of the heavy constrictions the music industry imposes— one way or another. Like it or not.
Her name is Doechii. Born in 1998 as Jaylah Hickmon straight out of Tampa, Florida. Raised as a choral singer, she gained recognition with a TikTok Meteora in 2020, which led her to being signed to Capitol Records in partnership with Top Dawg Entertainment: the same label that drove Kendrick Lamar to fame, and serves as the home to R&B queen, SZA. For any emerging artist, it is a dream coming true. But the whole major-label-and-rainbows fantasy is far from being what you really need as an artist.
Long story short, over the next two years several singles and Mixtapes are released. A banger after banger that makes the diameter of her spotlights bigger and bigger, touching different genres and styles with each song. But here’s the catch: They are a product of directives coming from upstairs, all part of the How To Make Superstars book that many labels refer to once they have a promising talent in their hands. A plan that may be fit for some, not for many, and not certainly not for all.
Doechii photographed by John Jay, via Rolling Stones. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
When you are first signed to a label, the sooner you give birth to an album, the better. And that was what Doechii was planning to create until she realized that the format was suffocating her and her creativity, and feeding into a spiral of self-doubt on both. Actually, the whole plan that had been made for her career was tight. The formula might have been right for some, but not for her, and just the word album and everything that it concerned (a theme, a concept, an ordered tracklist) choked her. She started working on it, but that music wasn’t for her: she was suffocating her internal compass just to follow rules, pieces of advice, and orders.
The result? She scraped everything and then closed herself in a studio for a month writing a song a day to put into a mixtape to put out immediately. In a defiant call to her label, she informed them to be ready—the project would drop in a month.
What came out was Alligator Bites Never Heal. A title tribute to her land, her persistence to fight back, and to the incurability of certain episodes of her life that led her to this moment in her career. An outburst of truthfulness and homage to her craft and origins, both musically and physically.
The mixtape was intentionally themeless, with no overarching concept or cohesive structure. Yet, a structure guides you along what sounds like a renting from a dear long-distance friend you haven’t seen in a long time and that has to update you on all the vicissitudes he or she has been through.
Doechii created a space to talk about her unhappiness with the status of her career and mental health exacerbated by an unhealthy lifestyle led by drugs and alcohol and her disastrous love adventures. A place to tell her label’s representative to put their nose out of her music. A place to tell people struggling like her that she fought to get her spark and balance back. She started to make music the way she used to: by using it as a form of self-therapy. The end sounds like a calm celebration of the fight against the alligator in her life.
The progression and underlying thematics are there with all sorts of sound and nose curling rhymes. But she didn’t want any stamp or trail to consider that had been put from above to let her doubt even more of her skills. It’s a mixtape, not an album.
Alligator Bites Never Heal encapsulates the sounds that mental obstacles make when shattered. Mental obstacles women put in front of their eyes when they let words from others get into their convictions and make them question everything.
This mixtape and Doechii may be the heir rap and hip-hop had been waiting for. But in reality, it’s just made from that place of raw sincerity and bluntness that constituted the foundations of the genres. Doechii just reminded everyone that they are still standing— and they’re there for the taking.
