Full of many different themes of love and life, Doja Cat’s fifth studio album, Vie, exemplifies what love feels like in someone’s life through many different angles.
Doja Cat, a popular singer and songwriter, shows all of her qualities as they come together to create the journey that is Vie.
This album is a massive switch-up from the hitmaker’s last few projects, including Scarlet and Planet Her. It is also a play on words: “V,” the original title (a play on the Roman numeral 5), was switched to “Vie” because she wanted to show the growth of her love life.
With the word’s true meaning in French being “life,” Vie is a way to describe what Doja Cat’s new album gives to many listeners: “life.”
The album gives a lot of insight into the many ways love can be perceived. The first thing you notice when listening to the album in order is the cohesive ’80s and ’90s pop sounds. Doja Cat experiments and incorporates a lot of these older pop sounds in her songs to give them that special funk.
Vie includes a lot of love songs and themes of romance that seem provocative, differentiating itself from other love albums. Its focus on heavy lyrics with the ’80s sound brings emotion to the listener rather than being a plain old love or breakup pop song. It immerses the listener into her universe.
The opening song, “Cards,” starts playing only in the left ear and slowly goes into both ears. This approach symbolizes Doja Cat’s comeback and change in sound from her previous era, which was focused on a lot of rap songs. “Cards” conveys that someone who falls in love has to play their cards right to give their love a chance: “Maybe in time, we’ll know / Maybe I’ll fall in love, baby / Gotta just play your cards right.”
In a lot of songs throughout the album, Doja Cat incorporates her rapping skills with her singing skills. She throws in catchy raps with funky sounds from the ’80s with French themes and lyrics while conveying the sound of falling in love with someone. The instrumentals are well thought out and the instrumental changes drastically between the first, second, and final chorus for many of the songs.
What follows after “Cards” are more cohesive songs about love: “Jealous Type,” “All Mine,” “Take Me Dancing (featuring SZA),” “Lipstain,” “Silly!Fun!,” “Acts of Service,” “Make it Up,” and “Stranger.”
“Stranger” exemplifies the album’s entire theme of how it feels to love someone unconditionally. This is a song that immediately makes me tear up because of how beautifully the lyrics, sound and music video complement each other and how well the meaning holds up.
“And I know you’re in my life / ‘Cause everything that is alive’s connected / And I believe the weirdest ones survive / You’re a trip to them and a vacation to me.”
Doja sings these lyrics with the passion in her voice that you would only hear if you were in love. The song exemplifies loving someone regardless of how “strange” they might be; loving and embracing a person’s weirdness makes a relationship. To back up the song’s main point, “Stranger” has an extraordinary ’80s saxophone sound mixed with today’s pop music melodies to create a loving sound.
“Are you happy?” Doja Cat asks in the song “Happy.” Although the album mainly shows themes of love, songs like “Couples Therapy,” “AAAHH MEN!” “Come Back” and “Happy” showcase other aspects and struggles of love such as distrust, yearning and jealousy. “Happy” conveys the struggle of letting someone go while wishing the best for them, no matter how wrong they did you.
The French title, Vie, is incorporated throughout the album, but unlike other songs, “Happy” uses the French lyrics to give the romance language a part in a heartbreak song: “TLC, I saw, I creeped / She’s in our bed, I bought the sheets / Pour ca, non merci, j’ai vecu ma vie / Don’t fall asleep, adieu, bonne nuit.”
The touching lyrics in French essentially give the listener an insight into how Doja Cat is using the romance language to say goodbye to someone she loved.
Although Vie was less successful than her last few albums, Doja Cat proves her creativity is unmatched. Most of the songs are around or over three minutes long, challenging the growing trend of making shorter songs for social media. She proves that her vocal skills have not only improved, but complement her rapping skills as an artist, showing that she does not need features on her albums to tell a story.
Velocity 
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