Watch highlights from the 2025 GRAMMYs on live.GRAMMY.com.
The 2025 GRAMMYs telecast has been reimagined to raise funds for MusiCares Fire Relief, a dedicated campaign to support the people affected by the recent wildfires in the Greater Los Angeles Area. Donate now.
Doechii knows how to command the moment. Whether she’s captivating TikTok fans with her quirky 2020 confessional “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” or making history as the third female rapper — and first artist to win Best Rap Album with a mixtape — at the 2025 GRAMMYs for Alligator Bites Never Heal, she’s an undeniable force in Hip Hop and the artist on everyone’s watch.
Born Jaylah Hickmon in Tampa, Florida, the 26-year-old rapper grew up with an affinity for the arts. Encouraged by her mother, Celesia Moore — who stood beside her on Music’s Biggest Night during her emotional acceptance speech — Doechii explored dance, gymnastics, and acting. But it was poetry and music that ultimately became her true calling. Raised in a Christian, single-parent household, she shared a deep bond with her mother over an eclectic playlist, ranging from Paramore and Outkast to Nicki Minaj. She invented her IamDoechii moniker in middle school as an alter ego to escape childhood bullying, but wouldn’t release music until high school, paving the way for her groundbreaking ascent.
In a 2022 interview with Spin Magazine, she recalled, “music was my goal. I told myself I wanted to be bigger than Beyoncè.”
Swamp Princess Rises From the Mud
While enrolled at Howard W. Blake High School, she released one of her first songs “Girls” to SoundCloud, an R&B-leaning track that transitions from a slow burn to a slaughtering beat.
Before she evolved into a genre-contorting artist, Doechii began connecting to fans, like most Gen Z artists, on the internet in the mid to late 2010s. It was around this time, the self-proclaimed Swamp Princess released “Coven Music Session, Vol. 1” and similar to her short Youtube quips, she bares her versatility on songs like “Pencil Pouch,” “Spookie Coochie” and “Body Offer.” The project oscillates between R&B, Miami bass, Boom bap, and Alternative Hip Hop, each track unveiling a different spell-binding flow.
A year later, she finally broke to mainstream acclaim with 2020’s Oh the Places You’ll Go, which housed her viral hit “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” which went on to amass over 33 million streams on Spotify. The 7-track EP opens with a poem, harkening back to her spoken word roots, before entrancing listeners with a spiraling soundscape reminiscent of the animated styles of Nicki Minaj and Doja Cat. In hindsight, the cathartic album served as a manifestation of her future and the release of her fears.
“Just before I made “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake, I was in a place where I was really afraid,” she expressed in a 2021 Rolling Stone interview. “I just felt creatively blocked, like, I just wasn’t able to produce great work.”
Inspired by Barbara Park’s adolescent Junie B. Jones book series, “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” is Doechii’s own coming-of-age tales. She boasts: “I am a Black girl who beat the statistics / f**k the opinions and all the logistics.”
The momentum from that track sparked the almost immediate release of her 2021 follow-up BRA-LESS. The 5-track EP is brazen, bold, and unabashedly Doechii. She ties Hip Hop, pop, and R&B into a perfect bow throughout the project. She warns of her impending take over on the title track, “BRA-LESS,” rapping “I’m not bigger or badder, I just won’t stop ‘till it’s ova / I don’t do it for closure / or moments to say I told ya.”
Her lyrics proved more than boastful banter when she signed a joint deal with TDE and Capitol Records in 2022, making her the first female rapper on TDE’s iconic roster.
The Birth of Doechii’s Commercial Success
That same year, Doechii released her first commercially successful track under the TDE banner, “Persuasive.” From the tracklist of her second EP she / her / black bitch, the house-tinged club track levitates under fluttering melodies. Inspired by queer Ballroom music and disco, the song became inescapable on TikTok and TDE enlisted Doechii’s labelmate SZA as a surprise feature for the equally enticing remix. “Persuasive” peaked at No. 33 on Billboard’s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart.
She pushed the envelope further with the release of her second single “Crazy.” She showcases rage and range with a frenetic, spitfire flow. Paired with a controversial music video complete with naked bodies, gun shots, and an albino alligator (a symbolism of her Gulf Coast roots), the song launched her into national conversations. She later explained in an Instagram video there was no intended storyline, but a reclamation of the term often used to discriminate against Black women.
“Crazy is about uncontained power, creativity, and confidence,” she shared with Vevo. “People call you crazy when they fear you or they don’t understand you. I’m reflecting that energy back on them to show them themselves.”
From 2022 to 2023, she released a string of collabs, including “Swamp Bitches” with alt-punk, hardrore rapper Rico Nasty, and Smino‘s “Pro Freak” featuring Fatman Scoop, before dropping “What It Is,” a R&B meets pop earworm. She teamed up with Pompano Beach, Florida rapper Kodak Black for the remix, “What It Is (Block boy).
Sampling Trillville’s southern classic “Some Cut,” Doechii pays homage to southern rap on the chorus, singing “What is is, ho? What’s up? / Every good girl needs a little hug / every block boy needs a little love.”
In a published love letter penned to the LGBTQ+ community, Doechii wrote about her experience growing up bisexual in a southern community and how her Florida upbringing and the local LGBTQ+ community inspired her sound and campy aesthetics.
“My creative work is heavily influenced by my Florida roots and the vibrant LGBTQ+ community,” she penned in the Billboard article. “Whether I’m working on choreography or undergoing a glamorous transformation, I draw inspiration from my memories of resilience and artistry of drag queens in Ybor City and the energy of ballroom culture in NYC.”
Doechii Bites Her Way To Rap Royalty
The culmination of her creative risks and inspiration was about to spill over into her most successful project to date: Alligator Bites Never Heal.
Leading up to the release of her mixtape, she teased new music with the weekly series, Swamp Sessions. Throughout the series, she employs visual and lyrical emblems of Tampa’s cultural terrain. Each track is sticky with angst and atonement.
She kicked the sessions off with “BULLFROG,” a campy threat to the naysayers and is full-fledged Florida on “FLORIDA WATA.” The kaleidoscopic freebie encourages people to choose authenticity in the midst of societal pressures: “Yeen gotta suppress the pain, just to say you up on game / Yeen gotta dig your grave, just to say that you with the gang.”
In the video for “NISSAN ALTIMA” — inspired by Kendrick Lamar‘s “Alight” music video — the Swamp Princess asserts her dominance alongside her TDE labelmates Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, and Isaiah Rashad. Meanwhile, “BOOM BAP” decimates her critics with a sharp-tongued flow: “Say it’s real and it’s rap / And it boom and it bap / And it bounce and it clap / And it’s house and it’s trap / It’s everything, I’m everything,” she declares before breaking into “tongues,” a divine language meant to confuse demonic entities.
She underscores her spirituality on the visceral “SUNDAY’S BEST,” a foreshadow into the searing therapeutic reflections on Alligator Bites Never Heal.
Across the sprawling mixtape, her sonic evolution and personal growth culminates into a brilliant collection. She sets the tone with “STANKA POOH,” a frenetic track engulfed in moody organs that’s named after a colloquialism for a favorite grandchild. Tracks like “BOILED PEANUTS,” “CATFISH,” and “DEATH ROLL” take listeners on a sonic journey through the humid, sometimes haunting universe she unfurls on the project.
On “DENIAL IS A RIVER,” she details her post-breakup depression and struggles with substance abuse in the narrative style of Hip Hop legends like Slick Rick peppered with breathing exercises reminiscent of Doug E. Fresh. An amalgamation of her southern roots and rap predecessors, she ties the past into the present, rapping: “What can I say?, the shit works, it feels good / And my self-worth’s at an all time low / And just when it couldn’t get worse / My ex crashed my place and destroyed all I owned.” The breakout single eventually notched her first solo slot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
She captures the energy of late-night Florida rendezvous on “SLIDE,” and on “WAIT,” she prophesies her future over a dreamy soundscape. “And I’m not talkin’ a family, but I’s been dreamin’ of fishes / Since I been watching the GRAMMYs / And I’m here to stay like the s*** in your panties / I need some standing ovations since y’all can’t seem to understand me.”
While promoting the release of her GRAMMY-winning project, she wrote in an Instagram post, “This mixtape embodies my resurgence, my reclaiming of power. It’s a testament to my unyielding spirit and limitless creativity. In my research about alligator attacks, I found that a common thread in each survivor was that the main reason they survived is BECAUSE they fought back. This mixtape is my fight back. I am nobody’s prey; I was born to be the predator.”
Rooted in her eclectic Florida upbringing and Hip Hop lineage, Alligator Bites Never Heal is an undeniable testament to Doechii’s limitless creative expression.
In a backstage interview with the Recording Academy, she reflected on her ascension from a local underground starlet to a global rap phenom, sharing, “I really started this from the bottom. We started on Youtube. I’m from Tampa, Florida. I started writing music on my bedroom floor and it kinda grew from there.”
From the Swamp to GRAMMY’s Spotlight
As the second category presented during the telecast, the 2025 GRAMMYs kicked off with Doechii breaking barriers with her win for one of the night’s top honors. Presented by Cardi B, the second woman to win Best Rap Album at the 2019 GRAMMYs, Doechii accepted the symbolic mantle, sharing through tears “there’s so many people out there who probably don’t know who I am. I call myself the Swamp Princess because I’m from Tampa, Florida! There’s so much culture in Tampa. Whenever people think about Florida, they only think about Miami, but Tampa has so much talent. Labels, go to Tampa, there’s talent there!”
She closed out her speech with a powerful encouragement to eclectic Black girls who may not fit into societal boxes: “I know that there is some Black girl out there, so many Black women out there who are watching me right now and I want to tell you you can do it. Anything is possible… Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes on you that tell you you can’t be here or you’re too dark… or you’re too loud… you’re exactly who you need to be…and I am a testimony.”
Loading…
After making history as the third woman ever to win for Best Rap Album since its inception in 1989, she lit up the GRAMMY’s stage with a tantalizing montage of “CATFISH” and “DENIAL IS A RIVER.” Accompanied by her longtime collaborator, DJ Miss Milan, she appeared in coordinated Thom Browne uniforms and beaded braids with her dancers (a stylistic theme throughout her Alligator Bites Never Heals tour) before stripping down into a matching bra and jock-strap set for a jazzy rendition of “DENIAL IS A RIVER.” The synchronous performance was praised as the best performance of the night.
Loading…
She celebrated the evening and her win with a surprise drop of the celebratory “Nosebleeds.” A genre-breaking artist tied to her swampy Everglades roots, her sonic journey is as vast as it is encompassing. Similar to her melting pot roots, she’ll never be defined by labels or genres. Her groundbreaking win marks the start of one of the most exciting ascensions in Hip Hop.
Rooted in the swampy depths of the Everglades, her sound is as expansive as her influences — blurring the lines between genres with effortless originality. Just like her melting-pot background, she refuses to be confined by labels. With this historic win, she solidifies her place as one of the most exciting forces shaping the future of Hip Hop.
More 2025 GRAMMYs News
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content
