When Doja Cat came to TD Garden Saturday night, she brought with her a standard assortment of pop-star accessories: backup dancers, flame jets, a cheek-revealing singlet enhanced with fake abs, trapdoors and hydraulic risers, a large turntable built into the stage, a giant mechanical spider dangling over her, and a large eye costume attached by optic nerve to the rafters. (Those last two are maybe slightly less standard.) None of it mattered. In a simultaneously tight and expansive 95-minute set, she proved that the only stage business that Doja Cat needed was Doja Cat.
Not that all that production value got in her way. With the concert split into five discrete acts and a recurring character emerging from among the dancers — a feral girl covered in blood and staring down Doja Cat with menace in her body language until a rapprochement was reached by the end — there was probably the bones of some narrative or other playing out. But it never overpowered the performance. Time and again the stage would reset; dancers came and went, ultimately leaving the focus on Doja Cat and Doja Cat alone.
Much of that had to do with how she projected not just confidence but strength. She spat out a torrent of syllables while hunched over and glaring during “Get Into It (Yuh),” delivered straight defiant dismissal in “[Expletive] the Girls (FTG)” and rapped “Can’t Wait” lying on her side as if oblivious to dancers dressed like the Wild Boys crawling along the length of her body.
It also came through in moments of apparent tenderness that she was able to create even when the lyrics didn’t quite bear it out (as with the affecting “Bennie and the Jets”-style clomp of “Ain’t [Expletive]” and the slow jam of “Agora Hills,” where “Baby, lemme lick on your tattoos” was one of the more printable lyrics) or the visuals seemed to conflict (see: a video screen full of flames, a hacking scythe, and skulls accompanying the love-drunk disco of “Kiss Me More”). And she remained connected enough to the audience to beam at their reaction at the end of the liquid neo-soul of “Often.”
Mostly, Doja Cat understood how to calibrate her performance to not only overwhelm but pull back as necessary. It was a dynamic that played out in miniature in “Balut,” which was heavy, slow, and spare enough that taking things up or down a notch made clear impacts on the song. Doja Cat was in control the whole time.
Coming out to a bumping, booming clatter in a “DON’T HATE ME IT TURNS ME ON” T-shirt, fellow rapper Ice Spice’s opening set was all about asserting dominance, but her undeniable confidence was a lazy one, bold enough to hold the stage but without the imagination to know what to do with it outside of an arsenal that seemed limited to bouncing, twerking, bending over, and feeling herself up.
DOJA CAT
With Ice Spice. At TD Garden, Dec. 2
Marc Hirsh can be reached at officialmarc@gmail.com or on Bluesky @spacecitymarc.bsky.social.
