The 2020s File Feature
Paint The Town Red
Paint The Town Red — Doja Cat Claims Her Number OneConsider the specific atmosphere of the internet in August 2023: Doja Cat had spent the preceding months i…
01 The Story
Paint The Town Red — Doja Cat Claims Her Number One
Consider the specific atmosphere of the internet in August 2023: Doja Cat had spent the preceding months in a very public act of self-reinvention, publicly distancing herself from the pop-friendly persona she had spent years cultivating and seemingly daring her fanbase to follow her into darker, more confrontational territory. The discourse was loud and genuinely uncertain. And then came Paint The Town Red, which landed like a verdict.
The Reinvention Before the Track
By mid-2023, Doja Cat had announced the end of her previous artistic phase with something close to theatrical hostility, declaring on social media that she was shedding the expectations of her pop audience. The move was bold and the reception was mixed. Industry observers were uncertain whether she was engineering a genuine artistic pivot or conducting an extended performance. Paint The Town Red answered those questions by not bothering to answer them at all: the song simply arrived and asserted itself through quality and audacity.
Sound, Structure, and That Sample
The track builds on a sample of Diablo's Scarface (Push It to the Limit), which gave it an instantly cinematic quality. The production pairs that dramatic source material with Doja Cat's most assured rap delivery, moving between menace and playfulness in the way her best work always has. The verses are dense and precise; the chorus opens up into something almost anthemic. The arrangement is constructed to reward the kind of close listening that her rap fans demanded while remaining accessible enough to dominate streaming.
Chart History: From Fifteen to One
The song's Hot 100 trajectory was a study in momentum. It debuted at number 15 on August 19, 2023, held that position for a second week, then began accelerating: number 5 on September 2, number 3 on September 9, and then number one on September 16, 2023. That climb over just five weeks from debut to peak was clean and decisive. The song went on to spend 37 weeks total on the Hot 100, a run that stretched well into 2024 and demonstrated genuine replay value far beyond its initial cultural moment. Over 363 million YouTube views accumulated in its wake.
The Defiant Statement
There is a thematic coherence between the song's content and the moment it appeared in. The lyrics deal in power, in self-possession, in the pleasures of spending and feeling and doing exactly as one pleases without apology. Coming out of a period in which Doja Cat had publicly rejected the idea of catering to audience expectations, the song functioned as a sonic proof of concept. An artist who was supposedly burning her goodwill instead delivered one of the year's biggest hits, which is a kind of irony the track seems entirely aware of.
Legacy: The Pivot That Worked
Pop music is full of artists who announced reinventions and delivered commercial disappointments. Doja Cat's 2023 pivot produced the opposite result. Paint The Town Red validated the gamble not just commercially but creatively: critics recognized it as one of her most fully realized performances, a song where her technical skill as a rapper and her instinct for hooks operated at the same level simultaneously. For an artist whose early mainstream success came partly through viral novelty, the track represented a consolidation into something more durable, a claim to longevity built on craft rather than circumstance. The 37-week Hot 100 run was not the product of a single burst of attention; it reflected a song that held up under repetition, that revealed something on the fourth listen that the first had not fully disclosed. In an era when most chart hits exhaust themselves within weeks, that kind of staying power is its own form of artistic argument.
Start from the first second and let the energy of that number one do what it does: the confidence in her voice has not aged a day.
“Paint The Town Red” — Doja Cat's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Paint The Town Red — Power, Pleasure, and the Artist in Control
The title is an idiom that has meant reckless, extravagant enjoyment since the nineteenth century, and Paint The Town Red uses that meaning as a launching point for something more personal and more confrontational. Doja Cat arrives on this track with a very specific argument to make about who she is and what she owes anyone, and she makes it in vivid, unapologetic terms.
The Central Theme: Self-Determination
The lyrics establish a speaker who is done negotiating her image with an audience she considers ungrateful. She catalogs her successes and her pleasures with deliberate excess, spending freely, celebrating loudly, rejecting the idea that ambition or enjoyment requires justification. The song positions self-determination as both a personal value and a response to external pressure, the pleasure doubled by the fact that someone told you not to have it.
The Devil Reference and Its Meaning
The song references the devil with a sly familiarity that recurs in a tradition of pop and rap songs where Satan represents freedom from moral policing rather than genuine evil. In this context, the speaker aligns herself with the figure who refuses to conform, who was cast out for the sin of having an independent will. That framing is less theological than rhetorical: it is a way of saying that the people who disapprove have appointed themselves moral authorities without earning the right, and the response is laughter rather than compliance.
Power and Money as Vocabulary
Throughout the track, material wealth functions as a vocabulary for autonomy. Spending and accumulating and displaying are not presented as empty status games; they are framed as evidence of capacity and freedom. The song belongs to a lineage of hip-hop and rap that has always understood that economic power, for communities historically excluded from it, carries meaning beyond the objects it can buy. Doja Cat deploys that vocabulary fluently, grounding a broader argument about independence in the concrete language of money and luxury.
The Defiance of Expectation
One of the song's more interesting dimensions is how directly it addresses the controversy surrounding Doja Cat's public statements in the months before its release. She had effectively told portions of her fanbase that their expectations were not her concern. Paint The Town Red does not walk that back; it doubles down. The track asks listeners to admire the confidence required to take that position while simultaneously delivering something with sufficient commercial and artistic quality to make the confidence seem warranted rather than reckless. It is a difficult balance to maintain and the song maintains it.
Why It Resonated
Songs about freedom from expectation have always found large audiences because the feeling they describe is almost universal. Most people experience some version of performing themselves for the approval of others, editing their impulses and their pleasures to fit an external standard. A song that rejects that process entirely, and does it with such obvious enjoyment, offers a vicarious release that transcends the specific circumstances of its artist. Paint The Town Red reached number one because its argument felt true beyond its author's biography.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging