Doja Cat's friendly fire with her fans is anything but and quite confusing

Being Doja Cat must be an interesting experience. She wields the power that comes with being such a popular performer but sometimes doesn't seem as if she wants to have fans. Maybe she doesn't. If that's true, she'll be happy to know she is losing quite a few recently.

Doja Cat tweeted in May that her last two albums - Planet Her and Hot Pink - were "cash grabs." While it might be refreshing for top-selling artists to critique their work with such honesty, Doja Cat appears to do many things tongue firmly in cheek. Just check out her Twitter feed. She's feisty with the people who adore her music and very sarcastic at times.

This week, Doja Cat was asked by one of her followers on Threads (the performer has since deactivated her Threads account) to declare her adoration for her fans and she responded by saying, "I don't even know y'all." While that is true, it's also extremely dismissive. Doja Cat's fans don't know her either, but still they spend their money on her tours and records and merchandise and support her life.

Doja Cat treats her fans with seeming disrespect

That's always been the catch-22 between a performer and their followers. No one really knows the other but fans feel as if they do through what the performer produces in music or art or video. That lack of true knowing is simply an understood part of the deal.

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And it can be dangerous for the artist to be held in such high esteem. Adoration can quickly turn to other forms, such as co-dependence or hate. Fandom in itself is a strange thing that normally has no known beginning, but it is an emotional connection.

But as opposed to athletes who get paid by a team or a sport to perform a role (and the team must somehow endure itself to its fans to create income, therefore the team is more directly related to the musical artist), artists rely on ticket sales and records sales to make a long-term income. Maybe Doja Cat just doesn't want to make any money. That's her choice if that's what she wants, but that seems unlikely. She should still be careful, however, because she may soon have few fans left who care enough to spend their money on her.