Iamdoechii’s “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” is named for an entry in the Junie B. Jones series of children’s books first published in 1992. The titular kindergartener was odd and disruptive, which resonated with Iamdoechii — Doechii for short, Jaylah Hickmon for long — as she reflected on her own childhood. On “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” Doechii’s nostalgic raps tell her origin story. As a young girl, she was bold (“In my black Taylor Chucks, the ones that laced up to my thighs/Lisa Frank lipstick on my eyes”), rambunctious (“I get a little violent when I play the game of tag”), sexual (“My thumb is over the screen/the other is in my jeans”), and broke (“My momma used stamps ’cause she need a little help”). The song toggles from a buzzy modern beat to a classic boom-bap one, highlighting the versatility she’s shown across her brief discography.
“Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” was released last September, two months ahead of her project Oh The Places You’ll Go, an autobiographical melange of pop, dance, and hip-hop. Last month, just as “Yucky Blucky” began to gain real traction, she dropped BRA-LESS, a five-song EP. Still, “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” is by far Doechii’s most popular track. It earned her a spot on Rolling Stone’s Breakthrough 25 chart in April. With the hashtag “yuckybluckyfruitcake” deployed over three million times on TikTok, people use the song to soundtrack dramatic physical transformations. The track has been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify alone, after being added to over 70 of the platform’s editorial playlists including its flagship hip-hop series, RapCaviar. She’s currently the cover of Feelin’ Myself, a popular Spotify playlist of women in hip-hop, earning the fourth spot after Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, and Saweetie.
“I had submitted so many times to Spotify to get playlisted,” Doechii says from a sunny patio in Norwalk, Los Angeles County. Tiny gems fixed to her teeth peek through her lips when she smiles. When she finally made it to Spotify’s Internet People playlist in March, she felt more motivation than celebration. “I was like, ‘Okay, how do we get more? Let’s get merch! What’s the next step?’” The vast majority of the streams “Yucky Blucky” has earned so far rolled in over the past month. Doechii started the independent-artist grind from Tampa, Florida in 2016.
Carl Chery, Spotify’s Creative Director and Head of Urban Music, championed Doechii to his peers the moment he encountered her music on social media. “I think because of the volume of music that we have to deal with, sometimes the job can feel like a little bit of a chore,” says Chery. “When [I] hear something like ‘Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,’ it just energizes me. I get excited about the possibility. I get excited about being able to watch someone go from zero to 60.” Chery and his team added “Yucky Blucky” to Internet People the same day they heard it.
Earning a playlist placement as a new artist doesn’t often translate to the rapid success Doechii is experiencing. “I don’t know if I’ve seen eight million [streams] in a month from an emerging artist,” says Chery, comparing her trajectory on Spotify to that of DaBaby and Roddy Ricch. Doechii’s brash confessions chronicling her development as a weird black girl have propelled her forward, and she’s working to keep up the momentum. “I understand that this success is really cool, but it’s one song,” she says. “What I’ve been trying to master now is making really intimate, honest music, but also resonating on a global level. I’m really focused on writing hits.”
Get to know Doechii and her breakout hit below.
What inspired “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake?”
You want the long answer or the short answer?
Long answer.
I had a turning point in my music. Just before I made “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake,” I was in a place where I was really afraid. I just felt creatively blocked, like, I just wasn’t able to produce great work. I invested in a creative recovery in New York. I read this book called The Artist’s Way. It really inspired me to get extremely honest in my music. I was never very personal. I made songs that I thought other people would enjoy and I avoided talking about myself or my experiences growing up because I didn’t really think it mattered. I didn’t think anybody would really care or relate, but after reading that book, I just felt extremely inspired to be really, really honest in my music. That’s kind of become the whole core of my artistry. I have a belief that I am a mirror to people. I want to be able to be brave enough and trust God enough to say what it is that most people are afraid to say.
How do you feel about the song blowing up?
It’s really cool. Um, it’s just really cool. I don’t feel hella like, “Oh my god, like, I’m jumping out of my fucking skin!” But I’m also not, like, mad about anything. I’m just very focused on keeping it going. I’m taking it in, but I’m ready to go. I’ve already started thinking about my second album and albums to come.
How have you built a fan base?
I started off on YouTube. I love interacting on the internet. I’m really young. I’m a digital age baby. I just turned 22. I’ve been on the internet since I was in seventh grade. I’ve been on YouTube for years, and I’ve built a fan base there. My content on YouTube was just vlogs and me being me. I would tell exaggerated, outrageous stories, like how I broke my arm or the time I almost got kidnapped — hella dramatized real life stories. Most of my fan base comes from YouTube and they just follow my journey. They are the reason why this happened.
What’s your perspective on some of the important milestones you’ve hit with “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake?”
I really want to highlight this TikToker. They’re non-binary. Their name is @theesudani. They’re the starter for the sound for “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” [on TikTok]. Sudani is like always going up for me and my music on their social media. I would say that what really triggered “Yucky Blucky” going crazy was how hard Sudani and their fans went for me, including my fans, the Coven. My OG fans really ride hard for me.
It’s been really cool to see how the world is interacting with the song. I didn’t predict that there would be people showing their weight transformations, or trans women and trans men showing their transitions, people showing their glow-ups. It’s really interesting to see that and it just makes me feel really good that that’s how it resonates with people.
NEWS
Hip-hop producer Metro Boomin told jurors at his civil rape case on Wednesday that he had two consensual encounters with his accuser in 2016, always wore a condom, and couldn’t wait for his trial to start so he could testify and give his side.
“Were you wrongly accused?” his lawyer, Lawrence Hinkle, asked inside a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.
“Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about this day for a year,” the producer, whose legal name is Leland T. Wayne, told the jury. The influential producer, songwriter, and DJ said he found it “preposterous” that plaintiff Vanessa LeMaistre had accused him of raping her in a hotel without a condom in 2016 after handing her a drink that allegedly caused her to “black out.”
“I really don’t know where to start. This is crazy. I can’t even believe I’m up here doing this right now,” he said. “For her to accuse me of something like this, it’s something I could never fathom. I can’t even say what I think should happen to people who rape people.” Wayne testified that he lost his mother to domestic abuse and believes sexual abusers “should be tortured and killed.”
Asked point-blank if he ever sexually assaulted LeMaistre, he said, “Absolutely not.” Asked again minutes later, he said, “No way in the world.”
Wayne, 32, took the witness stand as his friend and fellow Atlanta-based artist Young Thug watched in the courtroom gallery. “I’m just here to support him,” Young Thug told Rolling Stone as he walked into the courthouse during the lunch break. “He’s a longtime friend.”
Earlier on Wednesday, LeMaistre finished her own testimony in the case, telling jurors she was still reeling from the recent loss of her newborn son in 2016 when she visited Wayne at a Los Angeles recording studio after ingesting half of a Xanax. She said Wayne handed her a shot that she sipped shortly before she passed out. LeMaistre said she later found herself drifting in and out of consciousness in a hotel room with Wayne on top of her, penetrating her vaginally and then performing oral sex on her. When she finally woke up completely hours later, Wayne allegedly ushered her out of a side door and pointed her to a car that returned her to the studio to retrieve her car, she testified.
“I was confused,” she told jurors of her immediate reaction. She said she didn’t go to the police right away or confront Wayne because she was still processing what happened. “It was very foggy for me waking up the next day,” she explained.
LeMaistre, who was 30 when she first met a 22-year-old Wayne in Las Vegas earlier that year, testified that she spoke about the alleged assault with a mental health professional she was seeing at a treatment center called Prototypes in the fall of 2016. She later discussed it with professionals again when she called a pair of rape hotlines in 2024, she said.
“Having lost my son, and the defendant assaulting me, have been the two, by far, worst things I’ve ever experienced in my life. It has been excruciatingly painful,” LeMaistre said on the witness stand. “This stole the past nine years of my life. I haven’t been able to have any healthy relationships. I want to get married one day.”
During a fierce cross-examination by Wayne’s other lawyer, Justin H. Sanders, LeMaistre defended a series of handwritten notes she wrote that were turned over to the defense in discovery. In journal entries dated June 14, 2017, LeMaistre used two different pen colors as she authored what appeared to be a conversation with someone named “Chrisie.” “All of it was me just self-soothing,” she testified.
“When should I hit back Metro?” she wrote in the journal. “Will I sleep with him again?” Then switching to Chrisie’s voice, she wrote, “Yes, and it will be beautiful, great, amazing.” Asked what she meant by “again,” LeMaistre said “technically” she already had slept with Wayne, but “the conditions were rape.”
Sanders then turned to notes LeMaistre wrote during a 2024 trip to Peru, where she engaged in an extended “Ayahuasca ceremony,” a spiritual ritual involving the ingestion of a psychoactive plant used by indigenous cultures in the Amazon. In the notes titled “Plan Ayahuasca Gave Me,” LeMaistre wrote that she intended to “blow the whistle on Metro Boomin.” She also wrote that she planned to contact the law firm that singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura used to sue music mogul Sean Combs, and further planned to publish her “date rape” allegations in a post on social media. “We’re asking for 3.4 million to 3.7 million,” she wrote in her sometimes admittedly illegible handwriting.
“That was the number given to me,” Le Maistre testified about the amounts. Asked if she meant that the numbers were “given” to her during the Ayahuasca ceremony, she said, “Correct.”
With eight jurors listening intently, LeMaistre said that when she first heard the Wayne-produced song “Rap Saved Me” in 2017, she believed the lyrics were about her. In the chorus, artists 21 Savage and Offset rap, “She took a Xanny, then she fainted. I’m from the gutter, ain’t no changing. From the gutter, rap saved me. She drive me crazy, have my baby.”
LeMaistre also testified that she found out she was pregnant after visiting a Planned Parenthood in late 2016. As Sanders walked her through her medical records from Planned Parenthood, he showed jurors forms listed her last menstrual cycle had been on Oct. 1, 2016, and her “most recent unprotected sexual intercourse” as having been on Oct. 13, 2016. She denied experiencing any instances of “coercion” or intimate partner violence, the medical records said. Another record dated Nov. 7, 2016, said the gestational age of the fetus was five weeks and two days. LeMaistre, who had a non-surgical abortion to end the pregnancy, later contacted Planned Parenthood on Feb. 10, 2025, asking to amend the reported dates in her records and remove her “denial of coercion.”
“You knew when you tried to change those records that it was the only way you could make your story stick,” Sanders challenged LeMaistre. “You had to change the dates of the last unprotected sex, correct?” Sanders asked. LeMaistre denied the allegation. Sanders appeared to be suggesting that LeMaistre wanted to link her pregnancy to Wayne because it would support her claims that Wayne had unprotected sex with her and a reason to allegedly pen the lyrics “have my baby.”
In his own testimony, Wayne said he “never” has sex without a condom because he’s not ready to be a father. “Even at that time, my high school sweetheart and I were still using condoms. There was no way this girl I just met in Las Vegas, that I had unprotected sex with her,” he testified.
Asked if there was any truth to the allegation he personally authored or even “suggested” the cited lyrics in “Rap Saved Me,” Wayne replied, “None whatsoever. I just made the beat.”
While LeMaistre was the sole witness for her entire case, Wayne called a clinical psychologist to the stand to testify about her assessment of the plaintiff. Dr. April Thames, chief psychologist at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, told jurors that she reviewed LeMaistre’s medical records and conducted her own 90-minute to two-hour exam with the plaintiff. She said she personally diagnosed LeMaistre with “borderline personality disorder with psychotic features.” Under cross-examination, she admitted that LeMaistre had not formally received that diagnosis before, though she previously had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
Both sides rested their cases on Wednesday afternoon. Closing arguments are set for Thursday.
