Cardi B's debut album struck like a bolt of lightning, its synergy riding a larger shift in the new attention economy of the 2010s. The Bronx rapper and former stripper had parlayed a stint on VH1 into increased visibility, becoming a social VIP in the process and elevating herself from TV personality who raps on the side to full-time rapper with a self-made, new-money empire. Her virality and creativity dovetailed to land her a record deal and a breakaway hit single, "Bodak Yellow," which was eventually certified diamond. In 2018, with the risk of being relegated back to Love & Hip Hop: New York cast member still looming, Invasion of Privacy solidified Cardi as not just the next great NYC rapper but a bona fide star. She won the Grammy for best rap album, she became a billion-stream Spotify success story, and suddenly the entire rap world was her oyster, its recognition a shining pearl.
By 2021, Cardi was already feeling the strain of living up to all of that. In a conversation with Mariah Carey for Interview, she bemoaned the struggles of chasing the moving goalposts for women in rap. First, she was told she couldn't make it; then she made "Bodak Yellow." Next, she was a one-hit wonder; cue "MotorSport," "I Like It" and "Please Me." After that, she was a hitmaker but a lowbrow one; that is, until Invasion of Privacy made her a critical darling and the first solo woman to earn the Recording Academy's top rap prize. Now, she had to show that the album wasn't some kind of fluke: "Last year, because I hadn't put out music for a long time, social media was saying, 'She's over. I told you she was only going to last this and that amount. She's so mediocre,' " Cardi explained. "So I used to ask some of my fans, 'You think it's really over for me?' They gave me encouragement, like, 'I don't think you really understand who you are.' I get a lot of hate on social media, so if I feel the pressure, I know my fans feel the pressure of constantly defending my ass."
The defensive posture is Cardi's default mode, from VH1 to "Bodak Yellow," and one she assumes once more for Am I the Drama?, a smirking but uneasy follow-up seven long years in the making. A lot has happened for her since Invasion of Privacy: two more multi-platinum singles ("WAP," "Up"), three children, a role in the crime drama Hustlers, a stint judging the Netflix rap competition Rhythm + Flow and a highly publicized on-again, off-again relationship with her husband Offset, from whom she is now separated. She has also, evidently, been keeping a list of grievances — with other rappers, YouTubers and even conservative pundits like Candace Owens among her growing index of inquisitors. Cardi remains a formidable rapper, capable of the same venomous taunts and disarming self-reflection that made Invasion a modern classic. And yet, Am I the Drama? may be choked by expectation, taking aim in so many directions that it only rarely hits its mark dead on.
The question in the title is obviously a rhetorical joke: Across 71 minutes, Cardi reimposes herself as a messy exhibitionist and provocateur who lives for drama, a reality TV heiress with a fierce wit and a big mouth taking her time dispatching pearl-clutchers, critics, brokies, haters, those slandering her good name. You can boil much of Am I the Drama? down to the hook on trumpeting standout "ErrTime": N*** lose me, you know that n**** out his mind / Tell her make a hit, she in the stu' just wastin' time / If I take your n****, I don't wanna hear no cryin' / 'Cause I ain't say shit when hoes was out here f***in' mine." All who have wronged her must line up and face the firing squad. At the top of that list is Offset, the subject of much of the album's ire; his infidelity is never far from her thoughts, and there is the sense that he is the only one to ever best her. His foil — Cardi's new beau, NFL wideout Stefon Diggs — is presented as her do-over. If success really is the best revenge, she already has the upper hand.
A cross-regional trap is at the core of the Am I the Drama? sound. In its performance of the Big Apple hip-hop hustler, the album channels various eras of drill in New York, from Bobby Shmurda to guest Cash Cobain, while also imitating suave Hov jiggy rap and tri-state merengue. There are nods to the South, particularly Atlanta — the triumphant trap of Young Jeezy, Shawty Lo drawl — which could be read as digs at or influences from her former partner, along with Triggerman bounce and icy, swooning Janet Jackson quiet storm and dance-pop. She flits back and forth between aggrieved life partner and woman scorned getting her lick back, the production oscillating with her mood. Cardi knows how to deftly negotiate the soreness of an open wound under the watchful eyes of her public, nowhere more so than on the Summer Walker-assisted "Shower Tears," which finds the rapper reminiscing about spinning her wheels, refusing to yield. "I let my guard down, I let you in / You playin' games with my heart, I'm not gon' let you win," she raps. There is enough of that sensitivity and resolve to sustain the inherent face-the-music-ness of the album's primary emotional conflict, even for someone not invested in its real-world inspiration — and yet these songs are mostly powered by a broader, more indiscriminate spite and belief in the karmic boomerang.
Sometimes, Cardi is the boomerang, ready to deliver cosmic retribution. In that respect, she is a master of blunt force: Her methods may be a bit crude, but so much of her charm is in that very lack of discretion and the resoundingness of her lunging delivery, still second to none at wielding syllables like a crackling whip. Now, years into her incumbency, she is even more certain of her hegemony, that it is a reward for all she's done right and a punishment for all who have provoked or scandalized her. This record definitely won't sway anyone who isn't already a believer of Cardi's prosperity gospel, but it is undeniable that she was never simply a flash in the pan. On songs like "Magnet" and "Trophies" she reasserts her dominance, snapping at all who dare to venture into her orbit uncredentialed, even stealing rivals' men for fun. When locked in, as she often is, songs are buttressed by her sheer charisma. But far too often, Cardi feels constrained by her own success.
Perhaps there's always some kind of curse hanging over the rap throne, given how Cardi has inherited Nicki Minaj's obsession with hitmaking as an identity more than a practice. "Y'all n****s ain't doin' the numbers that my last s*** did," she raps on "Check Please." Her tallied streams make up the supposedly comfortable perch from which she dismisses her challengers. Many are faceless, some require inside-baseball knowledge of her many squabbles, and one she checks by name — Boston rapper BIA, on the diss song "Pretty and Petty." That track, in singling out its target, is the most effective of her tongue-lashings, turning a long-harbored grudge into a penetrating read. But pinpointing the crux of her polemic reveals the shallowness of her position: "It's been two years since you put a number on the board," she cracks. It isn't that BIA is bad at rapping, though Cardi does call her flow sleepy; it's that she has no motion. That's a far cry from where Cardi was in 2018, when she was smoother and more skilled than her adversaries, and immune to any attempt to get under her skin. Where Invasion of Privacy was unfadable, her pretension here betrays the truth: The pressure is all on her, she stands guarded in an effort to maintain her primacy, and, as an exercise, this album was made out of obligation to that cause as much as any other. It's one thing to play frontrunner, as many rappers do, but another entirely to play a rap actuary, to put greater emphasis on the scoreboard-watching and risk-assessing than the competing. By that metric, flopping commercially is a greater sin than producing a dud artistically.
That logic might be forgivable if Cardi weren't letting it dictate so much of her creative process. "My flop and your flop is not the same / If you did my numbers, y'all would pop champagne / If I did your numbers, I would hop out a plane," she raps, adding, "Suicide if I fall from the distance 'tween you and I." That kind of thinking clearly plagued the creation of this long-gestating album, which feels like the product of as many focus groups as therapy sessions. Not only is it overlong and bizarrely sequenced, but several songs feel like part of a box-checking effort for some consultant trying to meet various layers of demand, and settling on the add-to-playlist feature as a choose-your-own-adventure model: the sophomore afterglow (there are many callbacks to Invasion), hometown homage, pop-rap chart-bait and Shade Room-level gossipmongering, all while trying to live up to that Grammy win and also meet sales projections. (She admitted, half-joking, to breathing a sigh of relief when Taylor Swift revealed she wouldn't be dropping until October.) That latter requirement, being blatantly the most important, is also the only explanation for "Up" and "WAP," chart-toppers from COVID hibernation that sound like nothing else here, being tacked on — as a kind of flop insurance. (To wit: The album was certified platinum by the RIAA upon release because of the pre-logged streams of those singles.) To be fair, Cardi's accolades are many, impressive and worth flexing, and some of her most gut-busting and severe punches lean into that sense of status. Yet unlike her debut, this is less an instance of a confident artist emphatically meeting the moment than a wary one capitulating to the directives of image maintenance.
There haven't been many blockbuster rap albums in 2025 — in 2018, nine moved more than 200,000 units first week, with five doing at least 400,000; this year, only three albums have done the former, and none the latter. Cardi, by virtue of her prolonged delay, is the rare blockbuster rap star trying to adjust to an even more competitive attention economy than the one she entered into. (First-week sales numbers are down overall, pointing to a more diffusive streaming consumption.) In the space between Invasion of Privacy and Am I the Drama?, I hear Cardi reworking her approach to play the game — more songs, more algorithmically focused. Only problem is, it's starting to feel like even that way of doing things is already obsolete. Last year, Kendrick Lamar took a sledgehammer to the Drake economy, which was propping up not just a mainstream sound but a way of being, and a vacuum has clearly been left in its wake. Who knows what will fill it, but it's hard not to see the formula coursing through this album running counter to Dot's mandate: "Not Like Us" was notably left off GNX, and that LP had a steadfastness of vision that this one lacks. It appears Cardi's drama-focused strategy is going to pay dividends in the short term, easing the tension of supplying a bankable follow-up — and maybe there was no way to cram seven years worth of ideas into one record without some disjointedness anyway. Maybe, one could argue, that disorder actually mirrors the life she has led during that time. In either case, with it out of the way, perhaps Cardi B, free of a win-at-all-costs mentality, should finally set those burdens aside and concentrate her attention on something other than attention.
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