In the beginning was her wit. Before she became an object of curiosity to one stratum of America and a harbinger of certain moral calamity to another, Cardi B was just a regular girl from the Bronx whose ambitions of future success did not hinge on a career in rap. In fact, they didn’t include music at all. It was a manager, from whom she subsequently split and later defeated in a breach of contract suit, who had the vision. When he overheard Cardi artfully cuss a boyfriend over the phone, it signaled there might be more lucrative ways for the college student turned stripper turned social media star to use her words. Within two years, Cardi got to No. 1 with “Bodak Yellow.” Within three, she had released her debut, Invasion of Privacy, the album that would earn her a Grammy. It may have been someone else who originated her rap dreams, but it was Cardi who actualized them.
Seven years later, there are glimpses of what that manager must have peeped: Cardi’s righteous fury unleashes her brilliance. AM I THE DRAMA? has a mission, or at least a theme: revenge. Her knack for holding a grudge has already been twice immortalized. But on the album cover, Cardi uses a visual motif to underscore the message: recast from hood princess to Disneyesque villain, she poses with a pair of crows; a murder hovers in the background. Crows, like elephants and tigers, have long-term memories and the ability to recognize human faces. They, too, will beef a bitch forever. (Incidentally, in one research study, crows’ vengeful caws were at their most aggressive precisely seven years in.) Across 23 songs, she exacts several years’ worth of whackings, breaking only to grieve, flex, or flirt.
Cardi’s isn’t the first voice on AM I THE DRAMA?; nor is it the second or the third. “Dead” opens with a flash-forward to a scene presumably fantasizing about the album’s aftermath: news clips describe a killing spree targeting “bloggers and journalists” and “several female rappers,” and warn that the suspect, one Cardi B, is at large. Summer Walker, in the first of two guest appearances, narrates criminal intent: “I know they heard a bitch was coming and they scared/I wanna pull the lace fronts off they heads/I want all these bitches dead.” When the fearsome accused finally surfaces, she antagonizes and laments, before concluding, “I tried to come in peace, they tore me into pieces/Now I gotta R-I-P it.” Not for the last time, Cardi’s delivery rescues her from the cliche.
AM I THE DRAMA? acknowledges the stylistic transformation of New York rap, with production largely in the hands of Sean Island and DJ SwanQo. But Cardi maintains a respectful distance from the prevailing trends. Instead, she plays with bursts of experimentation, adopting new flows without sacrificing legibility. “Pretty & Petty” does double duty: The hook is readymade for ubiquity as a TikTok trend while the verses constitute one of the most punishing diss tracks of the year. She practically prances over the beat, a grittier, New York-ified take on the cadences and melodies associated with Mustard’s L.A.
In the vein of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the apparent glee with which Cardi crushes Boston rapper Bia, four years into an escalating beef, magnifies the effect: “Name five Bia songs, gun pointin’ to your head/Baow, I’m dead/That melatonin flow puttin’ us to bed/I’m doing you a favor, Epic, run me my bread.” As if to prove her point, the song’s release coincides with steep exponential growth of Google searches for Bia. Devastating. The album is at its most enjoyable when Cardi is in this prickly mode: “Hello,” “Magnet,” the 2 Chainz-written “Salute.” The bilingual, Dyckman-ready “Bodega Baddie,” a turbo-charged merengue bop, makes a promise akin to Rihanna’s mythical reggae album; at under two minutes, it’s a brief glimpse at a worthwhile style for Cardi to linger on.
It’s been a long seven years. Exercises in catharsis abound in the form of heartbreak songs, recorded in the shadow of divorce. With few exceptions, these are grating rap ballads on which even the specifics of a toxic relationship feel generic. The default formula of a sung chorus registers as vacant, even when entrusted with the capable Summer Walker, Lizzo, and Kehlani. Cardi joins many of her streaming-era peers in shunning the self-editing that made Invasion of Privacy, at 13 songs, effective. That work, when offloaded to the listener under the guise of generosity, lands instead as risk aversion.
In certain realms of pop, the songwriting process has become a compacted, impenetrable underbrush, with observers desperate to gather more meaning from a list of song credits than is actually possible. Cardi’s lablelmate, Pardison Fontaine, remains a stubborn yet compatible presence and, with writing credits on 19 of 23 songs, her most consistent collaborator. For fans, this makes him a trustworthy creative partner; for skeptics, it damns Cardi as a talentless hack and Pardi her sub rosa crutch.
But, as she has herself articulated, Cardi’s musical talent has not historically been that of an effortless generator of songs; what she has mastered, as a rapper and elsewhere, is locating an idea, seizing it, and transmuting it into something her own: a style of rap that is both outrageous and easily digestible, designed to travel well from the strip club to the Super Bowl. Always walking the line between edgy and accessible, Cardi summons the breakthrough of early aughts rap more than she does her contemporaries; this is the stuff of high-end recording studios, not improvised bedroom setups.
An ingenious cultural interpreter of sorts, Cardi transported the exclamatory trill “okurrr” from its drag origins to the late-night talk show circuit so effectively, and without any apparent sacrifice of authenticity, that it is often falsely attributed to her. “Am I the drama?” too, has its origins in drag. It was Scarlet Envy, as a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, who first wondered, cheekily, about her culpability. But, as an album, AM I THE DRAMA? seems to signal that, for Cardi, the question functions better as a rhetorical one: It doesn’t really matter whether she’s the drama; even if she didn’t start it, Cardi will be the one to end it.
