Several weeks before the rollout of her latest album, Am I the Drama?, Cardi B posed victoriously in front of a courthouse in Los Angeles. She’d been on trial for four days as the defendant in a $24 million civil lawsuit from a security guard who said that the rapper scratched and spat on her in an altercation outside of a doctor’s office in February 2018. “I did not touch that woman,” Cardi maintained; a jury ultimately ruled in the rapper’s favor. Throughout the trial, Cardi was very apparently determined to make the most of this irksome situation; to treat the proceedings as a sort of fashion week with a variety of bold courtroom looks; to speak oh so candidly both on the stand and on the steps; to reassert herself, in style. So, in the end, Cardi B stood before a bevy of microphones, wearing a $10,000 polka-dot suit by Valentino, and delivered some impassioned remarks about nuisance lawsuits against wealthy celebrities: “The next person to try to do a frivolous lawsuit against me, I’m going to countersue! ... I work hard for my money.”
The lawsuit might have been frivolous, but it wasn’t entirely random. Cardi’s brawled in a strip club in the past; she pleaded guilty to assault and reckless endangerment in a criminal case a few years ago in New York City. There’s a hardscrabble ferociousness that’s in fact central to the persona Cardi B has cultivated. So the lawsuit in L.A. always seemed to hinge on the fact that it is very easy to imagine Cardi clawing a security guard to the point that it left a scar. “I know I got a little reputation,” she joked at that press conference in front of the courthouse. “But I swear to God I’m innocent.” She did, however, very clearly throw a marker at an unidentified man outside the courthouse who shouted a question about her ex-husband: “Stop disrespecting me!”
It’s been eight years, a veritable eternity, since Cardi B released her viral breakout single, “Bodak Yellow,” followed by her debut album, Invasion of Privacy, with its still more massive megahit, “I Like It,” featuring Bad Bunny and J Balvin. She speedran the rags-to-riches plot: She was a stripper at age 19, then a cheeky instigator on Love & Hip-Hop, and then—now—a rap superstar who has long exceeded her once supposed 15 minutes of fame. She was a striking figure in her new echelon. Those tattoos! Those nails! The wigs! And that indelible accent of hers, with all its conversational ad-libs: aah-aah-aah! Jennifer Lopez, also a daughter of the Bronx, once sang so daintily about “still”—despite her platinum plaques and her move to Hollywood—being “Jenny from the block.” Cardi B, born Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar, never left, as far as I can tell, at least not in spirit. She’s as self-evidently rugged as can be, but with a certain elegance, as she’s in recent years become a creature of the award show after-parties, the Met Gala, and, indeed, Paris Fashion Week.
She’s also become a creature of the tabloids. She eloped with Migos rapper Offset, had three kids with him, and went through a nasty divorce; she’s now expecting a fourth child with her current boyfriend, New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs. She never totally left the realm of reality TV.
She’s hardly wasted the seven years since Invasion of Privacy. She filled the interim with big features and stray megahits: “Girls Like You” with Maroon 5, “Finesse” and “Please Me” with Bruno Mars, “WAP” with Megan Thee Stallion, and “Up.” She made herself at home on the Hot 100, even as she seemed to develop some resentment toward fans’ pleas for a second album.
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The last single (and music video) she released before the album launch was last month’s “Imaginary Playerz,” covering the late-’90s New York rap classic by Jay-Z but also, more broadly, paying homage to Foxy Brown and the Hitmen and the golden age of the nouveau riche mafioso noir. Here and now, with Am I the Drama?, Cardi B has essentially made a Rick Ross album—a big, slick, and booming absurdity, a height of zany arrogance. Cardi B has laced Am I the Drama? with a dozen disses, mostly directed at other female rappers: Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, BIA, and JT of City Girls, among others. These disses are at times shockingly direct. Hip-hop is a contact sport, or so the saying goes, but so much hip-hop conflict these days—Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” notwithstanding—transpires at the subliminal level; Cardi B seemingly has little to no use for plausible deniability. “Pretty & Petty” is especially hilarious in its immediacy: Name five BIA songs, gun pointin’ to your head!
(All that said, Cardi does also address Offset at length on “Man of Your Word,” a maudlin sort of rap ballad about the breakdown of their marriage. The song isn’t exactly a diss, nor is it good or otherwise interesting enough for me to drop the parentheses here.)
The disses are evident. The hits are a little less obvious. “WAP” is on here, because of course it is; the song’s got more than a billion streams, and it serves, due to the way “album equivalent units” are counted these days, as a sort of safeguard for the album’s overall commercial performance, even if the song does at this point sound like something ripped from an entirely different release cycle. (“Up” is on here for basically the same reason.) At face value, Am I the Drama? is largely defined by the conspicuous absence of Bruno Mars and the arguably excessive amount of backbiting. Am I the Drama? is more “Bodak Yellow” than “I Like It”: in other words, a shank crafted to bolster the “little reputation” of hers. This thing is 23 tracks and one hour and 11 minutes long, and I’d loosely estimate a third of the running time is dissing.
Cardi B’s onetime occupation as a stripper is often regarded as a cool quirk of her résumé when it’s in fact her signature strength. She has an ear for fundamentally danceable hits, so she’s able to lend even the most tedious grievances a certain irresistible bounce. Drake embodied this outlook on rap beef in the 2010s, in his feuds with Common and Meek Mill: the idea that the most devastating diss track is a ubiquitous one that your adversary will be forced to hear constantly in the club; Am I the Drama? is an entire album where the distinction between diss tracks and club tracks breaks down and becomes meaningless. You want to hear Cardi B having fun, and fun—to Cardi B—happens to mean swinging on JT over some old tweets on “Magnet.” Here she revels in drama and dancing, conjoined. She’s at her truest not when she’s dutifully mimicking the most stoic era of Hov on “Imaginary Playerz” but rather when she’s boisterously channeling Mannie Fresh on “ErrTime.”
The album isn’t without duds—specifically, the sorts of songs that remind you just how awkward the intersection of street rap and bubblegum pop can be. There’s one unambiguously awful song, “What’s Goin On,” with an atonal Lizzo butchering the classic chorus from 4 Non Blondes. There’s an overproduced and underwhelming head fake to a Janet Jackson feature that turns out to be merely a sample (of “The Pleasure Principle”) on “Principal.” There’s not much effort from the rapper, nor her singers and producers, to make the slower jams (“Man of Your Word,” “On My Back”) sound anything but perfunctory. There’s not much pop, in other words, and the pop that is here is pretty bad. So much depends, then, on how seriously you take and how thoroughly you enjoy her efforts as a dolled-up street rapper. Though, I’ll say, “Bodega Baddie” is one strange ray of sunshine: thrillingly quick, maddeningly brief, crying out for remixes, but all the same, a perfect distillation—in title, form, and execution—of the very idea of Cardi B, wearer of gowns, thrower of markers.
It’s still hard, all these years after “MotorSport,” to talk at length about Cardi B without eventually drawing a comparison to her supposed archnemesis. Nicki Minaj was seen as the entrenched and entitled queen who didn’t play well with other female rappers, while Cardi got to play the insurgent who’d snatch the old wigs and take Little Miss Barbie down a peg. But then Cardi B stuck around long enough to seem somewhat entitled in her own right. I’m the reason bitches got deals for like the last few years, Cardi raps on “Check Please.” She’s overstating her claim, of course, but she’s also pointing to a crucial fact of the generational shift from Nicki to Cardi—indeed, in 2025, most of the next-gen hip-hop superstars are women. So you can cast this sort of conflict as evidence of a crabs-in-a-barrel mentality, but then you have to reckon with the fact that these women nevertheless rise and thrive together. (To borrow another classic rap aphorism about friendly-ish competition: Steel sharpens steel.) There’s always some clamoring for the women of hip-hop to set aside their grievances with one another and unite in feminist solidarity, or whatever. But, again, this is hip-hop. Do she even got a BET Award?! That’s more like it. I do miss Bruno, though.
