Nick Bollinger discusses the ascent - and intent - of chart-topping rapper Cardi B.
Cardi B Photo: Steve Madden
It’s a month now since the release of Invasion Of Privacy, the first proper long-player from rapper Cardi B. Perhaps I’ve arrived way too late for a party that seemed to be peaking right at the moment the album dropped, but it’s worth noting – however belatedly - what is clearly one of the year’s most significant releases.
Invasion Of Privacy Photo: supplied
What is so significant about Invasion Of Privacy?
For one thing, it comes on the heels of her hit ‘Bodak Yellow’, the first solo track by a female rapper to reach number one in almost two decades, (the last being Lauryn Hill).
More than that, the stance and persona presented in that song – and the album as a whole – is not quite like those of any rapper before.
Sex and power are her major themes and she addresses these in the vernacular of the Bronx streets where she grew up, and the hip-hop genre of which she is an accomplished practitioner.
Brought up in the South Bronx by Dominican and Trinidadian parents who separated when she was young, by her late teens she was working as a stripper; something she has said helped her to escape a life of gangs and poverty, and an abusive relationship.
Her celebrity began on Instagram, where her frank and funny monologues on her life, loves and hates earned her a big following, which was consolidated when she took part in the reality television series Love & Hip Hop: New York. Her introduction as a rapper was on a 2015 remix of a Shaggy single ‘Boom Boom’, closely followed by a couple of mixtapes of her own, Gangsta Bitch Music Volumes 1 and 2.
But it was just last year that she made her major label debut with ‘Bodak Yellow’ and then she was everywhere. With typical succinctness, she offers a capsule version of her ascent in the album’s hard-hitting opening track ‘Get Up 10’. The origin story is important to Cardi, and she reprises it several times in different ways through the album.
Both musically and lyrically there’s a strong connection with Migos, the Atlanta rap trio whose particular and super-successful take on the southern hip-hop style known as trap is, in many ways, the sound of Cardi B’s music as well. She’s engaged to Migos member Offset, and all three Migos guest on ‘Drip’, one of Invasion Of Privacy’s standout tracks.
As in most of her rhymes, that track ‘Drip’ celebrates Cardi B’s success, which she typically measures in material terms – in this case the ice (that is, diamonds) drippin’ from her wrist.
But to look at it another way, those are just symbols of her real achievement, which is that as a female of colour, born in poverty in the United States, she has risen to the status of a star without diluting her accent, her attitude or anything she has to say.
As a profile piece in iD magazine recently put it, her success “is not only empowering to other young people of color, it’s threatening to those who are not.” And, unlikely a figurehead for liberal causes as she may seem, she speaks out against Trump or in favour of gun control with the same candour with which she raps about diamonds, Ferraris, and what she wants in bed.
Of course you could argue that occasional successes like Cardi B’s just reinforce the American dream – that anyone can make it, if they just hustle hard enough. Will she ultimately be a force for social change, or will the system absorb her, turn her into another distant icon, estranged from the streets that spawned her?
Who can say, but for now Cardi B – the version you’ll find on Invasion Of Privacy - is raw, rude and real.
Invasion Of Privacy is available on Warner Music.
