It’s been more than seven years since the Bronx rapper Cardi B dropped her taut, exuberant debut, “Invasion of Privacy,” a hit-studded statement of purpose that showcased her stylistic range, cemented her star status and made her the first solo female artist to win the Grammy for best rap album. Though the LP was made quickly in the wake of her breakout single “Bodak Yellow,” expeditiousness was part of its appeal. Cardi’s new-money reportage (“just checked my account, turns out I’m rich, I’m rich, I’m rich!”) and ebullient flow created a vivid snapshot lit by the afterglow of overnight success.
Though Cardi has spent the 2020s releasing a string of hard-edge singles, duetting memorably (and at times less memorably) with peers like Meghan Thee Stallion, and commanding attention with scene–stealing guest verses, it has taken the 32-year-old born Belcalis Almánzar considerably longer to release a follow-up. She has cited writer’s block, but plenty has happened outside the studio too. She ended a tumultuous seven-year marriage to the Migos rapper Offset, beefed publicly with female rappers of varying levels of fame and had three children. (Last week, she announced that she is expecting a fourth child, her first with her N.F.L. star boyfriend Stefon Diggs.) Most recently, there was the trial: a civil case stemming from a 2018 incident in which a security guard accused the rapper of assault. (Earlier this month, she was found not liable .)
Enlivened by a series of glamorous wigs, cartoonish facial expressions and memorable, off-the-cuff quotes, clips from Cardi’s testimony went viral. Since her early days as a Vine creator and a reality TV star, she has long understood the modern power of the shareable sound bite — she’s a maestro of the blurred boundary between music and meme. So in its own way, Cardi’s testimony became the strongest promotional single for her combative sophomore album, “Am I the Drama?” (She quickly manufactured several “Courtroom Editions,” featuring photographs from the testimony as covers.)
The album’s second track, the buoyant and boastful “Hello,” demonstrates how Cardi excels in that nebulous space between the headline and the hit. The song’s title echoes one of the trial’s more memorable quotes: “Because I’m pregnant … Hello?” With a voice that can draw musicality out of the simplest words and phrases (for instance: “coronavirus”), Cardi reintroduces herself here with an unflashy but insistent hook: “Hello? It’s me.”
Across 23 intermittently excellent but sometimes repetitive tracks, Cardi alternates among several registers: libidinous (the sultry and explicit “On My Back,” with a hook sung by the vocalist Lourdiz), wounded (“Shower Tears,” one of two tracks featuring the R&B artist Summer Walker) and opulently braggadocious (“I’m somewhere on the Amalfi Coast,” she raps on the forceful “ErrTime,” “tannin’ somewhere naked”). But Cardi is at her most animated when she is at her most violently vengeful, as she establishes on the menacing opener, “Dead.” “I’m collecting body bags like they purses,” she spits as a pointed warning. “I don’t even rap no more, I drive hearses.”
Cardi only hints at the objects of her scorn on the precision-cut “Magnet,” but she takes a direct approach on “Pretty & Petty,” a wild-eyed, unrestrained diss that states its intended target — the rapper Bia, who came for Cardi on the 2024 track “Sue Meee?” — in its opening bars. Cardi’s sense of humor is usually at its sharpest when she’s dissecting a rival, and she’s in fine form here, doling out schoolyard taunts and borderline-absurdist barbs (“look, meatball, you Italian”). Even after the beat drops out, she keeps going (“told you, don’t ever mention my kids”), like a boxer who needs to be held back by the referee long after the bell.
Like many long-delayed albums (and most albums with a producer list even longer than its track list), “Am I the Drama?” has a spaghetti-thrown-at-the-wall quality, and not all of it sticks. The streamlined, 13-track “Invasion of Privacy” boasted more confident concision. By the second half of “Drama,” tracks like “Check Please” and the Tyla-assisted “Nice Guy” play out like variations on themes already explored, while features from Selena Gomez (on the chirping, generic “Pick It Up”) and Janet Jackson (credited for what appears to be just a sample on the relatively rote “Principal”) feel gratuitous. The album’s low point is “What’s Goin On,” a bewildered breakup song that wastes some of Cardi’s most emotionally incisive bars on a regrettable premise: Lizzo singing a profane interpolation of the 4 Non Blondes classic “What’s Up.”
Still, in its best moments, “Drama” shows flashes of why Cardi remains such a transfixing and charismatic character, even when she slows things down.
On the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Man of Your World,” she reflects candidly on the failure of her marriage over a sparse beat that sounds like a mournful steel drum. In a finely calibrated vocal performance, she moves through initial fury toward something like forgiveness: “I really hope you find love, I hope you find a good spirit / I hope she satisfy your needs and everything that I didn’t.” Talk about dramatic testimony.
Cardi B
“Am I the Drama?”
(Atlantic)
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
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