Cardi B : Cardi B, the Female Rapper Who Ousted Taylor Swift from the Top of the Charts

Cardi B, the Female Rapper Who Ousted Taylor Swift from the Top of the Charts

In 2013, a radiant trickster from the South Bronx began uploading videos of herself onto social media. She spouted the rudest New Yorkese. “It feels so good when people throw money on me,” she said in one video. “It feels so good on my skin.” She had a manic tongue and a crooked smile that spread as, bare-faced and head-wrapped, she advised women on how to game the system: “Ever since I started using men, I feel so goddam powerful.” Her skits were shared, aggregated, copied, and blogged about. In 2015, she earned a role on the popular reality-television show “Love & Hip Hop: New York,” in which she played the sexy jester. (“If a girl have beef with me, she gon’ have beef with me forever,” she said in one episode—a warning that instantly became a meme.) She quit her exotic-dancing job, at which men and women had thrown money at her feet. She started to release music, and the music was surprisingly, bullishly, good.

                                                Vem är Cardi B? | POPSUGAR kändis

The rise of the twenty-four-year-old Cardi B, born Belcalis Almanzar—who earlier this week became the first solo female rap act to top the Billboard charts since Lauryn Hill, in 1998—is dizzying; it’s almost like a fairy tale, according to the Ringer’s Lindsay Zoladz. Cardi B released her first single, “Cheap Ass Weave,” in the winter of 2015; Atlantic Records signed her before spring. “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves),” released in June, clawed its way to the informal title of Song of the Summer. In August, Drake invited Cardi B onto the stage at the OVO Festival, in Toronto; the following month, a clip of Janet Jackson milly-rocking to “Bodak” mashed up with “What Have You Done for Me Lately” went viral. By mid-September, “Bodak Yellow” had overtaken Justin Bieber and Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” to become No. 2 on the Hot 100. Most prognosticators did not expect Cardi B to challenge Taylor Swift, whose comeback single, “Look What You Made Me Do,” a limp, candied missive, had been engineered to dominate both radio and streaming. (Last week, Swift’s label reduced the price of the single from a dollar to sixty-nine cents.) Cardi B’s fans, who go by #BardiGang, launched a campaign online, encouraging people to stream and buy “Bodak Yellow.” Forces aligned to give us one of the most dramatic music stories of the year.

                    Cardi B - Bodak Yellow (Latin Trap Remix) Lyrics | MetroLyrics

As we know from her social-media videos, which she continues to post, Cardi B grew up with her family in the Bronx; she and her sister spent a lot of time with her grandmother, in the Heights. (Of all her videos, the ones I adore the most show her in a messy, friendly kitchen, swinging her tiny grandmother around to the rhythm of old-school merengue.) She speaks with a first-generation, mixed-up, island twang. In the early two-thousand-tens, Almanzar was working at the Amish Market in the Financial District, making two hundred dollars a week—“Everything is, like, organic,” she recalled in one interview—when her manager suggested to her that she work across the street, at Private Eyes. Everyone loved her at the club; the plastic bags of cash allowed her to pay for school at Borough of Manhattan Community College, to help her parents, and to remove herself from an abusive relationship. “I told my mom that I was a dancer after a year and some change,” Almanzar told Complex, in 2015. “I was really mad at her so I screamed at her, ‘I’m a stripper!’ She was like, ‘Oh yeah?’ And pushed me down the staircase.” Her mother’s old-world rage turned to pride when Cardi B started making real money. She now owns an apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey. She’s dating the rapper Offset, of Migos. And, as of recently, she is the owner of a tangerine Bentley that she doesn’t yet have the license to drive.

          Cardi B’s triumph with “Bodak Yellow” is a rejuvenating one—a pure, brash New York story.

While Cardi B was working as a dancer, she was posting fuzzy, hilarious rants on Instagram and Vine. At first, she was just another Internet character, but, slowly and organically, her bottomless supply of witticisms drew thousands to follow her account. (As of today, she has more than ten million followers.) “It’s cold outside, but I’m still looking like a thotty ‘cause a ho never gets cold,” she said, twirling, in a body-con skirt and a flimsy bra top, in one popular video from 2015. Her mischief was refreshing. There was even a weird musicality to her chosen stage name—a play on Bacardi, after the rum; her younger sister, also an Instagram star, is named Hennessy. (Speaking to The Fader’s Rawiya Kameir, Cardi B said that she wants Hennessy to find ways to monetize her Internet popularity: “Don’t fuck up the formula.”) Even as Cardi B joined Mona Scott-Young’s “Love & Hip Hop,” franchise, she made it riotously clear that she was still the “regula, degula, schmegula girl from the Bronx.” Earnest as it may sound, Almanzar’s straight talk about perseverance felt authentic.

The phenomenon of Cardi B is just that : an anomaly in the culture rather than a confirmation of it. She threatens the rules. New York City long ago ceded its rap dominance to the South, but in “Bodak Yellow” Cardi B, a proud uptown kid, does a martial riff on an old flow of the Floridian rapper Kodak Black’s. Gloating, young, male rappers like Black and xxxTentacion are currently scaling the heights of Internet-based popularity while being openly abusive to women; Cardi B is open about the abusive relationships she has endured, and what she has had to do to get out of them. To male rappers, the strip club is a temple, an affirmation of their prowess; Cardi B turned the strip club into a site of feminine ingenuity. (“I don’t dance now, I make money moves,” she raps in the haughty hook of “Bodak Yellow.”) Rap fans can be conservative, wanting artists to be monkish about their dedication to the craft; Cardi B squeezes in verses among club appearances, fashion shows, parties, and Fashion Nova Instagram advertisements. Black stars uninterested in code-switching rarely translate their massive followings to traditional platforms; earlier this month, Vogue sainted Cardi B, dubbing her “New York Fashion Week’s Undisputed (and Uncensored) Front Row Queen.”

                                          All about Cardi B at In Touch Weekly

And, historically, women of color, let alone black women, have been mostly shut out of the Billboard Hot 100’s No. 1 spot. The triumph of Cardi B is a rejuvenating one—a pure, brash New York story. In her own way, she has made the Billboard charts, an industry relic of sorts, seem relevant, again. On Tuesday, when “Bodak Yellow” officially went to the top of the chart, my windows shook, the track’s bass blasting from double-parked cars outside. “You know where I’m at, you know I be,” she raps infectiously. “Congratulations to a fellow NEW YAWKA on a RECORD BREAKING achievement,” Nicki Minaj tweeted. The city sovereigns Remy Ma and Lil’ Kim chimed in, too. The best-selling female rap artist Missy Elliott, whose highest spot on the Hot 100 was No. 3, tweeted that having a No. 1 record was not as easy as it seems. “Bodak Yellow,” the little banger that could, wasn’t meant to be anything like a referendum on the state of women in rap. It’s not, arguably, even her best song—she rides the beat of “Lick” a touch more fluently. But we should know, by now, not to underestimate Cardi B.