Album of the Week: Cardi B ends seven-year wait with ‘Am I the Drama?’
Cardi B made her big breakthrough in 2017 with her debut single ‘Bodak Yellow’, which remarkably went to number one on the Hot 100. The following year, she released her debut album Invasion of Privacy, topping the Billboard 200 chart with 255,000 units in its first week. The Bronx rapper hasn’t released an album in seven years, but has still managed to maintain her relevancy. Now, she’s back.
The trailblazing New York artist returned with the release of her new album, Am I the Drama?, on September 19th. Released on Atlantic Records, the project includes 23 tracks and features from Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, Janet Jackson, Summer Walker, Selena Gomez, Kehlani, Cash Cobain, Tyla, and others.
The album notably includes the hits, ‘WAP’, released in 2020, and ‘Up’, which came out in 2021, as well as more recent singles, ‘Outside’ and ‘Imaginary Playerz’. Other song titles include ‘Dead’, ‘Bodega Baddie’, ‘Better Than You’, and ‘Pretty and Petty’, which serves as a diss track against BIA.
Cardi targets the Massachusetts rapper across the whole song, brutally rapping, “Name five BIA songs, gun pointin’ to your head/ Bow, I’m dead/ That melatonin flow putting us to bed/ I’m doing you a favour, Epic, run me my bread.”
She’s come a long way since the release of Invasion of Privacy, experiencing the highs and lows of life in the limelight. “Since then, I’ve experienced a lot,” she told Billboard. “The good and bad of fame, the hate, jealousy, drama, balancing my career with my personal life and growing up and maturing. I’ve learned to control my emotions and understand how life works and how to play chess better.”
Despite making her fans wait, she was always planning to release a second project. Cardi just didn’t want to force music for the sake of it, giving people material she only feels confident about. “My fans be like, ‘Oh, you should have put a project together when ‘WAP’ and ‘Up’ was out,’ but I only had four records that I liked,” she said. “I didn’t have an album done around that time. I’m not the kind of person that’s going to lock in in two months and complete an album. I’m very picky with my music.”
She added, “I want to put out this whole project because I have a lot of songs. I recorded 60 songs. Every other day, I’m a different person, I change my mind [about everything]. My team is always like, ‘I hope you don’t change your mind about your songs.’ I’m like, ‘Nope. I’m settled.'” Now, here we are, finally, with the finished product.
Cardi has gone through a lot of changes in the last seven years. She’s since got divorced from Offset, with whom she has three children, and also got into a relationship with a new partner, NFL star Stefon Diggs, and is pregnant with her fourth child. All of this change is reflected in her lyrics, going from a 25-year-old to a 32-year-old in the blink of an eye.