How stripping aided Cardi B’s rap career: “Helps me a lot”
Looking back, Cardi B credits a particular experience with transforming her life for the better: stripping.
After she was fired from her job in a grocery store, a teenage Cardi found work in a strip club on the other side of the street. She became a dancer there, and, all in all, she found the experience to be profoundly positive.
In an interview with VladTV in 2016, Cardi revealed that she took the stripping job at a particularly difficult point in her young life. “I was living with my ex-boyfriend who was beating my ass,” she said. “I had to drop out of school. I was living with his mama, two pit bulls in a bedroom. It was crazy.”
It was stripping that helped to get her out of this awful situation. “By getting my own money and leaving,” she noted. “How was I going to leave if I was only making $200 every week?”
By helping her to build the funds she needed to escape her abusive relationship, Cardi believes that stripping saved her life. “A lot of people be like, ‘Oh my gosh.’ They make it so negative,” she said of stripping. “But it really saved me from a lot of things. When I started stripping I went back to school.”
Cardi credits stripping with providing her with financial independence, the opportunity to escape an abusive relationship, and the ability to pursue an education—all of which are very profound benefits. But stripping also served her future career as a musician, as she spoke about to XXL in 2016.
Cardi admitted during the interview that, sometimes, it can be “a little bit scary to go out and perform” on stage. But this is where her stripper experience comes in handy.
“Before I get on stage,” she said, “I tell myself, ‘Listen, if you danced in front of the most gangsta, the biggest artists in the industry and the most get-money n—as, the biggest d-boys and the biggest scammers in New York City, if you’ve performed in front of them, you could definitely perform in front of these people that are actually here and love you.’”
This little exercise soothes Cardi sufficiently to get up on stage and perform. “So,” she said, “that really helps me. That mental, like, pep talk, helps me a lot.”