It’s been more than seven years since Bronx rap phenom Cardi B released her blockbuster debut album Invasion Of Privacy, a truly great record. We’ve had two presidential elections, one global pandemic, and countless waves of rap and pop discourse in the time since Invasion Of Privacy came out. In that time, Cardi B has had three children, and it’s about to be four. She’s gone through one divorce. She’s released a great many absolute bangers — “Money,” “Press,” “Tomorrow 2” with GloRilla, “Put It On Da Floor Again” with Latto — that will seemingly never appear on a Cardi B album. Now, Cardi B has finally released Am I The Drama?, the sophomore LP that some of us thought would never arrive. It’s real. It exists. And people have their knives out for this one.
Cardi B has had a tumultuous public life, and she’s never really gone away, but it’s still baffling that she went this long without releasing an album. If this were the CD era, Am I The Drama? would come with a bonus disc of songs that Cardi has released in the intervening years, and it would probably be better than the album itself. Instead, Cardi has confusingly included just two of her older songs on the new LP, and those ones are really old — “WAP” from 2020, and “Up,” from 2021. I was playing Am I The Drama? in the car when I dropped my son off at school this morning because I am a wonderful, thoughtful parent who only makes the best decisions. When “Up” came on, my kid was like, “Didn’t you say this was her new album?”
Other things about this album are going to annoy people. The promised Janet Jackson feature is not a feature at all. Jackson does not sing on “Principal”; it’s just a sample of her classic hit “The Pleasure Principle.” (Pretty good sample, though.) The album has lots and lots of material about Cardi’s breakup with ex-husband Offset. You have to be pretty invested in their story to care much about that, and plenty of those songs have lightweight R&B choruses. The hammering two-minute Spanglish dance track “Bodega Baddie” is a love-it-or-hate-it situation. (I love it.) Worst of all, “What’s Goin On” has Lizzo belting out a heavily Auto-Tuned rendition of of 4 Non Blondes’ eternally grating “What’s Up?,” one the worst inescapable hits of my entire life. Avoid “What’s Goin On” at all costs. It is the skip by which all other skips must be judged.
Cardi has reemerged at the worst possible time. Her run of hits kept going for a long time after Invasion Of Privacy, but it has dried up. (Recent singles “Outside” and “Imaginary Playerz” came and went without much chart impact, though both songs are good.) Cardi hasn’t been away long enough to get the nostalgia bump, but Invasion Of Privacy feels like it happened in a different lifetime. That album, with its patchwork of genres and producers and of-the-moment guests, took an old-school approach to crossover-friendly rap persona construction; it felt like an anomaly even when it was new. Cardi hasn’t really adjusted her flow or her approach since then. But god, it feels good to hear her rap.
I can’t pretend that I’ll keep coming back to the relationship songs on Am I The Drama?, though it’s striking to hear Cardi get personal and even mature on tracks like “Man Of Your Word.” I will come back to the hard songs, and there are a lot of those. Like Invasion Of Privacy, Am I The Drama? has a stormy, cinematic intro song in which we find Cardi at her most commanding. “Hello” and “Magnet” and “Check Please” and “Trophies” all offer the wonderful spectacle of Cardi talking her shit with undiminished levels of brash, defiant confidence. When she’s in that mode, she remains unstoppable.
Best of all is “Pretty & Petty,” in which Cardi goes nuclear mode on BIA, the Boston rapper who’s been poking at her lately. There are some lines on that one. “Name five BIA songs, gun pointing to your head.” “I’d rather die on the surgery table ‘fore I gotta walk around here lookin’ like you.” “You damn near unemployed/ They only book you when they can’t afford Coi.” Cardi calls her “diarrhea BIA” and rhymes that with “breath so stank you can smell her ‘fore you see her.” Even when her career is at its most ice cold, Cardi can still pull off a Mortal Kombat fatality. It’s inspiring.
Look, I’ve been rooting for Cardi B for a long time. It’s not fun to see her struggling, even if her version of struggling is still more successful than anything I’ll ever do in my life. The album does not come with the boulder-rolling-downhill momentum that Cardi had when she released Invasion Of Privacy. Even in a vacuum, nothing here can stack up to “Bodak Yellow” unless we’re counting “Up” and “WAP,” echoes from a different age. That fall-off is more Cardi’s fault than anyone else’s; she didn’t have to keep waiting this long. Some of it is out of her control, though. Almost nobody stays hot forever. The best thing that Cardi B can do right now is make actual good music, and that’s mostly what she does on the new LP. Her greatest weapon is the sheer force of her personality, and that still comes through. She sounds truly alive, and it’s still fun to hear a real-deal star going off over expensive-sounding production.
Am I The Drama? seems destined to go down in history as a definitive sophomore slump. It was always going to happen. But it’s still a solid major label rap album with a handful of great moments. I’ll take that.
Am I The Drama? is out now on Atlantic.
