On her second studio album, Am I the Drama?, Cardi B’s brash personality, humor, and charisma again imbue her genre-hopping with life and direction. From trap to boom-bap to Latin pop-rap, the rapper moves from song to song with confidence and ease. Given all the swerving, as well as the long wait since 2018’s Invasion of Privacy, a 23-track album clocking in at 71 minutes feels justified. In fact, anything less would’ve been disappointing.
Among the most nagging questions surrounding this release has been how Cardi would address her 2024 divorce from Offset. A trio of songs midway through the album, “Man of Your Word,” “What’s Goin On,” and “Shower Tears,” address the situation with an appreciable candor and vulnerability. Cardi pillories Offset’s many infidelities, explains how unreliable and deceptive he was, and laments all of her wasted time and effort. “Wasn’t eating this pussy like he used to…I told his ass be careful with me,” she spits with exasperation on “What’s Goin On,” directly referencing Invasion of Privacy’s “Be Careful,” where she was already drawing lines in the sand.
Cardi’s aesthetic taste has gotten more refined and restrained over the years. Moments of rapper-singer interplay in hip-hop can be corny, especially when a singer finishes a rapper’s train of thought, or vice versa. That definitely happens on Am I the Drama? but with a welcome self-awareness. For one, Cardi’s gruff bars and Kehlani’s luxurious melodicism complement each other perfectly on “Safe” as they wax rhapsodic about how far they’ve lowered the bar for men. And the beats on “Check Please” and “Killin You Hoes” are simple, with a squelchy synth near the end of the latter that helps draw extra attention to the rapper’s parting words.
The frustration and regrets about marriage that Cardi relays, especially toward the women who enabled her ex’s cheating, contribute to the album’s complicated gender politics. With the exception of a slippery-tongued Cash Cobain, Am I the Drama? is superficially woman-centric: All of its credited guests are women, a contrast from other albums by female rappers that are stacked with male guests in a seeming bid for legitimacy. But, then, the album begins with a fake newsreel where Cardi is said to be on the run after killing a crew of “bloggers, journalists, and most chillingly, several female rappers.” Summer Walker offers a kind of manifesto for the album on the chorus of the opening track, “Dead”: “I want all these bitches dead.”
The whole concept of “Better Than You” is Cardi’s belief that she serves better face than other women, while the G-funk-powered “Pretty & Petty” is a diss track penned about BIA, an associate of Nicki Minaj, who Cardi also obliquely references on the album. She does doff her cap to “the real bitches” on “Salute,” but it feels strange that a project so seemingly geared toward empowering women is lyrically built on so many pot shots.
Still, while she seems distrustful of other women, perhaps with good reason, Cardi’s blunt-force verbal workouts and filthy silliness—“I’m on your dick, I wanna hold it while you pee,” she quips on “On My Back”—is what we’re here for. Am I the Drama? is charming both because of and in spite of its rowdy pugnacity, packaged and polished with highly professional pop-rap craft.
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