Cardi B released an album promo clip last week that highlighted the precarious business of a second Cardi B album: She boards the subway in sweatpants, adopting the script of a down-on-her-luck mother of three selling CDs to get by like the enterprising teens and adults hawking wares to straphangers. It takes all the worst suggestions about the solvency of her career to the extreme. She’s a millionaire cosplaying struggle, though maybe she views it as a peek at a timeline in which her music doesn’t take off. The point that there’s actually a lot riding on this album’s being good is more gracefully underscored in Am I the Drama? itself. Am I the Drama? arrives seven years after her debut, Invasion of Privacy, to recount her journey out of a rocky marriage to Atlanta rapper Offset and into a new relationship with New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs. It’s a blast to hear from a narrator with an unfiltered perspective and endless supply of snaps who can document the stress, trauma, and obligations necessitating that rawness.
Am I the Drama? makes half-whimsical, half-serious reference to Cardi B’s personal and professional challenges in its title. Her marital strife was so out in the open that Offset released a song complaining about his superstar wife preferring Nobu to cooking. A security guard sued her for alleged assault, and Cardi sued a vlogger for defamation (she won both unrelated cases). Nicki and Cardi’s confusing cold war sparked tributary disputes with Ice Spice, JT from the City Girls, and Boston’s Bia. Over the summer, Cardi vowed to exact revenge on them: “I’m getting all my lick backs on my album tho …ON EACH ONE OF YOU BITCHES !!!” The longer the second album took, the more it looked as if Cardi was fine with being a lucrative singles artist who dips into other platforms, the kind of joyfully absurd figure every bit as cozy in a strip-club anthem as on the Smurfs soundtrack. Am I the Drama? aims to prove and explain itself while taunting doubters and repping New York. It’s unusual for a sophomore album to flaunt the veteran posturing she espouses in songs like the Jay-Z flip “Imaginary Playerz,” but ten years after our introduction to her on Love & Hip-Hop, Cardi is not an unlikely star and unproven prospect anymore. Am I the Drama? reconciles this past and present while balancing geographical specificity and global notoriety.
The Offset diss track “Outside” — “Clearly you don’t give a fuck, so I don’t give one either” — and the breezier “WAP” and “Up” grace an album otherwise steeped in the aggravation and insults it takes to get to a place of publicly squabbling with your husband. The minimalist “Man of Your Word” takes as much responsibility for a failing union as it doles out to the ex: “As a wife, I should’ve realized when you was hurt / But instead I put my music first.” Less mirthfully, the snide, vindictive “Errtime” says being cheated on nets complementary steal-your-man passes: “If I take your nigga, I don’t wanna hear no cryin’ / ’Cause I ain’t say shit when hoes was out herе fuckin’ mine.” The album’s midsection is full of divorce play-by-plays prickly enough to make you laugh and cry. It’s a more believable snapshot of Cardi waiting for her luck to shift than the subway shtick.
Raised in the Highbridge section of the Bronx not far from where DJ Kool Herc threw the 1973 party revered as rap music’s spiritual baby shower, Cardi bookends those songs with experiments in accentuating and contrasting her distinctly New York diction. Merengue and Bronx drill collide in “Bodega Baddie,” in which La Cardi drops Dominican Spanish colloquialisms and nods to Caribbean soca music — sounds of the Heights and the South Bronx. “Better Than You” taps into South Bronx rapper and producer Cash Cobain’s signature sexy drill-music aesthetic. Elsewhere, the album tries to complicate the inescapable regional specificity of Cardi’s delivery as the beats wander down south and out west. Bia catches hell in “Pretty and Petty,” which sees Cardi mock the New England rhymer’s whispering tone and employ the rushed delivery of Bay Area rappers. “Magnet” goes after Cardi’s Miami frenemy JT while trying out the chaotic flows of Florida’s BossMan Dlow. After Cardi calls Bia a “Brenda’s Baby ass bitch,” “On My Back” mimics the dramatic enunciation of 2pac love songs. Moments later, “Errtime” pulls inspiration from the Louisiana and Memphis vets Project Pat and Birdman. Am I the Drama? doesn’t treat New York like a center of the universe so much as a vantage point for raining terror.
Cardi highlights the diverging tastes of a generation that sees the 2010s as its “back in the day.” Am I the Drama? is interested in the geographic slipperiness and immutable character late-’90s Jay albums messily perfected when he was morphing into a certified national rap phenom. As with that era, poppier fare here feels especially hungry for a hit, though the Lizzo collaboration, “What’s Goin On,” deals agonizing earnestness alongside the screamingly obvious 4 Non Blondes interpolation. “Pick It Up” with Selena Gomez and “Nice Guy” with Tyla stick out like cuts on 2020’s Good News where Megan Thee Stallion’s singing wasn’t on par with the raps. Easing off the stiff trend awareness of songs like album opener “Dead” — a declaration of war that devolves into Summer Walker doing some sort of uncanny-valley approximation of a SZA feature — yields treasures like “Principal.” Cardi’s take on Janet Jackon’s “Pleasure Principle” acknowledges ’80s R&B and trap as close kin, fusing pillowy synths to hard drums like Kendrick Lamar’s “Dodger Blue” and “Luther.” But the racing hi-hats and brusque threats Am I the Drama? circles back to always feel more potent.