By Frazier Tharpe

Copyright gq

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.
Before you even get to the halfway mark of Cardi B’s new, long-awaited sophomore album Am I the Drama?, it’s fair to consider the title as a rhetorical question—by that point she’s already dissed about four different rappers (or five, if you count her estranged husband Offset.) It’s one thing to use an album to reclaim and own some unwieldy narratives, but kicking over a whole new hornet’s nest and reigniting several conflicts at once? That’s just deliciously chaotic—but more importantly, musically speaking, it makes for the most thrilling moments on the project.
It’s been seven long years since Cardi shocked the cynics and doubters with a cohesive, heater-packed, locked-in-top-to-bottom debut album. In the years between she’s weathered an on-again off-again marriage and so many different beefs (mostly with fellow female rappers) I honestly gave up on keeping track of the facts and chronology. But none of that context is crucial or even really necessary at all to simply enjoy hearing Cardi addressing all dramas even if your average rap fan forgot it like Alzheimer’s.
As a casual Cardi fan, I’m learning about disputes it’s possible I never even realized existed before. Nicki Minaj? That’s mythological canon, of course. Nicki in turn treated any up and coming female rapper embracing Cardi as an act of war, which created the byzantine geopolitical strife which I believe is the root of Cardi’s issues with Ice Spice, and maybe also JT and Caresha of City Girls. And thanks to this album, the memory of Bia so confidently previewing her objectively godawful Cardi diss boomeranged back into my head like I was Guy Pearce.
A few of these disagreements, it’s worth noting, did happen long enough ago that the specifics are easy to forget. But there’s power in Cardi not folding in the face of a laughably long hiatus and instead just successfully spinning this whole project as doing things on her own time. The result is her settling all family business in one fell swoop like Michael Corleone in the climax of The Godfather.
This isn’t me enabling messiness and ShadeRoom-level dramatics; reasserting herself just brings the most spark out of Cardi on this album, musically speaking. “Name five Bia songs, gun pointed to your head/Bow, I’m dead” is just an incredible way to start a diss track. That laugh-out-loud moment opens “Pretty and Petty,” the album’s bouncy centerpiece. But Cardi gets right to the smoke on the album intro, with some very thinly-veiled lines aimed at Ms. Minaj.
The album technically closes with two prehistorically-old singles “WAP” (2020) and “Up” (2021); Cardi has suggested that these two loosie hits needed a proper home, which is fair, although this move is also a blatant charts hack to boost album sales on the strength of those two monster songs, one of which is nearly diamond-certified by now. But Am I the Drama?’s real climax is “Killin You Hoes,” a kind of closing-argument blanket statement for anyone else throwing shots, as befits an album whose overarching theme can be loosely interpreted as “Don’t get me fucked up.”
Cardi is a character and a master entertainer; one of her biggest strengths as a rapper is her delivery and the ability to tweak a line to be as comedic or brutal as it needs to be for maximum impact. She touches all zones in all her various disses, effortlessly going from that aforementioned Bia punchline to something like the relentless savagery allegedly aimed at JT on “Magnet”: “Fake friend-ass bitch, a clown-ass bitch/On the net, kick your friend while she down-ass bitch/Your loyalty depends who you around-ass bitch/Backdoor ho, hatin on the low-ass bitch/You a shady-ass bitch, you’ve been trash since birth/Mama didn’t want you—Brenda’s baby-ass bitch.”
The snarl, the ferocity of the delivery—Cardi sounds the liveliest on Am I the Drama? When she’s handling her enemies. Equally important is that she’s throwing all of these punches over absolute bangers—true to her roots, all of these songs sound tailor-made to do damage at parties and strip clubs, so much so that it’s kind of a travesty she didn’t drop them during the summer. There’s a specific sort of thunderous, Jeezy-esque, Shawty Redd-inspired Atlanta energy that Cardi harnessed for the bops on this album that makes you want to run through a wall, notably on standouts like “Errtime.” Mix that sound with hater energy and the results are too potent to ignore. I don’t know why Cardi bothered trying to recapture Jay-Z’s one-of-a-kind stunt raps on “Imaginary Player” when she sounds so much more in her element on “Magnet,” sounding every bit the unbothered baller with her “baby” rhyme scheme and interpolating D4L’s “Betcha Can’t Do It Like Me.”
This will likely kick off a wave of response tracks and social media back-and-forths. But in some cases here, Cardi puts herself in a rarefied Pusha T position, attacking so lethally that any reply will inevitably come up short, releasing her from the obligation to respond. Regardless, none of these spats—save maybe a Nicki vs Cardi title fight—are beefs that will fill a Drake/Kendrick void, but that’s besides the point. With all due respect to her marital drama, newfound love, and pop tracks like her Lizzo and Selena Gomez collaborations, the highest highs on Am I the Drama? come when Cardi is in Attack Mode. And leaning into that is what helped her more or less deliver on a nearly-decade long’s worth of high expectations. A little spite is good for the soul.
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