When you’ve held onto the follow-up to a beloved debut album like Invasion Of Privacy as long as Cardi B has, the pressure to deliver can not only be overwhelming, it can be debilitating — understandably so. The hype train has no brakes: It simply picks up speed until it hits terminal velocity, but if you ride it out too long, it loses momentum and stalls out permanently.
So, your options become one of three: Either you deliver, which is often the most difficult outcome to achieve, roughly akin to throwing a dart at a bullseye from 30,000 feet at 500 MPH. In this metaphor, the jetliner you’re throwing from also somehow doesn’t depressurize and throw you screaming into the void. Then, there’s failure. I don’t think we have to explain the dreaded “sophomore slump.”
The third option, and the one that’s seemed to become the most popular in recent years, is the swerve. You know your long-awaited assumed opus can never live up to its predecessor, so you juke expectations and drop a left-field project no one could possibly expect. This is what Kendrick Lamar did with his 2015 jazz-rap classic To Pimp A Butterfly, which is well-regarded now, but left fans desperate for Good Kid part deux scratching their heads. That same year, Kendrick’s mentor, Dr. Dre, finally abandoned the insanely anticipated Detox for Compton, a decidedly less ambitious project that nonetheless fed fans’ hunger for high-concept gangsta rap (and made Anderson .Paak a star in the process).
Of course, Cardi B, being Cardi B, went ahead and invented another option: On Am I The Drama?, her sophomore album six-plus years in the making, she over-delivers, for better or worse, in more ways than one.
Starting on the surface level, Am I The Drama? contains 21 all-new songs, in addition to megahits “Up” and “WAP,” bringing in a tracklist of 23 songs — an increase of a full LP’s worth of tracks over Invasion Of Privacy. No one can say she hasn’t been busy in the seven years since 2018. Those 20-plus songs run the full gamut of what we’ve come to expect from Cardi since: boisterous club songs, vulnerable love songs, antagonistic battle rap, and nods to New York’s vibrant Hispanic subculture.
She also holds nothing back; She dedicates no fewer than three tracks to addressing her extremely public and fraught breakup with ex-husband, Offset. In “Man Of Your Word,” Cardi leaves little doubt, snarling, “I held back for you, was really biting my tongue / Should’ve fell back from you, instead, I gave you a son.” The regrets continue on “What’s Goin’ On?,” where Cardi autopsies the relationship for its cause of death: “You wrote down some beautiful vows / Gave my first beautiful child / Told me you was quiet for all of these hoes / Come to find out you the one loud.”
“Shower Tears” details the aftermath, as Cardi negotiates with herself through the “getting over it” phase of the breakup. “I’m on the edge, this the last straw, you got me fed,” she muses. “I have to question this again, then this sh*t is dead.” This is the raw, unflinching honesty that has so endeared her to the listening public. It’s also overkill; Invasion Of Privacy hit similar notes more efficiently. Yes, relationship drama is messy, and clearly, this was the biggest thing on Cardi’s mind as she finished up this album, but the sprawl takes away some of the urgency of her confessional, and we really didn’t need Lizzo’s 4 Non Blondes impression. 33 years later, “What’ Up” still grates.
Fortunately, from there, Cardi gets back on her bullsh*t, and shows she’s willing to try new things. While “Outside” is a fairly standard Cardi trap track, “Pretty & Petty” steps out of Cardi’s comfort zone for what is ostensibly a BIA diss track, but is secretly the result of so much of the New Yorker’s recent time spent in LA. That Cardi’s first-ever West Coast club anthem doubles as a scathing dressing-down of one of her dwindling number of semi-worthy foes (at least until you-know-who decides to step back in the ring instead of sending proxies) is a testament to Cardi’s growing prowess as a songwriter and sound scout. I would love to see her continue to branch out.
I would also love, as I wrote in my review of Invasion Of Privacy, to see her excavate Latin American sounds and standards, because that’s where her best material resides. In 2018, it was the boogaloo-sampling “I Like It”; Here, it’s the bachata banger “Bodega Baddie,” which blasts through like a clarion call for any Spanish speakers in earshot to sashay their way to the nearest dance floor and hit those steps. It’s also all too short: We need a ten-minute remix with Romeo Santos and Luis Vargas, stat.
Cardi hits another half-dozen stops on her rap subgenre world tour, including airy soul-sampling trunk thump on “Better Than You” (think Curren$y and Wiz Khalifa’s “The Check Point” from How Fly), Memphis goth trap on “Errtime” (anything Three 6 Mafia), even classic New York boom-bap on “Imaginary Playerz.” But there’s the sense here that despite showing off so many facets, she could have maybe held some of these tracks back, as plenty of them end up saying the same things as the others, just in a different font. We love a versatile queen, but the back half drags in an effort to prove facts no serious music listener ever doubted.
These are minor quibbles, though. If the album’s a hair overlong, it’s only because Cardi is making up for the wait and indulging the impulse to show off as much of the work as possible. This is far more forgivable than it would be for someone like, say, Drake, who refuses to let 12 months pass without inflicting his presence on the pop music world, or the fleet of SoundCloud rappers who never really had anything to say in the first place. Cardi is not only the drama, she’s a one-of-a-kind, once-in-a-generation artist who can get away with a lot. She’s not only paid off fans’ patience but earned herself a lot of leeway for the next one.
Am I The Drama? is out now via Atlantic Records. Find more information here.