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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.”
