This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
Cardi B didn’t come out of nowhere. If she’d come out of nowhere, that would’ve made more sense. Instead, Cardi came from the noisy, tawdry world of Instagram influencers and reality-TV stars, and she almost immediately transcended that world. It was crazy to witness. One minute, she was a name that would sometimes pop up in my feed, usually in connection to some of the most irritating cultural flotsam out there. She was just one of I don’t know how many people I’d trained myself to tune out. The next minute, she was the voice behind an all-out banger, the type of song that exists to rattle summertime SUV windows in the greater New York area. A minute after that, the banger in question was the #1 single in America. In the blink of an eye, Cardi B went from improbable to inevitable, and she mostly did it through the sheer force of her personality.
“Bodak Yellow,” the song that made Cardi B famous outside of the Instagram/VH1 bubble, is a personality song. Cardi didn’t write her raps entirely by herself, and she admitted it. Her ghostwriters got songwriting credit, which means they weren’t really ghostwriters at all. She took her flow from another prominent rapper, and then she used the song’s title to shout out that other prominent rapper. But the power of Cardi’s voice, the imperious fuck-you charisma that she brought to every line, elevated both song and performer beyond everything around her.
“Bodak Yellow” was such a starmaking moment that it put Cardi’s entire career into a different light. Once you heard it, everything that Cardi had put into the world — the mixtapes, the reality-show feuds, the uproariously bawdy Instagram videos — started to look like Julia Roberts’ high-school yearbook photo. Suddenly, all that stuff became evidence of a star moving through the regular-people world before everyone fully understood who they were dealing with.
If you love pop music, you live for moments like this. In a climate that increasingly seems oriented toward feeding the parasocial obsessions of various big stars’ online stan armies, it’s even more exciting to see a rocketship take off. Today, Cardi is an established part of that star system, and she’s at a point where her new anthems don’t necessarily make the same impact that they once did. When “Bodak Yellow” took off, though, Cardi was a total outsider to that system, and the song landed hard enough to change her place in the world. She didn’t dance now. She made money moves.
Fresh music, bold entertainment, and men’s fashion—one tight email a week.
