Cardi

AM I THE DRAMA? acknowledges the stylistic transformation of New York rap, with production largely in the hands of Sean Island and DJ SwanQo. But Cardi maintains a respectful distance from the prevailing trends. Instead, she plays with bursts of experimentation, adopting new flows without sacrificing legibility. “Pretty & Petty” does double duty: The hook is readymade for ubiquity as a TikTok trend while the verses constitute one of the most punishing diss tracks of the year. She practically prances over the beat, a grittier, New York-ified take on the cadences and melodies associated with Mustard’s L.A.

In the vein of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” the apparent glee with which Cardi crushes Boston rapper Bia, four years into an escalating beef, magnifies the effect: “Name five Bia songs, gun pointin’ to your head/Baow, I’m dead/That melatonin flow puttin’ us to bed/I’m doing you a favor, Epic, run me my bread.” As if to prove her point, the song’s release coincides with steep exponential growth of Google searches for Bia name. Devastating. The album is at its most enjoyable when Cardi is in this prickly mode: “Hello,” “Magnet,” the 2 Chainz-written “Salute.” The bilingual, Dyckman-ready “Bodega Baddie,” a turbo-charged merengue bop, makes a promise akin to Rihanna’s mythical reggae album; at under two minutes, it’s a brief glimpse at a worthwhile style for Cardi to linger on.

It’s been a long seven years. Exercises in catharsis abound in the form of heartbreak songs, recorded in the shadow of divorce. With few exceptions, these are grating rap ballads on which even the specifics of a toxic relationship feel generic. The default formula of a sung chorus registers as vacant, even when entrusted with the capable Summer Walker, Lizzo, and Kehlani. Cardi joins many of her streaming-era peers in shunning the self-editing that made Invasion of Privacy, at 13 songs, effective. That work, when offloaded to the listener under the guise of generosity, lands instead as risk aversion.

In certain realms of pop, the songwriting process has become a compacted, impenetrable underbrush, with observers desperate to gather more meaning from a list of song credits than is actually possible. Cardi’s lablelmate, Pardison Fontaine, remains a stubborn yet compatible presence and, with writing credits on 19 of 23 songs, her most consistent collaborator. For fans, this makes him a trustworthy creative partner; for skeptics, it damns Cardi as a talentless hack and Pardi her sub rosa crutch.

But, as she has herself articulated, Cardi’s musical talent has not historically been that of an effortless generator of songs; what she has mastered, as a rapper and elsewhere, is locating an idea, seizing it, and transmuting it into something her own: a style of rap that is both outrageous and easily digestible, designed to travel well from the strip club to the Super Bowl. Always walking the line between edgy and accessible, Cardi summons the breakthrough of early aughts rap more than she does her contemporaries; this is the stuff of high-end recording studios, not improvised bedroom setups.

An ingenious cultural interpreter of sorts, Cardi transported the exclamatory trill “okurrr” from its drag origins to the late-night talk show circuit so effectively, and without any apparent sacrifice of authenticity, that it is often falsely attributed to her. “Am I the drama?” too, has its origins in drag. It was Scarlet Envy, as a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, who first wondered, cheekily, about her culpability. But, as an album, AM I THE DRAMA? seems to signal that, for Cardi, the question functions better as a rhetorical one: It doesn’t really matter whether she’s the drama; even if she didn’t start it, Cardi will be the one to end it.