Cardi B on “AM I THE DRAMA?” album cover. Photo Credit: Cardi B’s Online Webstore
While Cardi B remains a trap icon, her latest album was bloated and uninspired with 24 tracks of viciously vapid chaos.
The new album, “AM I THE DRAMA?,” struggled to live up to the Grammy Award-winning hype of Cardi B’s 2018 debut album, “Invasion of Privacy.” The 7-year-old album broke the record for most-streamed female rap album of all time.
Cardi B’s new project comes across as a high-volume performance of caustic confrontation rather than a lyrically or sonically compelling experience.
The album opens with bombastic feature track, “Dead,” which mimics the dramatic and gloomy tone of hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur’s first posthumous album, “The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.”
R&B artist Summer Walker joins Cardi B in the chorus to portray the drama as a critical declaration. The first verse alone sends the audience head-first into a show of hollow hubris.
The album is largely bloated with repetitive beat work and uninteresting bars provided by Cardi B. The artist also samples Janet Jackson on the song “Principle,” which is largely squandered by uncompelling aggressive battle raps and largely repetitive choruses.
Cardi B also frequently alludes to the late Selena Quintanilla, a Latin pop icon whose legacy is fundamentally at odds with the aggressive and explicit content of this project.
Tracks such as “Magnet,” “Pretty & Petty” and several others take shots at her hip-hop contemporaries, including Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice, Bia and the City Girls. In spite of her scathing rhetoric, these shots are largely unarresting and come across as needlessly vengeful. In the track “Magnet,” Cardi B relies on crude and unnecessary shock value by employing cheap homophobic insinuations seemingly towards Lil Uzi Vert, who is non-binary.
The deficit in artistic intention extends to Cardi B’s attempts at emotional vulnerability and introspection. In the song “What’s Goin On,” Cardi B recounts feelings of estrangement and frustration in a past relationship, accompanied by a jarring and bizarre feature by Lizzo.
Ultimately, Cardi B’s 2025 project appears to serve as the soundtrack to an incredibly messy public life. For KSU Owls currently navigating their own high-stakes social situations, the album’s chaotic energy and main-character-syndrome commentary may prove to be incredibly relevant.
This being said, it is still questionable if Cardi B’s drama is enough to carry a major hip-hop release. While the highs of “AM I THE DRAMA?” are undeniably engaging, the remainder of the album does not seem to differentiate itself from other anticipated contemporary releases.
Cardi B is the drama, but the chaos cannot seem to carry her music.
