More Than Stars

Cardi B

Making money moves and breaking records: the success of Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow”

by Annie Cooper

Like many, I was introduced to Cardi B through Instagram. A video of her strutting down a hotel hallway, proclaiming “It’s cold outside, but I’m still lookin’ like a thotty because a hoe never gets cold!” was making the rounds, and was all it took to sell me on the “regular, degular, schmegular” girl from the Bronx. Cardi, born Belcalis Almanzar, was an Instagram celebrity long before her music career took off. Her videos, in all their unapologetic brashness and disregard for “that fake shit”, are polarising. However, they are undeniably entertaining, a kind of anti-self-help series for women, where topics range from the validity of stripping as a career, to questioning where your booger goes after you wipe it on a wall and come back for it later. How Cardi presents herself on the Internet personifies everything that women are taught not to be publicly, which was crucial to the success of herself as an Internet personality, and in turn the entirely unprecedented success of her hit single “Bodak Yellow.”

Before her career took off, Cardi’s musical ambitions were documented on the VH1 series, Love & Hip Hop in New York, where she soon became the show’s breakout star. Catchphrases like “washpoppin” and “she gone have beef with me foreva” quickly infiltrated the casual dialect of Twitter and Instagram users, and YouTube was flooded with ‘best of Cardi B’ compilations. Despite this, the two mixtapes that she dropped during her time on the show were unremarkable at best, and fittingly received a lukewarm reception. This is the norm for most artists that are featured on Love & Hip Hop. While viewers watch the artists try to make it in the studio and on stage, their musical careers largely remain stagnant. That is, until last June, when “Bodak Yellow” (a take on Kodak Black’s “No Flockin”), a legitimately enjoyable song, was dropped and dominated the charts.

“Bodak Yellow” is Cardi’s debut major label single, and rose to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 in just seven weeks after its release, a surprisingly rapid conquest for what was then a relatively unknown artist. Currently, it is sitting at No. 1 on the charts, having surpassed Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” With it, Cardi became the first female rapper to hit No. 1 without a male feature since Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” in 1998, an achievement that has seen Cardi gain considerable recognition from mainstream media outlets. The single has set a new precedent for the stars of Love & Hip Hop and female rappers in general, with the track now almost as ubiquitous as Kanye West’s “Stronger,” or Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.”

From the outset of the track, Cardi taunts those who underestimated her legitimacy as an artist – “Said ‘little bitch, you can’t fuck with me if you wanted to’ / These expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes.” Most, if not all of the song’s lyrics run in the same vein, forging a full-fledged anthem for those who have come up from nothing. Each verse hits hard, creating its own mini-chorus that is just as infectious as the one that came before it. The main chorus’ inclusion of bars about making it out of the strip club – “I don’t dance now, I make money moves / I don’t gotta dance, I make money moves”– sounds almost humorous, when considering the track overtook Taylor Swift’s position on the charts despite Swift’s cautiously curated ‘girl next door’ image. Similarly, the track differs greatly from Lauryn Hill’s outputs. In 1998, Hill denounced the then burgeoning, recurrent theme of female sexuality in hip-hop, chalking it up to “a huge lack of self-esteem” from other artists. In “Bodak Yellow,” however, Cardi wholly embraces her sexuality through her lyrics – “My pussy feel like a lake, he wanna swim with his face / I’m like ‘okay!’ / I let him get what he want, he buy me Yves Saint Laurent.” Her caustic lyrics are congruent with the image she has developed, one of a proud woman that is self-assured in both her sexuality and her music.

The rapid success of Cardi B is unprecedented for female hip-hop artists, but also for artists in general. Rarely does a debut single create the traction that “Bodak Yellow” has, especially without a viral campaign or a guest feature from an already established artist. Its success is likely due in part to the rampant support that Cardi established from her Instagram fan-base. Her lack of shame and unabashedly cheerful disposition – even when retelling stories of how her butt implants almost killed her, or how her man brought his other girlfriend’s dog to her apartment – allows her to cater to a whole new demographic. A demographic of women who are tired of having to tone themselves down in order to get respect. To this day, her Instagram posts are filled with comments from women praising her for ‘being real’, and for inspiring them to be themselves. A rapper like Cardi B sitting on top of the charts redefines what it means to achieve mainstream success, and what it takes for a woman to be taken seriously. With the success of the track and Cardi B showing no signs of slowing down, I can only hope that this signals a new beginning for female artists in the hip-hop industry.

natpitcher • October 23, 2017


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