Music Review: Cardi B’s “Invasion of Privacy”
Cardi B apologizes for nothing on her explosively charismatic debut album
Scrutiny has always been the trade-off for celebrity, but when social media fame translates into tangible success in the entertainment industry, those caught up in it find their lives put under an especially strong microscope. It is a phenomenon that preoccupies Cardi B, who centers it as the titular theme of her debut album Invasion of Privacy (★★★★).
The album may be a debut, but that seems almost like a technicality. Cardi has been notorious for years. Already famous for her Instagram, mixtapes, and a stint in the world of reality TV, she had the music industry’s spotlight turned on her with the release of her 2017 single “Bodak Yellow.” Fears that her rapid rise to the top of the charts and her ensuing fame would somehow compromise her or dull the sharp edges of her personality were distilled into something of a mantra online: “Protect Cardi at all costs.”
Happily, those fears appear to have been unfounded. Never one to backtrack or shy away from showing the world who she is, Cardi’s appeal as an artist is inseparable from her charisma, which is infectious, over-the-top, and often abrasive. Invasion of Privacy presents many sides of Cardi, each overlapping with the others. She poses the rhetorical question herself on “Drip,” musing “Is she a stripper, a rapper, a singer?” It functions as a tidy rejoinder to those who would boil her down into any one neat category, as though she was incapable of wearing more than one label at a time.
Like Cardi herself, the album is multifaceted, showing her claws in one lyric and then retracting them, breaking hearts one song and having hers broken in the next. She is far from the only artist capable of packaging vulnerability and ferocity together, but she has a special talent for flipping between the two. Cardi, for her part, answers her own question, in the process neatly capturing her ethos: “I’m busting bucks in a Bentley Bentayga/Ride through your hood like, ‘Bitch, I’m the mayor.'”
While the main strength of Invasion of Privacy is Cardi’s attitude and sheer force of personality, the album also deserves recognition for its cohesion and finesse. From beginning to end it is meticulously crafted, the work of an artist who is indebted to both the past and present of hip-hop and very aware of the fact. “Bodak Yellow” appears as the fourth track on the album and is a natural peak, but rather than becoming the album’s default focal point, it exists comfortably alongside the more recent hit “Bartier Cardi,” a song accompanied by a video dripping with old Hollywood glamour. This is one of the tracks that show the artist at her most confident and her most venomous, casually tossing off insults and easily outshining collaborator 21 Savage, who comes off as more of an afterthought than anything else.
While the singles are strong, the album is well worth listening to from beginning to end, featuring plenty of standouts, including the playful send-up of both Latin stereotypes and her New York background on “I Like It,” to the despondent “Thru Your Phone,” a sobering encapsulation of the anger and sadness of a discovery of infidelity. The closer “I Do” ends the album on a note of prickly defiance — “Good girls do what they told/Bad bitches do what they want.” There is little room to wonder which side Cardi is coming down on.
Invasion of Privacy offers both swagger and vulnerable moments, taking us on a tour of Cardi’s mind, a glimpse into who she is as a person for her devotees, and a sharp rebuke to haters and would-be naysayers. It is difficult to find a conversation about Cardi that does not reference her past work as a dancer in a strip club, but perhaps nobody has done more to keep reminding us of the fact than Cardi herself, who is stubbornly protective of her former occupation, once quipping to Cosmopolitan, “Y’all going to respect these strippers from now on.”
Cardi has a special talent for taking the things that she is criticized for and alternately weaponizing them, wearing them as armor, and turning them into one bop after another. Typically, we might expect the response to an invasion of privacy to be to push back or call out the tormentors, especially from an artist as well-known for her sharp put-downs. But Cardi’s response is instead to lay out everything she is and show that she has nothing to hide, and therefore nothing to be ashamed of.
Invasion of Privacy is available to buy on Amazon.com and iTunes, and on streaming services.
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