Out of all the labels Cardi B loves to wear and rap about, “drama queen” has become her favorite — and she wears it like royalty on her latest tour.
For a decade now, the cameras and headlines have followed the braggadocio rapper’s every move, every dig, every partner and every trial, like last year’s televised civil case, in which a jury cleared her of allegations that she attacked a security guard in 2018.
In the beginning of her career, the fast-lipped New Yorker might have found it to be an “invasion of privacy” (the name of her debut album in 2018). But seven years later, when she asks, “Am I the drama” on her latest album, Cardi does so with a wide smirk, knowing full well the answer.
Besides, doesn’t a little drama make for the best performance? That answer — as proven by Cardi’s big theatrics at United Center Saturday night — is a resounding yes.
Her two-hour musical smackdown started off with a literal bang: A chaotic explosion of fireworks set off in such force that it could have rendered the first few rows deaf and blind. “Hello, it’s me, hello I’m back,” Cardi declared in the opening song, dressed in a red-and-black trench coat with a blonde and purple wig like a devilish Cruella out to steal attention.
While the rapper needs no introduction, this was all about reintroduction. After seven long years between albums, and six years between headlining tours, Cardi B is back and she has a lot to get off her chest.
She did so in 37 nonstop songs — from the savage “Pretty and Petty” to the gloating “Money” — all while utilizing the macabre and defiant imagery of “Am I the Drama?” as a backdrop. Often zeroing in on the gaggle of black birds, it was an obvious statement to her detractors to “eat crow.”
Cardi has shared in interviews that the dark and dystopian themes that run through the album’s iconography are symbolic of something that died within her, as she entered into a new dawn of not giving any f---s. As she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, her “cockiness is
