She’s brash, she’s loud, and America is all in for her special brand of sass, from online feuds to strip club brawls. But when Cardi B accepted her first Grammy award—making rap history in the process—the 26-year-old had the crowd falling in love with her softer side.
On Sunday night in Los Angeles, the unstoppable Bronx native cemented her spot in the upper echelons of hip-hop as the first woman solo artist to win a Best Rap Album Grammy.
And she accepted the trophy with signature, unfiltered charm.
“The nerves are so bad. Maybe I need to start smoking weed,” she quipped, to laughs and applause from the glitzy gala set.
Visibly shaking, she spoke of the odds being stacked against her as she raced to complete her debut album Invasion of Privacy while pregnant with her first child.
She clutched her rapper husband, Offset, later turning to him: “You husband, thank you.”
The touching vignette was a far cry from the larger-than-life image of the reigning queen of rap, who had earlier gyrated through a sexually-charged performance in leopard thigh-highs and peacock-style feathers.
Born Belcalis Almanzar to a Dominican father and Trinidadian mother, Cardi B’s unchartered rise to fame sparked during her days as a stripper when she carved out a social media personality on platforms including Instagram.
Posting videos that saw her wax poetic on everything from cheating lovers to the qualities of the pancake chain restaurant IHOP, Cardi snagged a spot on the reality series Love & Hip Hop, further amplifying her image.
“Hey, America, washpoppin’?” she said in her intro video for the show. “You might know me as that annoying dancer on social media that be talking hella crazy, with the long nails and the big ol’ titties, but I’m just a regular, degular, shmegular girl from the Bronx.”
And thus the New Yorker began clocking her rapid ascent to stardom: as her profile grew, Cardi in 2015 gave up stripping to give rap a go.
It was a bold gamble given her lack of experience, but her love of spectacle and fast-talking style helped ensure it paid off.
After releasing a few mixtapes she found runaway success with her breakthrough 2017 megahit “Bodak Yellow”—a foreboding track with skittering beats whose lyrics revolve heavily around her stripping past.
The song smashed the charts, overtaking pop princess Taylor Swift to snag number one on the Billboard Hot 100—the first woman rapper to take the top spot since legend Lauryn Hill did so in 1998.
The internet celebrity turned bonafide rap star then dropped her album Invasion of Privacy—the work that captured this year’s top rap Grammy—in 2018 to critical and commercial acclaim, assuring Cardi a seat at the table in the male-dominated world of hip-hop.
Cardi B has hinted she will drop a new album in 2019, capitalizing on a year of runaway success.
But no matter what comes next, there is little doubt Cardi from the Bronx will keep building her brand where she began: speaking to her fans directly, and keeping it real.
