Cardi B: "There are many female rappers out there who are not as judged as I am"

You know her name, now it's time for you to know the story behind the singer willing to follow the tradition, while writing her legend.

BY JOAN ESCUTIA

(Courtesy of Vogue Mexico)

At the end of 1998, when the world was anticipating the arrival of a new and uncertain millennium, Lauryn Hill debuted at number one on Billboard with the first single from "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", which would be her debut album after a successful career with the Fugees. The song, aptly titled 'Doo Woop (That Thing)', was a leap into a new era of women in hip hop., with a lyric that made reference to her presence in the genre not as an appendage to the rest of the men whose rhymes held a kind of monopoly since the golden age of rap, but as a true artist who had gotten there on her own merits. . Nineteen years later, in the fall of 2017, an artist managed to repeat her feat and, since then, she has shown on multiple occasions that this force remains as active as in those years and perhaps more fertile than ever.

"I just want to continue the tradition," says Cardi B for the cover of Vogue Mexico and Latin America for the month of September, "I want to have quality, exactly like them." She refers not only to the legacy of the aforementioned Lauryn Hill, but also to the path paved by other women in the hip hop universe such as Missy Elliot, Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah and a handful of artists who managed to make feminine rhymes a banner more than an accompanying accessory. 'The reason why they are always mentioned is because they are timeless icons and that is what I want to become. One of the gifts I want to give people is quality and originality'.

“I am naturally a person with flavor. My roots give me a lot of attitude”.

'Bodak Yellow' is the song with which Belcalis Almánzar achieved his first place on that popularity list on his own, a piece in which that quality and originality are perfectly well represented. If for Hill's time the samplers from the golden age of soul were the main source, for Cardi B it is the hi-hat, the synthesizers and the deep basses derived from trap, that subgenre of hip hop in which the experiences of a street infested with illegality are the main inspiration. The mirror is almost magical: Cardi B is also one of the most accurate representations of a culture that has forged the personality of the millennium in which we live.

The piece was the first single from 'Invasion of Privacy', Cardi B's debut album that would come after a couple of apprentice mixtapes titled 'Gangsta Bitch Music' and in which she demonstrated, in a way as ambitious as it was effective, that everything what had happened before had been firm steps to get there. There are also references to the history of the genre as well as to its Caribbean roots that have always accompanied and forged it. With a Dominican father and a Trinidadian mother , her life was full of discrepancies from the beginning. "Growing up with all this Caribbean heritage was confusing for me," she says, recalling the times when her coexistence was divided between diasporic cultures in the United States.

'My mother's family always lived away from us because we were in the city. But my dad's family was always close. I used to go to my grandmother's house very often with my cousins ​​and I always felt confused because it was very difficult to understand as a child, I wondered how come my skin color doesn't look like my cousins? When I grew up I understood the difference between color, hair texture, etc. and that made me appreciate how I looked more.'

Today Cardi B proudly carries a Caribbean heritage that becomes palpable in each of her movements as an artist. Not just musically, the way he talks, the way he walks and the way he interacts are steeped in a tradition that can hardly be called Western. 'Now that I travel the world I see how important it is to have a lot of Caribbean heritage because I am naturally a person with flavor. My roots give me a lot of attitude. I feel that Caribbean people are raised in a very strict home structure and the older I get, the more I see it.'

It is a special discipline that has injected her career with a formality that has led her to do more and more memorable things. 'I don't know if music has changed me, I feel that making music has changed the way I make music,' he says about the theory, 'I take my time with it better, I make sure I pronounce the words better, say the words better. things. I take more time. I used to make music for fun, but I feel like it's not like that now because now I do it much more seriously.' The proofs are there: since 'Invasion of Privacy' –and the number of singles that kept it in constant reproduction– Cardi has released songs that in one way or another have shaped the musical sound of the last five years.

Cardi B is a careful listener. 'Thanks to Caribbean music I perfectly understand where some sounds come from', she says. 'The other day I played a song to someone who told me 'that dembow beat is everywhere' and I replied 'that's not dembow , that's funk and it's Brazilian'. Some people aren't that familiar with Caribbean culture and wouldn't understand.' It is an ear that developed from a very early age, when her grandmother played those songs that were part of the first Latin American revolutions in music. And, while Cardi's curiosity towards those beats would develop later, the seed kept growing.

'When I was young and my grandmother played a lot of Latin music in Spanish, I didn't love it because it was music from the 60s or 70s and I wanted to listen to more new things. I wanted to listen to hip hop or Shakira, something that was newer. But when I grew up I was able to appreciate the sounds. When you grow up you realize that many artists sample music from the 60s, 70s and 80s, music that when you are little you don't want to listen to much. But once you grow up you can appreciate it.'

Growing up in a place like the Bronx in New York also gave her a special character, one that derives from the bravery of all the identities that came before her and shaped the region's way of life. Today Cardi B is a personality known for her war attitude, an artist who is not concerned with pleasing the rest of the people around her, but with showing that a lifetime dedicated to fighting can also become art. 'There are a lot of female rappers out there who aren't judged as much as I am. I have no room to fail, I can't lose.'

Hence, his work reaches beyond music and is well documented. Not only did she appear in Hustlers alongside Jennifer Lopez as an actress, but she has also been the producer of her own television series, creator of a clothing brand, and creative director of projects that have taken her message to places as unexpected as necessary. 'I am a very creative person and I don't just want to show my creativity in music, I am a complete person,' she assures her passionately. 'I have a vision in my visuals, in my music videos. I have a vision of how I would like my own film to be. I have a vision of how I would like to do my TV show. I have a vision in my personal fashion. All of that complements me because I'm an artist, not just a rapper.'

Many things fit into her life as an artist and perhaps some of her greatest achievements, in her eyes, have to do with fashion. Designs by Thierry Mugler, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo and Thom Browne have fallen on his body, something he describes as amazing. 'I've always felt that being a woman of color and being someone who doesn't come from a wealthy family or not being a nepobaby , it's always going to be harder to get into the spaces that I want to be in. But I'm thankful that my love of fashion has taken me to all those places,' she says proudly. 'The journey has been long but at the same time it has been sweet. I've wanted to walk the shows since 2016 and I remember sitting in the fourth row at my first show .fashionable, I was very excited. I have worked on myself to the point of constantly sitting next to Anna Wintour and having conversations with her. It's an amazing thing. It's something that's in you, so when you do it right, you're rewarded.'

'All the time I've felt rejected [in fashion]. But when there are people who don't want to dress you or don't want to work with you, you have to prove to them that you will make them regret turning you down. When they repent and then come back, the scales flip and now they are the ones who have to prove to me why I should have their product in my body. Now they have to come up with an amazing design and, let me tell you, I'm very picky, honey.'

They are achievements to which she was always destined. Her artistic life was born in the public eye and her talents were noticed by thousands of people thanks to the internet and social networks, which she calls "a blessing and a curse at the same time." Since then and with the fame that she has accumulated, her interaction with them has become more and more complicated. 'I think there has been a revolution in social media. People today have become more sensitive, but also more brutal,' she notes, 'When I became famous and started using them, I didn't feel like people cared so much about artists. I felt like they cared but now it's like people can't wait for an artist to say or do something they don't like or find out who they're dating. I remember that in my twenties, when I started using the internet,

The perception does not come from spontaneous generation, many of the controversies in which it has been involved stem from an increasingly close interaction with the audience, a premise that has led pseudo-fans to violently jump the line between spectator and artist. 'I think they call it 'stan culture'. Has it become worse because of the internet or has it always been like this but we never saw it because we didn't have internet? Imagine how many fans invade your life or even non-fans. Just like with Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, but we never saw the seriousness of that because we couldn't since we didn't have social media.'

All of those reflections have led her to where she is now, just weeks after launching Jealousy in collaboration with her husband Offset, a member of the Migos group. "My husband and I wanted to do a song like this after the haters wouldn't stop talking about us," she says of a piece so visceral that it can only come from experience. 'There are many people who always tell us things, that they are attacking us all the time and we wanted to take all that weight off our shoulders. We were too tired of responding to people on the internet and we decided we better put it to music'. The song is part of a series of sporadically released singles that lead directly to the next Cardi B album the world has been waiting years for.

'I'm not going to release any more collaborations, I'm going to release my next solo single. Right now I'm working on the cover art and ideas for the next record because it's definitely coming up. Everyone always tells me I should put the record out now, they did when I released Wap [with Megan Thee Stallion] and when I released Up , but I always let them know I'm not going to wait long after all these singles. So stay tuned because it's coming out very soon,' she assures. 'I also have plans in the world of cinema. In fact I have plans to do as much as I can: fashion, branding , I want to do it all, honey.'

Today more than ever Cardi B's future looks promising. Even more because of certain influences that remained unknown and that he now decides to glimpse: 'Mexican music has been an important part of my life. I love Ana Gabriel, Luis Miguel, Rocío Durcal, who is not Mexican, but she is practically an icon of Mexican music. They are artists that I love and I love them'. It is a closeness that we did not see coming: "There are many Mexican soap operas that I watched when I was young and from which I learned lessons of love," he says.

'I'm not going to release any more collaborations, I'm going to release my next solo single. Right now I'm working on the cover art and ideas for the next record because it's definitely coming up. Everyone always tells me I should put the record out now, they did when I released Wap [with Megan Thee Stallion] and when I released Up , but I always let them know I'm not going to wait long after all these singles. So stay tuned because it's coming out very soon,' she assures. 'I also have plans in the world of cinema. In fact I have plans to do as much as I can: fashion, branding , I want to do it all, honey.'

Today more than ever Cardi B's future looks promising. Even more because of certain influences that remained unknown and that he now decides to glimpse: 'Mexican music has been an important part of my life. I love Ana Gabriel, Luis Miguel, Rocío Durcal, who is not Mexican, but she is practically an icon of Mexican music. They are artists that I love and I love them'. It is a closeness that we did not see coming: "There are many Mexican soap operas that I watched when I was young and from which I learned lessons of love," he says.