Cardi B Is Using Her Music, Her Business and Her Politics to Express Herself

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The Many Lives of Cardi B

A shape-shifter with talent and personality to spare, the rapper keeps finding new ways to express herself.

The Many Lives of Cardi B

A shape-shifter with talent and personality to spare, the rapper keeps finding new ways to express herself.

The rapper Cardi B, photographed in New York City on Sept. 9, 2026, wears a Chanel dress, chanel.com; Chanel High Jewelry bracelet, chanel.com; Tiffany & Co. ring, tiffany.com; David Webb earrings, davidwebb.com; and Giuseppe Zanotti shoes, giuseppezanotti.com.Credit...Photograph by Ilya Lipkin. Styled by Ian Bradley

By Emily Lordi

Emily Lordi is a professor at Vanderbilt University and a writer at large for T Magazine. Her book “Holding Lightning: The Life, Loves, and Art of Whitney Houston” was published last month.

Oct. 21, 2026

ONE SUNDAY IN late July, the drifting 20- and 30-somethings at Pacha, an outdoor venue in Brooklyn’s East Williamsburg, gathered themselves into a dense, expectant crowd shortly before Cardi B was scheduled to perform at 2 a.m. The drag queen Kevin Aviance kept asking if we were ready for the queen. D.J. SpinKing summoned us, bizarrely, to make some noise if we made “more than $200K.” Cardi had finished touring “Am I the Drama?,” her 23-track meditation on villainy and culpability, in the spring. This was a 30-minute set organized by a friend, not by her label, Atlantic Records; she would start the party and end it.

“What the [expletive] is going on?” she greeted us around 3 a.m.

She wore a pink leotard and leggings that showcased her implausible figure — thighs so wide they appear to be padded, tiny Barbie waist, bountiful butt — and a cute hostess hat that fell off during her opening song, “Hello.” She soon paused to remove her heels, walking around in stocking feet, at 5-foot-3, and patted her crotch, saying, “Cool it down!” She took a shot of Hennessy, eventually drinking straight from the bottle, which she passed into the crowd with the admonition that we not give one another mono. Yet after every lax interlude, she grew taut, gazing into the middle distance like a hunter. She rapped her signature 2017 boast “Bodak Yellow” — along with the crowd — as if pushing a brand-new single: “If I see you and I don’t speak / that means I don’t [expletive] with you.”

About two weeks later, on a Friday afternoon, hundreds of staff and their guests snaked through the corridors of the National Public Radio office in downtown Washington, D.C. Those attending Cardi’s Tiny Desk concert (part of the series in which musicians perform on a set the size of two cubicles) were mostly people of color, ranging in age from babies to senior citizens. Cardi, 34, arrived in a black peplum blazer showing minimal cleavage; beehive updo that one NPR employee compared to the Latin-pop icon Selena’s — her version of a respectable businesswoman touring an office in the nation’s capital.

“I’m nervous,” she told us by way of introduction. She was joined by a seven-piece band with two backup singers with whom she’d rehearsed for about a week. Late-night Cardi had been replaced by a vixen career girl, but both were determined to kill in performance. On “Hello,” Cardi fixed her game-time gaze on the camera and made manic claws of her talon-nailed hands to act out the “stress” she induced by stealing other people’s men. After a few turned-up tracks, the band segued to the breakup song “Man of Your Word.” “Oh, we gettin’ sad with it,” Cardi said, as if she were caught off guard by her own set list. “They got me thinking about my marriage” (to the Migos rapper Offset, whom Cardi divorced in 2024, and with whom she has three children). Yet she seemed genuinely overcome by the song, whose steel drum accompaniment creates a wobbly, miasmic feeling. “I believed you,” she pleaded, her voice breaking. “Act like I’m singing it for the first time,” she told us when they had to start it again. At Pacha, she’d run out the clock by twerking. Here, she concluded, “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming.”

It’s by now a cultural cliché to love Cardi for her authenticity. Perhaps no other star has so effectively synchronized the two meanings of “personality,” as a celebrity personage and the organic expression of a psyche. Unlike other celebrities, she has never come across as fake, because she hasn’t tried too hard to be liked. And we feel we know her because we’ve followed her rise from the charming Bronx instigator shooting Instagram videos in her local bodega to the underestimated rap aspirant during her 2015-17 stint on the reality show “Love & Hip Hop: New York” to the artist whose 2017 debut studio album, “Invasion of Privacy,” made Cardi — with her signature rasp, gothic humor and battle-ready flows — the first solo female act to win a Grammy for Best Rap Album.

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