Here’s What You Need To Understand About Cardi B’s New Album

Sex, money and power are three things you’re not meant to want as a woman. And if you do want them, heaven forbid you actually talk about it publicly. No, sweetie. You’re meant to go about your quest for orgasms, authority and financial prosperity quietly, remember? Lol. It’d be funnier if it weren’t still so deeply embedded in our societal psyche.

We know better and many of us are doing better, but with the release of her debut album Invasion of Privacy, Cardi B is shouting the gospel of her better way loud and clear for anyone in the back who hasn’t been taking notes. Please pick up your pen.

As the name suggests, the album invites us into her world; the one that the Twitterati have so eagerly encouraged, criticised and speculated over since we realised that Cardi B is way more than a straight-talking one-hit wonder. In a concise 13 songs, we get a no-holds barred listen into the life of a woman who demands the holy trinity of sex, money and power that’s typically reserved for men. Welcome to Cardiville; where bad bitches want shit and then go get it for themselves.

Make no mistake, Cardi B really does make money moves. We all know the bones of her famed rags-to-riches story pretty well by now: she went from stripping to social media stardom which was quickly followed by a two-season stint on reality TV show Love & Hip Hop before coming along and dropping the Bodak Yellow bomb in our eager, bop-hungry laps a little later. One of the brilliant things about Cardi, and the journey that we’ve watched these last couple of years, is that she’s comfortably open about having zero qualms about chasing the cash: ‘I’m gonna get this bag because I don’t know if it’s going to be here tomorrow’, she told Beats 1 Radio.

These days Cardi is out here spilling 300Kon the set for her upcoming Coachella appearance, even though she’s apparently earning just 70K per day for the pleasure of being there. But it’s cool because she’s got that kind of dollar and she’s more than able to spend it. ‘Get money, go hard’, she raps on the albums first song, Get Up Ten. ‘Only person in my fam to see six figures’, she adds. Gucci, Louboutin and Fendi all get multiple shout outs to illustrate the life she’s happy to brag about living now, and the refrain is consistent. You can’t get through 30 seconds of any of the album’s songs without being hit in the face with Cardi’s ‘have money, will spend it’ attitude, and it’s really hard not to be here for it. She’s unashamedly, unapologetically thirsty for cash and the ‘Get Rich Or Die Trying’ attitude that has so long reigned supreme in the world of ‘aspirational’ rap lyrics, has long needed to return to a female mouthpiece.

Then there’s sex. It’s one of the crucial pillars of hip-hop literacy that Cardi B is hungry for too and in Invasion, her vagina holds as much of a resounding presence as her bank account. In Bodak Yellow Cardi’s ‘pussy glitter’ might be gold, but in one of the stand out tracks I Do, a perfect collaboration with SZA, Cardi let’s us all know that her ‘pussy so good I said my own name during sex’. Let's take a minute to imagine that scenario playing out in our comparably vanilla, missionary-bound sex lives...

It’s assertive, it’s demanding and it’s irrevocably about sex from and for the female gaze. Much like the great women of rap who’s shoulders she stands upon, Cardi subverts the tired narrative of rapper boys bragging about dipping their dicks in plethoras of hoes and playfully demands sexual attention of her own. The threesome with Rihanna and Chrissy Teigen that Cardi suggests in She Bad? That's for her and no one else.

The album is not without its vulnerability, but it's all underpinned with an inherent sense of control and affirmation. Cardi’s most tender moments come when she tells us 'Yeah, my heart is like a package with a fragile label on it' in Be Careful, or when she touches on the agony of finding out that you’re being cheated on in Thru Your Phone (‘I went through your phone last night / It’s killin’ me, killin’ me, killin’ me, oh’). In true Bardi style, though, they're juxtaposed by her characteristic wit and proactive acknowledgement of the fact that deep down, the ball is in her court if she decides it is. The lyrics 'I could've did what you did to me to you a few times ... But that's not my M.O., I'm not that type of bitch' and 'I'ma make a bowl of cereal with a teaspoon of bleach /Serve it to you like, "Here you go, n*gga, bon appétit"' follow respectively.

Cardi B is in on the joke, and the joke is anyone who thinks that they have any place criticizing or threatening her hard earned entitlement to sex, money and power. Her boobs? She'll tell you that they're the only fake thing about her. Her crooked teeth? She earned a load of money and paid to fix them up. She doesn't give a shit what we think because she's going to tell us about it anyway, and she's going to tell us while she dominates a sphere that requires that level of assertion to be as successful as she is. ‘I think us bad bitches is a gift from God’, she raps. And damned be anyone who thinks otherwise.

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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.