Save this storySave this story
In an LA rehearsal studio in late January, Cardi B is watching a phalanx of dancers move around the room, rehearsing for Little Miss Drama, her ongoing two-month, 35-show tour. The rapper, dressed in an oversized silk bonnet and Uggs, is marking the moves, but her dancers are performing full-out, their cropped halter tops and durags dappled with sweat. Cardi stands on the edge of the room as the women straddle chairs backward, tightening their core muscles and wrapping their ankles around the back in order to control their slow descent to the ground. She wants to try, so two dancers spot her as she leans back, but she’s unable to balance her weight with just her arms. Cardi crumples to the ground. (This same thing happened during her Vegas show, but she played it off with a joke that it was caused by the government.) She looks, resignedly, at her fellow dancers. “You’re in your 20s, ain’t you?”
Schiaparelli dress and jacket. Grainne Morton earrings.
Though Cardi may not have total core control, at 33, she may have everything else: a history-making rap career, a largely sold-out tour, and a new business (Grow-Good, her hair-care line, out in April). She's also now a mother of four (she gave birth in November, though you'd never know just by looking at her). Still, signs creep in: She’s rapping along to “Thru Your Phone,” from her 2018 album Invasion of Privacy, but loses her place and groans loudly into the microphone. Her dancers practice an interlude without her, presumably built into the show to give her a water break, and Cardi watches, taking notice of the erotic noises that make up the soundtrack. She grimaces. “That’s too much moaning,” she complains, seemingly grossed out.
The energy is off. She needs a refresh, a gust of new energy, a reminder that she is both a working mother and a bad bitch. She needs, she suddenly realizes, to change her shoes. “That’s why I’m not feeling cunt, because of these fucking Uggs,” she says, walking back to her dressing room. A minute later, she returns wearing glittering fuchsia heeled boots, giving The Wizard of the Bronx. “Okay, Doroth-eisha!” Patientce Foster, her long-time creative director, shouts in approval.
“I just want to do everything now. I told myself I needed two years of being uncomfortable so I could be comfortable.”
It’s what Cardi needed. She’s back on the floor and back in the mood, twirling around with her choreographer Sean Bankhead; she’s strutting in front of the wall of mirrors, her silk bonnet flopping, blowing kisses to an imaginary crowd. It’s been seven years since her last tour, and she wants people to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. “I want to give my fans a good moment and have been pulling strings to make this shit happen, and it’s turning out beautiful.”
That also requires a tremendous amount of work. The only breaks she’ll get on Little Miss Drama are when she’s commuting from one city to another. As she’s revving up for it to begin, her days are filled with long rehearsals, “100 gazillion meetings,” and doctors’ appointments. Recently, she tells me, a physician told her that her hormone levels were too high and she needed to slow down. I asked if she thought she had time to rest. “No, I can’t,” she says. “Not this year.” It is January.
“I just want to do everything now,” she says, as we talk in her dressing room. “I told myself I needed two years of being uncomfortable so I could be comfortable. Things just change every single fucking day. And it’s like, This is your moment. This is the time to do it.”
Throughout our interview, Cardi seems self-conscious about vocalizing her anxieties, not about the anxieties themselves, but there are so many of them spewing out of her. In the lead-up to the tour, she’d been doing her research, attending Madonna’s and Beyoncé’s concerts. As an artist, she knows her strengths and weaknesses. “That was way crazy,” she says of Beyoncé’s show. “That’s way removed from what I could do,” and from what her fans are expecting from her, specifically, a really good vibe. Which is why these rehearsals have gotten Cardi particularly stressed: She has to face one of her weaknesses: dancing. “I hate choreography; it’s like math to me,” she admits. She’s bare of makeup and nails, her lips pouty. “I don’t have much of a rhythm like that. I could rap all day. But dancing is like, ugh.”
Patou jacket and dress. Jennifer Behr earrings.
Still, she’s the Cardi we’ve come to love and expect: wickedly funny, quick to laugh, able to make fun of herself. “I got a lot of shit on my mind, so I’m just fucking talking. Like, my life has been a fucking movie right now.” I ask her what’s going on. “Everything!”
The last time I’d seen Cardi, she was in her 20s. We both were. I was writing my first cover story for another magazine, a few months before the release of Invasion of Privacy, her landmark first album that, among other accolades, became the highest-certified female rap album of the century, and won her a Grammy for Rap Album of the Year. We had lunch at Tao, a see-and-be-seen restaurant in Manhattan, where I wrote in my notebook that she seemed particularly hungry and grumpy, and didn’t touch any alcohol. How strange, I thought. A few days later, she announced she was pregnant with her first daughter.
In the time since, I note to her when we sit down again, she’s gone from being a star to a total phenomenon, a mainstay in the culture, the hottest rapper to have on a feature, but, most notably, she’s had mad kids. Right now, they’re at home in New Jersey, but they were on Cardi’s mind. (During a break, Cardi could be heard responding confoundedly to her eldest child, Kulture, who was talking to her over FaceTime: “Did you call me bro?!”)
“That’s why I’m not feeling c*nt, because of these f*cking Uggs.”
In addition to figuring out how she can gyrate in a chair without losing her balance, she’s also trying to decide what to do with her children while she’s on tour. Though Kulture accompanied her for several weeks on her first tour, so much has changed since then. “Kulture’s in school, and her school don’t play that shit,” Cardi says. We’re both leaning up against the makeup counter in her dressing room, a mess of fruit and candy and products from her Grow-Good line. She’s less concerned about Wave, a very swag four-year-old and her second child with her ex, Offset, missing class, but Wave takes his extracurricular sports very seriously, and Cardi doesn’t want him to miss out on something that he loves so that he can sit on a bus with her. Not to mention that the buses always smell like gas, which is not fun for anybody, least of all for kids. “So I just be like, How the fuck am I gonna make this shit fucking work?”
Still, they’re the reason why she works so hard in the first place; she wants to ensure her legacy, to provide for her family, to make them proud of her. “I want to be the grandma that everybody come to the crib, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, my grandma was that bitch.’”
Cardi is proof-positive that the best jobs are monetizing what you’re already good at. In Cardi’s case, that’s getting people to like her. Thirteen years ago, before becoming a world-famous rap star, she was an Instagram-famous personality. She began posting videos of herself regaling the camera with tales from the strip club, and goofy, hood takes on human behavior. Eventually, masses of people started tuning in. In one particularly viral clip, she showed her recipe for a hair mask: avocado, eggs, and mayonnaise. She released the video during the tail end of the natural-hair, YouTube-channel era, when trying out tons of expensive products in the name of research was du jour. Cardi’s all-natural, already-in-the-kitchen alternative caught people’s attention—as did her long, healthy hair, which she had spent years taking care of after some experiences that went awry (bleaching her own streaks, and a haircut so bad that her mother went back to the salon to curse the stylist out).
Issey Miyake dress. Graff jewelry.
Even now, she’s passionate about the benefits that produce can have on our bodies, sermonizing in front of a bag of pink and red Starburst wrappers. Onions, she says, are one of the best things you can use for your hair. They could help rebuild breakage, may help your hair grow, and they’re cheap. “Onions!” She’s at an imaginary pulpit. She punches the rest of that sentence: “Do not! Make! Your! Hair! Stink!” And as with any sermon, there is a lesson to impart. “I tried garlic…” she says, a beat later. She pauses for a long time, then turns serious. “Do not put garlic in your hair.”
Grow-Good doesn't have garlic, but it does include many of the same household staples—avocado, coconut, and rosemary oils—that Cardi has always used in her hair. The line also has different formulations for different types of hair, something Cardi knows well: Her hair is different from her mother's, and now, her daughter's hair is different from her own. Which is why she took the formulation of the new hair-care line so seriously. No matter what, she knows, now that she’s an entrepreneur, her reputation is on the line. “People are gonna buy my shit just off my name, but are you gonna come back?” she asks. “It’s about coming back.”
“A bad song is not gonna f*ck up your life…[But] imagine you put some sh*t into your hair, and you damage it, and I’m responsible?!”
The stakes are different than they are with music. She’s had songs not perform well, but there’s no choice other than to keep going and move on to the next. But messing up somebody’s hair? That’s next level. “A bad song is not gonna fuck up your life,” she says. “Imagine you put some shit into your hair, and you damage it, and I’m responsible?!” Never.
She agrees with me that, through it all, the most radical shift in her life has been becoming a mother. The rapper is still, famously, a regular-degular girl from the Bronx. Now that she’s a multiplatinum superstar, it doesn’t mean that she no longer gets nervous about performing on live TV. “When I have a camera on me, I get really nervous. On tour, I feel like I have a safety blanket because it’s my fans.” Or that she feels totally comfortable around other celebrities: “I’m shy with all of them, it don’t matter if you big or small.”
On motherhood: “Something changes in you, and that’s all moms.”
Her group of closest friends has more or less remained the same, and that’s what keeps her the same, despite the glitz and glamour of her life. The welcome transformation has been motherhood. “Something changes in you, and that’s all moms,” she says. “Even a fucking dog will change as soon as they become a mom. They don’t got to learn it. Just…” she looks at her phone screen, her kids in the background. “A new you is born.”
Michael Kors coat. Saule earrings.
Family, though, is a tricky thing. A week after we talked, including about her then-boyfriend, and father of her fourth child, Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs, the breakup rumors began. There was talk of relationship issues, too, when Cardi and I first met. And it persisted for years: She and Offset got engaged in 2017, and she filed for divorce (for the second time) in 2024. But up close now, I could feel the difference: She’s grown, a woman certain of her self-worth and with a smaller tolerance for bullshit. Am I the Drama?, her most recent album, is chockablock with the sort of swag, confident, I’m-a-bad-bitch-with-a-fat-ass hits we expect from Cardi (as well as many songs we’ve already heard, including singles like “WAP,” released over five years ago). But the chorus from one song, “Principal,” a track featuring Janet Jackson (need any more proof that Cardi is a star?), kept rattling around in my head when I saw how swiftly the relationship with Diggs seemed to have ended: “If you ain’t on the same shit, watch me lane switch; I’m too sexy to be lonely and too grown to be played with.”
Twelve hours after her rehearsal, she’s preparing to film a commercial in another LA studio. Friends are sprawled out on the couch, or coming in and out of the room to show off their outfits, or sneaking mimosas into coffee cups. It feels the same as any group of girls getting ready to go out. Tokyo Stylez, Cardi’s hairstylist, brushes out a sleek brown hairpiece, and Erika la’ pearl, her makeup artist, dabs at Cardi’s face while the rapper scrolls through her phone, controlling the music. The three had recently appeared on RuPaul’s Drag Race together, and the contestants were just as excited to see the hair and makeup team as they were the star herself. They’ve all worked together for years, and they’re a certain type of family, like comrades, her sisters, the three of them weathering all types of trials and tribulations in front of each other over the years. Cardi says they have all transitioned in and out of various stages of life together, and they’re deeply bonded because of that.
“When I have a camera on me, I get really nervous. On tour, I feel like I have a safety blanket because it’s my fans.”
“It’s a cunty language that we speak,” Cardi tells me, and not everyone automatically understands that. By way of explanation, she cites the meme of a panicked Kathy Griffin saying, “I need to talk to a gay person.” Her variation would be, “I need to talk to a cunt,” and for her, that’s Erika and Tokyo, both trans women. The three of them have bonded over beauty in all of its connotations: laser treatments, looking snatched, falling in love, doing too much, MC Debra’s Instagram. “Sometimes, I have a little jokey joke, and only the cunts get it.”
The girls who get it, get it. The girls who don’t, best of luck. But that’s what family is, the people who speak the same language as you, who know you, who only need a look or a single word to know how you’re feeling. Those relationships are what’s kept Cardi in the driver’s seat.
I ask her if there’s anything she would change over the past few years. “There’s a lot of business moves that I wish I was a little bit wiser, but I feel like I’m doing everything at the right time,” she says, cheesing big. “Well, maybe I should have put out my album a little bit before. But you know what? Everything is great.”
Cardi B Reacts to TikTok Trends
Cardi B goes down the TikTok rabbit hole to check out some popular trends! Watch as Cardi tries out tattoo baby hairs, taste tests the Japanese cheesecake hack, tries the credit card grabber tool and much more.
