In a rare and surprise move, Cardi B gives major props to Nicki Minaj for dominating the female rap game for over a decade.
After an almost year-long absence from publishing music, Cardi B has returned with an explicit and raunchy single titled “WAP,” which features fellow rapper Megan Thee Stallion. The video was released on YouTube on Thursday, August 6, at midnight. The track has already amassed over 27 million views, and it is receiving both positive and negative reviews surrounding the extremely explicit nature of the lyrics and the visuals. In the midst of this, Apple Music’s “Beats 1” segment decided that they just had to sit down with Cardi to dish about the making of the steamy video as well as her hiatus from music and her feelings about the music industry.
During the interview, Cardi took a quick trip back to the past, contemplating a time when female rap wasn’t as widespread as it is now.
“When I was six, seven, eight, there was a lot of different female rappers. And then there was a time that there was no female rappers at all,” she said. “I had to keep replaying songs from the early 2000s. Like, I had to keep replaying it, replaying it, replaying it because for a while there wasn’t no female rappers.”
However, that was before Nicki Minaj made her entrance onto the scene, cementing her rap queen status and opening doors for other female rappers to make their debut. Although Cardi did not mention Nicki directly by name, she praised Nicki for her endurance and success in dominating the rap game for many years.
“And then there was one female rapper that dominated for a very long time and she did pretty good…and been still dominating,” said Cardi.
Nicki Minaj and Cardi B have been sworn enemies since coming to blows following their collaboration on “MotorSport,” which saw Minaj revising her verse to remove the lyric where she name-dropped Cardi. Then there was the notorious altercation at a New York Fashion Week party back in September 2018, where Cardi threw her shoe at the “TROLLZ” rapper, prompting Nicki Minaj’s friend Rah Ali to attack Cardi. Things then popped off on social media, with both parties dragging each other. However, they then decided to leave the drama behind putting an end to the online bickering.
This is also something Cardi discussed during the Beats 1 interview as she highlighted the fact that female artistes are always pitted against one another.
“I feel like people be wanting to put female artists against each other,” she said. “It’s the people that be trying to do that sh*t. Every single time I feel like there’s a female artist that’s coming up, coming up, coming up and it’s getting they mainstream moment, I always see like little slick comments like, ‘Oh, they taking over your spot. They taking over this. They taking over that.’ And it just makes me feel like, ‘Damn, why it had to be like that?’ Because I actually like shorty music a lot.”
Cardi N appears to want to break free from that narrative as she becomes the body of unification within the female rap game. Aside from collaborating with Meg on “WAP,” Cardi also commissioned cameos from other female rappers such as Mulatto, Rubi Rose, and Suki Hana.
Watch the full interview below.
