Music Review: Cardi B Up

Cardi B
“Up”

RAP
By the looks of it, Cardi B’s sky-high production budget has stayed intact since “W.A.P.” That titanic single was parental-advisory-warning-required tribute to female sexuality, accompanied by a music video in which she and co-conspirator Megan Thee Stallion strut in a gated mansion. Her follow-up, “Up,” features equally opulent displays. It begins with Cardi as a “grieving” widow, stamping her Louboutins on a statue’s chest—“R.I.P. 2020,” a placard reads—then dancing in cheerleader-like formation and swapping tongues with other hot women in a giant silver oyster. In a wink, perhaps, to “W.A.P,” she flaunts a vibrator while licking her lips. But for “Up,” Cardi wanted to return to the original inspiration behind her debut mixtape, “gangster violence” and Chicago drill. If “W.A.P.” was “too sexy,” in her own words, this is her “hood song.”

“Up”’s very catchy main refrain—which Cardi B has been accused of ripping off—is not a sexual innuendo; it’s about having unsettled beef. “If it’s up, then it’s up, then it’s up, then it’s stuck,” Cardi repeats in the chorus. The track is a tight and unsurprisingly funny dismissal of detractors, “bitches” whose “breath smell like horse sex,” who call her ugly while their boyfriends are secretly trying to seduce her. Cardi is skilled at these types of brusque taunts. She raps over a foreboding bassline and the clinks of what sounds like the Triggerman beat, but her taut delivery drives the song: “I said my face bomb, ass tight/Racks stack up Shaq height.” “Up” has Cardi’s characteristic self-assurance and instantly quotable one-liners—it’s a solid showing.
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