CARDI B ENGINEERED INSTAGRAM FAME INTO REALITY TV STARDOM INTO A POPPIN’ RAP CAREER. NOW SHE’ S LEARNING TO JUGGLE EVERYTHING THAT COMES WITH IT.
MONEY MOVES
BY: RAWIYA KAMEIR To put it in her own indelicate words, Cardi B really has to take a shit. She’ s curled up in the backseat of a black Denali that has been tasked with delivering us over the Hudson River, from midtown Manhattan to her apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey. It’ s a 30-minute drive on a good day, but the rainy Monday afternoon traffic is moving too slow for Cardi’ s lunch. The meal— her go-to Nobu trio of rock shrimp, an eel avocado roll, and ceviche, which she eats with the aid of chopstick helpers— is, she says,“ playing peek-a-boo with [ her ] asshole.” Laughing, she repeats the complaint a little more urgently, to the delight of our middle-aged driver, who seems curious about the big-mouthed, big-assed, big-boobed, red-haired girl who’ s clearly the star of this ride and probably a star somewhere else, too. Cardi is decidedly un-puritanical when it comes to her body, and she prattles as matter-of-factly about her digestion as she does about the mosquitos that went to war on her legs in Dubai a couple of days ago(“ 17 million of them motherfuckers”), the freedom of having her natural hair out today(“ I swear it felt like there was a roach up in there”), and the imperceptible pooch she intends to remedy by erecting a stripper pole in her living room(“ Yo, I’ m telling you, when I was dancing I used to have a sixpack, yo”). The next day, at a style fitting for this story, she peels off a pair of leggings and bares her vagina to a room of strangers. Does she want a pair of panties?“ Um … no.” It’ s not quite that Cardi is unfiltered. There is very much a filter, actually, a strategic self-censoring that keeps private the things she doesn’ t want to share. But when it comes to the mechanics of existing, and thriving, as a human being, she’ s unashamed, unpolished, unapologetic— a stream-of-consciousness genius. That quality is what has landed Cardi precisely here: jetlagged in an UberBLACK, with a sleeveless, knee-length black-and-white fur on her body and a pair of fur-lined Gucci mules on her feet