Southern Plug Magazine: Leaders of the New School ft Remy Ma Volume 2 Issue 1 C | Page 19

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 six-
pack, 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