Book Club Week 4: Invasion of Privacy by Cardi B

This is the most recent album we've done so far, hoping people enjoyed it! I'd never listened to this album before last week, Cardi B isn't my normal type of Hip Hop. Overall, this is the first album we've done for these threads that I thought was just kind of mediocre for me.

Started off strong, Get Up 10's beat has me moving and starts off pretty interesting. Goes a bit off the rails topic wise as the song goes on but I still liked it. This is sort of the direction of the whole album. The entire album has the hardest beats, makes me want to put some subs in the trunk and drive around. Also there is Be Careful, which has a whole different, lighter vibe to the beat that was a breath of fresh air when it came on the first time. There is something to be said for Cardi's cadence and voice too. She could probably rap some goofy shit and still sound good doing it. I don't know if this is a skill you can train or if you have to be born with it but she has it.

Besides Get Up 10, I think my favorite tracks were probably Be Careful, Thru Your Phone and Bickenhead. Thru Your Phone was for sure the most interesting song to me. The topic, the hook and the emotion expressed really worked for me.

Least favorite tracks were Best Life and Money Bag. I really did enjoy Chance's verse on Best Life, but I have a soft spot for Chance. Money Bag is just boring. It probably could have been saved if the beat went as hard as some of the earlier tracks on this album but here we are. Honestly, the entire album was just less interesting after Be Careful.

My whole thing with this album is that a lot of it is so uninteresting topic wise. Sometimes she brings up something interesting, like talking about being embarrassed by her teeth on Best Life and the whole start to Get Up 10's, but otherwise she isn't saying anything a million other rappers hadn't said before. I guess that is the nature of making an album aiming for commercial success, you are probably going to stick to what has been proven to work.

Question for the end to build off of something I mentioned further up, did anybody else feel this album was really front loaded? I know artists frequently start off an album with the stronger tracks but I can't figure out if I was just getting bored with the album or if this was a really bad case of it. I personally think Cardi is just an artist who works best on an individual song and can't string together a whole album.

Damn, I reran it just to see... didn't age as well as I thought it would. I didn't like it at first, loved it after I heard Bodak Yellow for the thousandth time and that style started to grow on me, and now it's just not living up to that time I liked it I guess.

but a few months after this shit released, it was fantastic. She must have been hyped when those videos of mfers in subway stations getting buck to her music started showing up on the internet.

I already knew that this was not a style of hip-hop that I enjoy. So I went into this with low expectations and I think I can say my expectations were met lol.

It felt like Bodak Yellow was supposed to be one of the highlights of the album and I can see the appeal there but that one is not for me.

Two songs that I kind of liked were Be Careful and I Like It. Be Careful was a nice change of pace from the rest of the album and it had an interesting beat. And I Like It was just too much fun with the booming bass over the "I like it like that" sample.

Other than those two tracks and a few absurd lines from Cardi that made me crack a smile there wasn't much else I liked from this album.