Hi, everyone. Minus 20 Psychic Damage here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Cardi B album, Am I the Drama?

Rapper, songwriter, former reality star, Miss Cardi B. She is finally dropping her sophomore full-length LP here seven years after her debut, Invasion of Privacy, a trim and solid first album that, by no means was perfect, still had a pretty wide variety of timely bangers on it. It did feel like an official and successful graduation past her mixtape era, even if the viral "Bodak Yellow" ended up making the cut in the tracklist.

This project, this time for Cardi, was actually a pretty significant sea change in hip hop music, even if Cardi wasn't considered to be the most lyrical or technical spitter out there, because her success did, in a lot of ways, flip the hip hop hierarchy on its head. Not only did she manage to become a superstar within the genre, coming into it as a dancer and a media personality, but gaining the fame that she did broke this intergenerational gender fever that hip hop had been suffering from, one where the mainstream could seemingly only tolerate one popular female artist at a time.

And look, over the decades that it's existed, rap music has had a lot of influential and important female talent. But for a while, it felt like there was almost like a ceiling blocking the progression of anybody who wasn't technically the top girl at the time. And in the wake of Cardi's success, we actually saw this massive tidal wave of women rappers doing really well, commercially and artistically. Names that are so plentiful and relevant, I can't list all of them in this video. People like Ice Spice, Latto, Glorilla. And Cardi has even been known to collaborate with some of them. Most famously, Megan Thee Stallion, a Texas native with whom Cardi created her biggest single to date, "WAP" – or "Wet Ass Pussy".

And is it her biggest? If not, it's definitely big enough to technically bring this album up to platinum status upon week of release, because the final two songs on this record are singles that are four and five years old, respectively, and have collectively gone platinum over 10 times together. And in today's streaming consumption age, adding those old songs to this new album contributes to its overall album sales, even if the rest of the tracks on this record see only a fraction of the streams.

So commercially, the success of Am I the Drama? is pretty much in the bag now, but the cultural and artistic significance of it is still up in the air. I mean, it's not a controversial take to say that seven years is maybe just a bit too much time to wait for a new record from an artist of Cardi's caliber. I mean, when it comes to being in the mainstream, I think striking while the iron's hot is always going to be important to a degree.

And even "WAP"'s popularity, for as much of a reset culturally as that song was, it's washed out with the tide at this point. In addition to that, Cardi's creative progeny had been providing quite a bit of competition over the last five years. On top of that, more recent singles like the Jay-Z nod, "Imaginary Players", from this record, have failed to stir up anywhere near as much excitement or interest as those old songs.

That song also just felt like further confirmation of what Cardi does and does not do well as an artist, because for sure, she has a distinct voice, a brash delivery. She makes banger beat choices a lot of the time, has a lot of outlandish one-liners. But these characteristics are hard to show off when you're not doing much more than just painting within lines Hov drew up in 1996 '87. Why is she doing this? Is it because she's been around a while or she's from New York? It just feels like she's gesturing towards some rap snob appeal or veteran status that doesn't actually exist for her.

There are parts of the rest of this album, unfortunately, that also feel a bit like a fairy tale, like the opening moments of the album, which are loaded with this theatrical newscaster chatter about Cardi B being a controversial figure, but also brutal killings? Like her having something to do with one of the darkest chapters in music history? I mean, it is true: Cardi B is occasionally a controversial figure. But even in her most recent court appearances, there were more hijinks than there were instances of genuine shock.

I mean, don't get me wrong. I do think Cardi is a significant figure in music, and I love her unfiltered attitude. I love that she's funny. I love that she has a personality. But the tone of this opening track breaks with her typical level of self-awareness and her tendency to just not take herself too seriously, especially with Summer Walker on this track doing this really urgent theatrical performance as if the fate of the world just hangs in the balance here, strings and pianos and all.

To whatever degree people are talking shit about Cardi and her career at this point, it directly correlates with how long Cardi has had her fans waiting for this record. If anything, people have been awaiting her return while desperately attempting to tune out all of the headlines and drama that cropped up in the wake of her separating from her ex, Offset. If anything really would at this point bring Cardi back to her former glory, it would be a record that just returns us to regularly scheduled programming and reminds us of why we fell in love with Cardi to begin with.

And it seems like, to a degree, Am I the Drama? wants to do that. But at this point, it's not fully sure as to how to do it, so it just tries a little bit of everything to see what sticks.

Things in the tracklist get off to a pretty rocky start with the song "Hello", which is this spooky synth trap banger with several ideas worth of hooks. But Cardi and her collaborators just try all of them, from the "Hello" refrains to the "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah"s, and the "It be me" line starters. It's a lot of effort without a lot of focus.

The following "Magnet", though, tries with something a little bit punchier, but Cardi drops maybe one too many doo doo bars and makes the song difficult to stomach as a result, be it the Dalmatian line, or the A, B, C, D, E, F, G line. Even some of the bars she saves on the back end of the track for JT, formerly of City Girls, don't bite quite as hard as they could have.

From here, for a while in the tracklist, it just feels like anything goes, and the lack of a plan leads to a lack of memorable songs, maybe with the exception of "Bodega Baddie", as it's got all these rapid fire merengue rhythms, Spanish vocals, punchy samples. It's a track that really brings Cardi B back to her Dominican roots and is just one of the more thrilling highlights of the album.

But yeah, again, much of the first leg on this record just feels like Cardi is killing time, whether she's doing a very low-key Atlanta-type vibe on "Salute", which sounds like a Gunna track or Migos b-side. Or a snoozer with Kehlani, where it feels like Cardi is just trying to repeat as many lines as she can to get to the the song.

The real first emotional stunner to come in the tracklist, I think, is the song "Man of Your Word", which, I mean, going into this record, I think we all expected an Offset track or two, and this is one of them. In my opinion, it's handily the best, even though the presentation of this track is a very low key and very subtle. It's still a powerful moment emotionally, as Cardi lyrically goes over all of the years they spend together, the feelings of betrayal, all the regrets, the cheating, etc. The song even sees her wishing him the best and thinking of the various ways in which things could have turned out better. Again, thoughtful moment that is almost undercut by a few songs to follow that attempt to do a similar thing, but much worse, including one with Lizzo that interpolates Four Non Blondes' "What's Up". And yes, it is every bit as tasteless and tacky as you can possibly imagine.

Thankfully, deeper into the record, things do pick up a little bit with the song "Outside", though I would really say this is one of a few tracks on the record that could use a very forceful and amped feature. And then there's "Pretty and Petty", which is actually a hilarious BIA diss, a rapper who I mostly only know for consistently going at Cardi's neck for a while now. Even though the song here is very much a delayed response, it's very much a worthwhile response. I don't really see BIA coming back that effectively from this one.

I think "Better Than You" had the makings of another banger in this tracklist, but Cash Cobain turns up in the second half of the track for whatever reason with this AI-ass feature sounding lifeless and robotic as hell. The song "On My Back" is an attempt at a sex jam, but very little of it comes through as genuinely feeling sexy. Not only because vocally Cardi doesn't really have much in the way of finesse or subtlety, as it were, but there are also bars on the track that ruin the mood a bit, too, you could say: "Now, wherever you at is where I want to be / I'm on your dick, I want to hold it when you pee."

The rest of the record isn't amazing, but it's not a total loss. "Airtime" just feels like classic mixtape Cardi all the way. And "Principal"'s prominent Janet Jackson sample makes it one of the more fun tracks on the record, too.

Then the closing tracks, again, are "Up" and "Wet Ass Pussy". I still like those tracks. I still think they're fun. I think even "Up" has grown on me a bit in the last few years, or at least it sounds better and more lively than some of the more boring songs in this tracklist, that's for sure. But I'm sure for a lot of fans to have songs this old landing on this album and making up a bulk of its streams, it's a bit of a bittersweet inclusion, because if these songs weren't here, the overall quality of the album would be quite a bit lower.

Unfortunately, we got a very bloated, very inconsistent, delayed project here that didn't need to be anywhere near this messy and scatterbrained. And yet that just is what it is. After "WAP" came out, after "Up" came out, I wish we had gotten an album that was as trim and as punchy as Invasion of Privacy within a year of those two tracks dropping. That would have been the perfect and ideal moment to drop a record for Cardi. If things had played out that way, we would basically be in line to get the third album now, not the second record.

Sadly, this thing is far from Cardi's best work, and is really just not the blowout that her sophomore record had the potential to be given just how good Invasion of Privacy was. Hopefully, those issues with consistency and focus that Cardi suffered from on this project can be overcome on album three because honestly, I don't really know if Cardi's career can take another seven-year gap. I'm feeling a light to decent 4 on this record.

Anthony Fantano, Cardi B, Forever.