Still, she’s the Cardi we’ve come to love and expect: wickedly funny, quick to laugh, able to make fun of herself. “I got a lot of shit on my mind, so I’m just fucking talking. Like, my life has been a fucking movie right now.” I ask her what’s going on. “Everything!”
The last time I’d seen Cardi, she was in her 20s. We both were. I was writing my first cover story for another magazine, a few months before the release of Invasion of Privacy, her landmark first album that, among other accolades, became the highest-certified female rap album of the century, and won her a Grammy for Rap Album of the Year. We had lunch at Tao, a see-and-be-seen restaurant in Manhattan, where I wrote in my notebook that she seemed particularly hungry and grumpy, and didn’t touch any alcohol. How strange, I thought. A few days later, she announced she was pregnant with her first daughter.
In the time since, I note to her when we sit down again, she’s gone from being a star to a total phenomenon, a mainstay in the culture, the hottest rapper to have on a feature, but, most notably, she’s had mad kids. Right now, they’re at home in New Jersey, but they were on Cardi’s mind. (During a break, Cardi could be heard responding confoundedly to her eldest child, Kulture, who was talking to her over FaceTime: “Did you call me bro?!”)
In addition to figuring out how she can gyrate in a chair without losing her balance, she’s also trying to decide what to do with her children while she’s on tour. Though Kulture accompanied her for several weeks on her first tour, so much has changed since then. “Kulture’s in school, and her school don’t play that shit,” Cardi says. We’re both leaning up against the makeup counter in her dressing room, a mess of fruit and candy and products from her Grow-Good line. She’s less concerned about Wave, a very swag four-year-old and her second child with her ex, Offset, missing class, but Wave takes his extracurricular sports very seriously, and Cardi doesn’t want him to miss out on something that he loves so that he can sit on a bus with her. Not to mention that the buses always smell like gas, which is not fun for anybody, least of all for kids. “So I just be like, How the fuck am I gonna make this shit fucking work?”
