Arts & Culture

SWAN | Cardi B’s Realness

By |

Yesterday, Cardi B made news when it was discovered that the artist has been charged with assault over a violent incident that occurred in a strip club in Queens and involved members of her entourage and two women who have allegedly had illicit affairs with Cardi B’s husband, Offset. According to a New York Times article about the matter, Cardi B supposedly “showed up at the Angels Strip Club on Aug.15 and confronted the sisters” when “her bodyguards and other members of her entourage attacked the bartenders with bottles and chairs, causing serious injury.”

Some qualifications and disclaimers are certainly due. As a white man, I recognize the limitations inherent in the true scope and relevance of any public, non-peer-reviewed discourse I might offer on the lives of black, female hip-hop artists. Nevertheless, as a student of musicology and cultural studies, these are topics that interest me, and I feel as though engaging in the attempt at discourse brings me closer to some sense of empathy towards the way other people experience the world. So, I turn to Cardi B.

In Cardi B’s defense, it is important to note that the details of this altercation at the strip club in August are merely alleged; none of us were there, of course, and so we don’t really know what went down.

Columns

PINERO | Cardi B and the Era of “Big Mood” Politics

By |

About thirty seconds into Cardi B’s first appearance on Love & Hip-Hop: New York, I joined her legion of loyal Instagram followers. She was animated, real and side-splittingly funny.  In two and a half years, I watched a former sex worker rocket past the glass ceiling of D-list reality TV (underneath which Latinx/Black women of humble beginnings are often confined) and onto the mainstage of American pop culture. As a woman of color, her explosive success is more than a pleasant surprise — it’s a delightful shock. I never thought I would see someone so boldly Afro-Latina, so proudly female and so blatantly hood be so widely embraced.