Cardi B topped the charts with “WAP,” but before she released her single with Megan Thee Stallion, she felt pressure to deliver another major hit.
Speaking with SiriusXM, the Grammy-winning rapper opened up about the anxiety she faced from the industry and the public to top her debut album Invasion of Privacy, which spawned a pair of No. 1 hits, “Bodak Yellow” and “I Like It.”
“I just felt like I was under a lot of pressure,” said the newly-single rapper. “Like if you don’t have like a super crazy smash, it’s like, ‘Oh you flop, flop, flop.’ The song could be like 2x platinum.”
Cardi feels she was not afforded the same opportunity as her male counterparts before being written off. “You’re always under pressure and then I feel like it’s not fair because there are male artists that will go two years without putting a fu**ing song out and they don’t be like, ‘Oh, you’re irrelevant. It’s over for you.’”
She admits that the pressure took a toll on her. “I didn’t put out songs for nine months and it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s irrelevant. She’s over. She’s a flop. We told you that.’ That type of shit started to get to me, like crush me.”
However, she refused to release something she wasn’t proud of. “I feel like I’m not gonna let that shit get to me to the point that I’m gonna put out a song that I’m not really in love with just ’cause.”
In the end, she proved her naysayers wrong. “WAP” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with 93 million U.S. streams, the biggest ever for a song in its first week of release.
