Former gangster and stripper Cardi B makes Lady Gaga look like a nun
SHE is the plastic-surgery loving stripper-turned-rapper named after her favourite tipple and possibly the most controversial female pop star to come out of the USA.
Cardi B, the charts’ latest superstar, makes meat-dress-wearing Lady Gaga and Katy Perry look like nuns and has already lived a wilder life than Madonna — and she’s only 25.
Her single Bodak Yellow was a huge hit in the States last year, knocking Taylor Swift off the top spot to spend three weeks at No1 in September.
Last week she smashed into the UK Top Ten, with her debut album Invasion Of Privacy going straight in at no six. And her Latin-flavoured single I Like It is predicted to be the soundtrack of the summer.
So what is it like in the mad world of Cardi B — where fearlessness appears to go hand in hand with flashing?
She explains: “A lot of people always be telling me, ‘Oh, why you always showing your breasts in every outfit?’
“When I was 19, I worked in the strip club from 8pm to 4am for two months straight, Monday through Sunday, my feet f***ing hurting, so I could buy these.
“When you do plastic surgery, you practically put your f***ing life on the line. So I put my life on the line for these.
“And that’s why I’m going to show them to the death of me.”
Born Belcalis Almanzar to a Trinidadian mum and Dominican dad, Cardi spent her time between Highbridge, a Latino-majority neighbourhood in New York’s South Bronx and her gran’s apartment in Washington Heights.
Her parents split before she was a teenager and she grew up with 36 cousins on her dad’s side.
Despite a relatively normal childhood, by the time she was 16 she became involved in the street gang Bloods, which sparked her wild behaviour.
She recalls: “I have real good parents. They have regular, poor jobs. They real good people. I was just raised in a bad society.”
Needing money to make ends meet at the age of 19, she began stripping at the New York Dolls club, yards from her former school.
Speaking last year, she explained: “My mum kicked me out a couple of weeks before my 18th birthday. I had a job for about six months at a supermarket and they fired me for being late.
“I was crying hysterically. The manager told me to go across the street to the strip club and dance, saying I’d make so much money and had a nice body. Ever since then I was dancing — Tuesday to Sunday, every day.”
She planned to retire from stripping at 25, according to reports, but quit at 22 having become a hit on social media.
She adds: “People want me to be so full of shame that I used to dance. I would never be ashamed of it.
“I made a lot of money, I had a good time and it showed me a lot — it made me open my eyes about how people are, how men are, about hunger and passion and ambition. I wanted to let people know I was a stripper, I wasn’t a prostitute.”
Cardi has never been one to bite her tongue, as her 22.2million Instagram followers know.
And she doesn’t hold back when talking about her body either. As well as the boob job, she has had work done on her teeth and spent £560 on silicone filler injections to make her bum bigger.
She said: “When I was 21, I did not have enough meat on my body.
“They don’t numb your ass with anything. It was the craziest pain ever. I felt like I was gonna pass out.”
She wanted to return to the “surgeon” — who performed the procedure in her basement apartment — for another touch-up.
But she adds: “By the time I was gonna go get it, the lady got locked up ’cause she’s supposedly killed somebody. Well, somebody died on her table.”
Cardi decided on her quirky stage name thanks to her tipple of choice and her sister’s unusual moniker.
She explained: “My sister’s name is Hennessy, so everybody used to call me Bacardi.
“And then, you know, I shortened it to Cardi B. The ‘B’ stands for whatever . . . depending on the day, beautiful or a bully.”
She adopted the title on Instagram while still working as a stripper, building a fan base thanks to clips showcasing her figure and quirky sense of humour. From there she was tracked down to appear on US reality show Love & Hip Hop: New York — and soon became the breakout star.
During her two-series stint she discovered a talent for rapping. She was signed to Atlantic Records last February — going on to release her US smash hit Bodak Yellow and the accompanying video, where she is seen writhing in a PVC dress next to a leopard and crawling across a table in front of a sheikh.
The tune was so huge it racked up 520million YouTube views and made Cardi the first female solo rapper to claim a No1 Stateside in 19 years.
It also scored her two Grammy Award nominations and resulted in Bruno Mars asking to collaborate with her on his single Finesse, which they performed at January’s ceremony in New York.
Asked how she felt on the red carpet as she attended the event for the first time, she replied with a giggle: “I feel it all, butterflies in my stomach and vagina.” It’s not just music fans who love her, celebrity followers include Rihanna and 50 Cent, as well as Beyonce, who Cardi was so starstruck meeting recently that she said she “wanted to s*** on myself”.
Now there is more interest in her personal life than ever, having confirmed on live TV earlier this month that she is expecting her first child with her fiancé Offset, one third of rap trio Migos.
The couple started dating in February 2017 and he proposed in October. But in January rumours circulated that he had cheated on her.
The couple have stayed together and Cardi is due to give birth this summer.
Opening up about the baby, she said: “It wasn’t planned. You know what? I’m a grown woman. I’m 25 years old. I’m going to say this in the most humblest way. I’m a millionaire. You know what I’m saying? I’m prepared for this.”
Motherhood will be yet another challenge to deal with after facing the whirlwind of global fame, which she still struggles with.
But coming from a working-class family, now she is able to give her child the upbringing she could only have dreamed of.
She explained: “I do feel kind of guilty sometimes ’cause, like, I could buy myself a $5,000 dress or a $3,000 dress and I’m buying these things but I’m knowing that my cousin needs money for the rent.
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“And then I gotta tell myself, ‘Stop feeling guilty. You worked for this’.
“When I was a stripper, I used to strip, like, six nights a week. I used to bust my ass. And I didn’t stop.
“Today I work just as hard as I did before.”
She makes these four look tame...
Madonna
THE Queen of Pop courted controv- ersy with Like a Virgin and was threatened with a boycott from the Vatican for the destruction of religious iconography in the Like a Prayer video. She locked lips with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 Video Music Awards, used the f-word 13 times in an interview with David Letterman and published a book of erotic snaps.
Lady Gaga
THE provocative star captured the public’s imagination thanks to her outlandish dress sense. She has stepped out in a dress made entirely out of meat, strapped on a pyrotechnic bra, worn a phone as a hat and attended a baseball game in her undies. Her stage shows are often equally as odd, one section of the Monster Ball tour ended with her covered in blood.
Katy Perry
CONTROVERSIAL hit I Kissed a Girl was slated as homophobic by some, but Katy said it was based on a real incident. She then stormed into a raging feud with Taylor Swift, sparked by a row about backing dancers. The pair sniped at each other online and in interviews. In 2010 she was slated for wearing a dress that showed too much cleavage – on kids’s show Sesame Street.
Nicki Minaj
THE HIP-HOP trailblazer from Queens in New York is often stirring up trouble in her music videos, on the red carpet and in her lyrics. The Super Bass singer brought a fake Pope to the Grammys in 2012, has fought with fans on Twitter, experienced a nip-slip live on morning TV in 2011 and had a raunchy video banned by US TV network BET.