How Cardi B Turned The Tables of Exploitation

If you don’t want to “party with Cardi” yet, you may be one of the last ones standing.

The breakout Bodak Yellow rapper is hard to ignore. Between five Billboard Hot 100 hits in rotation, her growing collection of magazine features and casual collaborations with big money brands like Amazon — you most likely can’t make it through the week (or the day) without a Cardi B cameo.

But make no mistake about it, the Bronx-raised rapper carved a calculated path to the top. Cardi B took every conventional form of exploitation, and meticulously twisted it to work in her favor.

At 19, Cardi ditched her job as a cashier and started stripping. But, before you assume and shudder at the cliche thought of a ‘poor teen lacking self-respect’ — think again. Not only did the young stripper know what she was getting herself into, she did it with a mission. Stripping was not just slightly more lucrative than being a cashier. Fresh off her first night on the pole, Cardi recalls stacking up more than $300 in her first eight hours. From there, Cardi tells Fader Magazine, the money only got bigger. She hasn’t dished exactly how much cash she pulled in from from the pole. But, to put things into perspective, the average American stripper can rake in $30,000-$100,000 per year. Suddenly, it makes sense as to how “A hoe never gets cold”, a phrase coined by Queen Cardi herself. Like any wise business man or woman, Cardi moved on when she bolstered her bottom line.

Cue Love & Hip Hop: New York. By 2016, the hilariously outspoken stripper’s exploding social media following caught the attention of a woman who knows a thing or two about exploitation herself — Mona Scott Young. The mastermind behind VH1’s Love & Hip Hop franchise systematically pits men and women of color against each other through set-up scenes, steeped in salacious drama, over the contrived backdrop of sex, money and lies. Even though Cardi B was willing to play along for two seasons, she was smart enough not to make the divisive franchise her bread and butter — it was just an appetizer. All along, Cardi was cooking up “money moves” behind the scenes. And unlike some of her not-so-successful Love & Hip Hop predecessors, Cardi B left Mona and the gang in the dust when she was ready to launch the final phase of her

meteoric rise to musical fame.

One Grammy nomination, two iHeartRadio and five BET Hip Hop awards later, Cardi herself wants to make one thing clear. She does not want “people to think [she] became a rapper because [she] was on Love & Hip Hop”, put bluntly in her Cosmopolitan cover story.

Cardi B didn’t just make lemonade out of lemons — she bit through the bitter peel, took the seeds and planted an entire orchard, stocked with ripe fruit of her own. And if this past year is any indicator, her harvest is just getting started.