Welcome to Week 4 of our Book (Album) Club! This weeks album is Invasion of Privacy by Cardi B. Please give the album a fresh listen and give us your thoughts, opinions and possibly hot takes.
Doesn’t matter if this is your 100th time listening to the album or you listen to the album the first time right before posting!
October 17th: R.A.P. Music by Killer Mike
October 24th: AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted by Ice Cube
October 31st: There Existed an Addiction to Blood by clipping.
November 6th: It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy
This is the most recent album we’ve done so far, hoping people enjoyed it! I’d never listened to this album before last week, Cardi B isn’t my normal type of Hip Hop. Overall, this is the first album we’ve done for these threads that I thought was just kind of mediocre for me.
Started off strong, Get Up 10’s beat has me moving and starts off pretty interesting. Goes a bit off the rails topic wise as the song goes on but I still liked it. This is sort of the direction of the whole album. The entire album has the hardest beats, makes me want to put some subs in the trunk and drive around. Also there is Be Careful, which has a whole different, lighter vibe to the beat that was a breath of fresh air when it came on the first time. There is something to be said for Cardi’s cadence and voice too. She could probably rap some goofy shit and still sound good doing it. I don’t know if this is a skill you can train or if you have to be born with it but she has it.
Besides Get Up 10, I think my favorite tracks were probably Be Careful, Thru Your Phone and Bickenhead. Thru Your Phone was for sure the most interesting song to me. The topic, the hook and the emotion expressed really worked for me.
Least favorite tracks were Best Life and Money Bag. I really did enjoy Chance’s verse on Best Life, but I have a soft spot for Chance. Money Bag is just boring. It probably could have been saved if the beat went as hard as some of the earlier tracks on this album but here we are. Honestly, the entire album was just less interesting after Be Careful.
My whole thing with this album is that a lot of it is so uninteresting topic wise. Sometimes she brings up something interesting, like talking about being embarrassed by her teeth on Best Life and the whole start to Get Up 10’s, but otherwise she isn’t saying anything a million other rappers hadn’t said before. I guess that is the nature of making an album aiming for commercial success, you are probably going to stick to what has been proven to work.
Question for the end to build off of something I mentioned further up, did anybody else feel this album was really front loaded? I know artists frequently start off an album with the stronger tracks but I can’t figure out if I was just getting bored with the album or if this was a really bad case of it. I personally think Cardi is just an artist who works best on an individual song and can’t string together a whole album.