Unapologetic rapper Cardi B is the hottest thing right now, she’s got it all, and she’s not afraid to use it, sitting at No. 1 at the Billboard Hot 100 for the second week straight, Cardi is a true testament to hard work and the reward that comes with following your dreams while still keeping your feet on the ground.
Before her Bodak Yellow success, the 24-year-old artist made her living as a stripper, then an Instagram celebrity where she would often post the raunchiest stories imaginable to an audience in need of empowered women that could guide them through their social and sex lives and then a reality tv star.
But that’s just one facet of the multipersonality that has turned our Bronx queen into the sensation that she is now, going through her backstory, you’ll find that there’s a much deeper side to Cardi Bae than one could expect.
Before becoming a celebrity, she used to go by her birth name Belcalis Almanzar, that’s what her Trinidadian mother and Dominican father named her, so you can now guess where her beautiful thick Latin accent came from. Her attitude is not an accident either, the singer was raised in Highbridge, a Latino neighborhood in South Bronx and her grandma’s apartment in Washington Heights with 36 other cousins and 7 other siblings.
Her early life was bereft of the commodities she enjoys today, she grew up poor, but filled with love, that was the only asset she never starved for, love. “I have real good parents, they poor. They have regular, poor jobs and what not,” as she told Global Grind in an interview “They real good people and what not, I was just raised in a bad society.”
After dropping out of college for not being able to juggle her classes with her $200-a-week cashier salary, Cardi decided to become a stripper, starting out at local strip clubs and working her way through the most lucrative spots in Manhattan. she was always focused on “making money moves” as she puts it in her songs, learning a bit of Russian and French here and there to exalt her already exotic persona, she was determined to create this illusion of the hottest woman ever.
Stripping proved to be a very smart choice for Cardi, it was a lucrative career, along with the financial independence, she gained the confidence to dump her loser ex-boyfriend and become a sort of street role model for her Instagram followers.
Soon after her viral success, Cardi B could drop her job as a stripper and started making a living from hosting gigs at clubs, along with the income she would make from being a social media influencer, it was only a matter of time before she got contacted to appear on Love & Hip Hop: New York, a hilarious reality tv show, where her charisma landed her her the record deal she has now.
Her ascent to stardom might not be unique, others have done it before, but what other Instagram celebrity has the street cred and the talent to squander at such a high-paced rate? We’ll wait until you can come up with somebody half as hot as Cardi Bae.