Cardi B

Cardi B - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Cardi B

Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar (formerly Cephus; born October 11, 1992), known professionally as Cardi B, is an American rapper. Born and raised in New York City, she is known for her energetic rap flow and outspoken lyrics. Since launching her music career in 2016 and releasing her two mixtapes, Cardi B has been credited for elevating the relevance of female rappers in popular music.

This profile of Cardi B covers Early Life and Family Background, Career and Rise to Fame, 2017–2018: Breakthrough with Invasion of Privacy, 2019–2020: Hustlers, Rhythm + Flow and "WAP" and 2021–2024: Standalone singles and other ventures.

Her first studio album, Invasion of Privacy (2018), debuted atop the Billboard 200 with the largest female rap album streaming week of all time and became the best-selling and the highest-certified female rap album of the 21st century. Ranked by Rolling Stone as the best debut album of all time by a female rapper, it made Cardi B the first solo female artist in history to win the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album. Its singles "Bodak Yellow" and "I Like It" both topped the Billboard Hot 100 and were certified diamond by the RIAA; the former made Cardi B the first female rapper in the 21st century to top the Hot 100 with a solo song and the first in history to achieve a diamond-certified song, while the latter made her the first-ever with multiple number-one songs. Her third US number-one, the collaboration "Girls Like You" in 2018, made her the first female rapper ever to earn multiple RIAA diamond-certified songs.

Cardi B's second album, Am I the Drama? (2025), made her the only female rapper in history to have her first two albums debut atop the Billboard 200. It became the female rap album with the highest certification of the 2020s, the most weeks inside the top ten of the Billboard 200 in the 2020s, and the most charting songs (18) in Billboard Hot 100 history. Including the US top-ten song "Outside" and US number-ones "WAP" and "Up", it is tied with Invasion of Privacy as the female rap album with the most Hot 100 number-ones (two each). "WAP" is the only female rap collaboration to debut atop the Hot 100 and had a large cultural impact.

Cardi B is the female rapper with the most number-one singles (five) on the Billboard Hot 100, the only female rapper to achieve multiple solo number-ones, and the only to earn number-one singles in two decades (2010s and 2020s). The highest-certified female rapper in US digital single sales (70 million), Cardi B has the most diamond-certified songs (four) among female rappers—with "Bodak Yellow" being the highest-certified female rap song. Also, Invasion of Privacy is the most-streamed female rap album on Apple Music and Spotify. A Grammy Award winner and the female rapper with the most Billboard Music Awards (8), Guinness World Records (8), BET Awards (21) and ASCAP Songwriter of the Year awards (2), Cardi B has also won nine American Music Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, four NAACP Image Awards, and four Soul Train Music Awards. Time listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018, while Billboard named her Woman of the Year in 2020 and ranked Invasion of Privacy as the top female rap album of the 2010s.

Early Life and Family Background of Cardi B

Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar was born on October 11, 1992, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Her father Carlos is Dominican and her mother Clara is a Trinidadian of multiethnic descent; Almánzar identifies as an Afro-Caribbean. Almánzar was raised in the Highbridge neighborhood of the South Bronx, and spent much time at her paternal grandmother's home in Washington Heights, which she credits with giving her "such a thick accent." Almánzar developed the stage name "Cardi B" as a derivation of Bacardi, a rum brand that was formerly her nickname. She has a younger sister, Hennessy Carolina, who was born in 1995. She has said she was a gang member with the Bloods in her youth, since age 16, but stated she would not encourage joining a gang. She attended Renaissance High School for Musical Theater & Technology, a vocational high school on the Herbert H. Lehman High School campus. Belcalis speaks Dominican Spanish, English, and a small amount of Russian and French.

During her teens, Cardi B was employed at a grocery store in Tribeca. She was fired and became a dancer at a strip club across the street. Cardi B has said that becoming a stripper was positive for her life in many ways: "It really saved me from a lot of things. When I started stripping I went back to school." She stated that she became a stripper to escape poverty and domestic violence, having been in an abusive relationship at the time after being kicked out of her mother's house, and that stripping was her only way to earn enough money to escape the situation and get an education. She attended Borough of Manhattan Community College before eventually dropping out. While stripping, Cardi B lied to her mother by telling her she was making money by babysitting.

In 2013, she began to gain publicity due to several of her videos spreading on social media, on Vine and her Instagram page.

Career and Rise to Fame of Cardi B

In 2015, Cardi B joined the cast of the VH1 reality television series Love & Hip Hop: New York, debuting in season six. Jezebel considered her the breakout star of the show's sixth season. The New York Times wrote that she garnered popularity with "her ability to rattle off one-liners". The sixth and seventh seasons chronicle her rise to stardom and her turbulent relationship with her incarcerated fiancé. On December 30, 2016, after two seasons, she announced that she would be leaving the show to further pursue a career in music.

In November 2015, Cardi B made her musical debut on Jamaican reggae fusion singer Shaggy's remix to his single "Boom Boom", alongside fellow Jamaican dancehall singer Popcaan. She made her music video debut on December 15, 2015, with the song "Cheap Ass Weave", her rendition of British rapper Lady Leshurr's "Queen's Speech 4". On March 7, 2016, Cardi B released her first full-length project, a mixtape titled Gangsta Bitch Music, Vol. 1. In November 2016, she was featured on the digital cover of Vibe magazine's "Viva" issue.

On September 12, 2016, KSR Group released the compilation Underestimated: The Album, a collaboration between Cardi B and other KSR Group artists HoodCelebrityy, SwiftOnDemand, Cashflow Harlem, and Josh X. It was previously released only to attendees of their U.S. Tour. As the label's flagship artist, Cardi B said: "I wanted to make a song that would make girls dance, twerk and at the same time encourage them to go get that Shmoney," in regard to the compilation's single "What a Girl Likes".

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardi_B), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.