Cardi B Caps Breakthrough Year With Debut Album Release

The anticipation around Cardi B’s debut album has been scorching hot, so when breakthrough artist finally debuted the full album at a party late Thursday, she told the DJ to make sure the sound level was perfect.

“DJ, make it a little loud ’cause I don’t feel it in my bones,” she said after the second track played, while the DJ worked on the sound.

That’s when Cardi B’s silly and likable personality — which has helped her skyrocket on social media and the pop charts — shined brightly. She went into karaoke-mode, singing some of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You,” even getting the audience of music industry players in New York City to participate.

But the DJ needed two more minutes.

“Two minutes? What the (heck) I’m supposed to do with two minutes? I’m running out of jokes. I’m running out of entertainment,” she said, then reminding the crowd that she’s performing on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.

Cardi B, the 25-year-old Bronx rapper, released her major-label debut album, “Invasion of Privacy,” on Friday. It comes 10 months after she dropped “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves),” the ubiquitous rap song that topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in October, making her one of three females to top the pop charts with a song last year.

When that Grammy-nominated song came up during the listening, she skipped it: “I know you heard it 1,000 times. I put it on my album because that’s the song that made me rich … That song changed my life.”

The next track, “Be Careful,” was released last week and was met with controversy when an older version of the song by rapper Pardison appeared online. Some of the lyrics were directly used on Cardi B’s song and some wrote that she stole the song, though Pardison was listed as a co-writer on the track.

“I don’t know where Pardison is at, but Pardison is a big part of the song. You know, I heard the record and I was like, ’…I want that record for me. So, you know, I flipped it and I made it into a girl version,” she said.

“I don’t give (expletive), ghostwriter, co-writer, (people), I don’t give a (expletive),” she said. “What you need to do is ask your favorite rappers about their ghostwriters.”

Thursday’s event was tightly packed, as attendees bumped shoulder to shoulder while dancing to Cardi B’s new songs and drinking out of large red cups. The scene outside was similar as people waited in the cold to get inside the white-hot event, met with the heavy smell of marijuana as the door opened as some entered.

Bartenders and waitresses at Common Ground mimicked Cardi B’s style: They dressed in the short, green wig and black-and-white plaid shirt Cardi B sports on her new album cover.