Cardi B

Invasion of Privacy, her debut studio album, landed at the top of the Billboard 200 chart in 2018 and was dubbed the best female rap album of the decade by Billboard. It was widely praised, making Cardi B the first woman to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album as a solo artist and the first female rap album to be nominated for Album of the Year in fifteen years.

With "Bodak Yellow," Cardi B became the first female rapper to receive a diamond certification from the RIAA and the first to top the Hot 100 with a solo release in 19 years. With "I Like It," a female rapper achieved multiple number-one songs on the list for the first time. She is the only female rapper to have had several tracks recognized as diamonds by the RIAA thanks to her work with the band Maroon 5 on the Hot 100 number-one song "Girls Like You." Since then, "WAP" (2020) and "Up" (2021) have both been songs from her upcoming second album, and both have topped the Hot 100 and other international charts. 

Cardi B, who has been named one of the most influential female rappers of all time by Forbes, holds a number of records for female rappers in hip hop, including the most number-one singles (five) on the Billboard Hot 100, the most number-one solo songs, and the most number-one singles in two consecutive decades (the 2010s and 2020s). She is also the female rapper with the most RIAA diamond certifications (three), the highest female rapper certification ever on their Top Artists (Digital Singles) ranking, where she is also one of the top ten highest certified females, and the female rapper with the most songs with one billion Spotify streams, where she also has the most streamed female rap album. She became the first lead artist to finish at the top of the first Billboard Global 200. In addition to a Grammy, eight Billboard Music Honours, six Guinness World Records, six American Music Awards, fourteen BET Hip Hop Awards, and two ASCAP Songwriter of the Year honors, she has also received numerous other awards. She was listed among the 100 individuals with the most influence in the globe by Time magazine in 2018, and Billboard named her Woman of the Year in 2020. In 2022, she started working for the entertainment magazine Playboy as its creative director.

Early Life

On October 11, 1992, Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar was born in Manhattan's Washington Heights. She was born in Trinidad to a mother of African and Spanish ancestry and a Dominican father. Almánzar was reared in the South Bronx's Highbridge area and spent a lot of time at the Washington Heights home of her paternal grandmother, which she attributes for giving her "such a heavy accent." Almánzar derived her stage moniker "Cardi B" from the rum company Bacardi, which she had previously gone by as a nickname. Hennessy Carolina, her younger sister, was born in 1995. Since the age of, she has claimed to have been a member of the Bloods gang. She has also declared that she would not advise others to join a gang.

She attended Herbert H. Lehman High School's Renaissance High School for Musical Theater & Technology, a vocational high school.

Cardi B worked at a Tribeca Amish deli when she was in her teen years.

After being let go, she started dancing at the strip club across the street. Cardi B has said that having a good impact on her life as a stripper includes the following: "I was truly saved from a lot of things by it. I returned to school when I began stripping."

She has said that being a stripper was the only way she could make enough money to leave the situation and pursue an education. At the time, she had been expelled from her mother's home and was struggling with poverty and domestic violence. She eventually stopped attending Borough of Manhattan Community College. Cardi B deceived her mother into believing she was earning money by babysitting while she was stripping.

Due to several of her videos becoming viral on social media, including Vine and her Instagram profile, she started to achieve notoriety in 2013.