Because I’m a weird and curmudgeonly fuck who doesn’t go to clubs and while driving listens only to Waze and Spotify playlists mostly consisting of Kanye and the Inception soundtrack, before last weekend, I’d heard about Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” more times than I had actually heard it. By a pretty significant margin, too. While I’d read countless tweets and status messages about it, I’d listened to it exactly zero times. I just exist in a space where listening to it would have to be intentional. And that space is called “Pittsburgh.”
Last weekend, however, I listened to it five times. Once in my homeboy’s SUV on a drive from Cumberland, Md., to Washington, D.C.; once at the Reminisce Party in D.C.; once Sunday in the Uber from my friend’s house to the Blacksonian; and then twice Monday after I downloaded it from Spotify and listened to it in my own car on a drive to Cleveland (I had a busy weekend). And I’m now convinced it’s the greatest song I’ve ever heard. Cardi B is like Django, Mozart and Jesus wrapped in a Trini-and-Dominican package.
Which is why it surprises me that much of the commentary I’d read in those tweets and status messages was either about how the song sucks collated dumpster drippings or how she’s the latest and greatest bane of hip-hop.
Not all, of course. Many recognize it for the sublime ratchetness that it is. But there are quite a few people who hear this song and want to immediately stop hearing it, and I do not understand them. Because this song is all the things that are good and just and hood and beautiful in the world. Which means that people who don’t like it must have some fundamental flaw preventing that from happening. Or maybe they just suck.
If you are one of those people, here are 10 signs that you are a party-pooping-ass bitch-ass.
1. You have no soul. And instead of a void existing where the soul would be, the soul space is filled with expired Durex condoms stuffed with acorns and deleted texts from Taylor Swift.
2. You take shits and wipe yourself with a dishrag.
3. You invite people to group dinners, and then you leave and go make phone calls when it’s time to order so people have to wait for your ass to get back before the server takes their orders. You make group dining an uncomfortable experience.
4. You let your white friends say “nigga.”
5. You put ketchup on celery. Which doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world, but you have a history of awkward condiment usage, and that’s usually a sign of pervasive wackness.
6. You sleep on beds with no top sheets. Just mattress and comforter. And not because you can’t afford sheets. But because you’re just triflin’.
7. You drive with a clip-on tie in your dashboard for whenever you’re stopped by the cops.
8. You don’t wash grapes.
9. You like people’s Facebook status messages just so they’ll maybe notice your new profile pic and like it, too.
10. You go to the airport with shoes and no socks, knowing that you’re going to have to walk through security barefoot, and the thought of doing that doesn’t bother you at all.