The Number Ones: Cardi B’s “Up”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

For the past few years, my kids and I have had a little tradition: When I take them out to a restaurant or a movie and my wife isn't there, we take a slow lap around our neighborhood on the drive back home and play Cardi B's "Up" really loud. I'm not sure how long we've been doing this, and I'm not sure how it got started. My son, the younger of my two kids, was probably around nine or 10 when this thing began. I just asked his older sister if she remembers why we were doing this, and she says that she doesn't know: "It just happened. We were possessed by Cardi B."

It was probably my son's idea, and he was probably doing it for pure shock value. "Up" is a song with a lot of cussing, and he took clear and visible delight in yelling these cuss words out the window. He probably didn't understand what most of those cuss words meant in context, and he's never done it when anyone's been out walking around or anything. My son's fantasy, I think, was that some neighbor would hear him yelling along with "Up" and be utterly scandalized, or maybe that I'd get really mad and yell at him and then he could point out the hypocrisy because I also like riding around and listening to songs with cussing. But I never got mad at him; I just laughed, turned it down a couple of notches, and rapped the song right along with him and his sister.

Is this good parenting? Probably not. But when you're a parent, you make the rules, and you get to nurture these little indulgences. You get to take your kids to R-rated movies and tell them dirty jokes, if that's what you want to do. You always have to do these little mental calculations about the right level of permissiveness. The "Up" thing is just fun, and it's fun for reasons that go beyond any charge that comes out of shock value. Maybe shock value is why we started rapping along to "Up" while taking a lap around our neighborhood, but we kept doing it because it just feels good to rap along to that song with people who you love.

It's been a few years, and we still do the thing where we drive around blasting "Up." We do it because the song is short and we can figure out the timing so that we pull up in front of our house right when it ends, which is always satisfying. We do it because it's just the thing we do; it evokes memories of every other time we've done it. And we do it because it's still fun. Shock value only lasts so long, but certain feelings are forever. "Bitches ain't fuckin' with me now, and I can see why! Dirty-ass, dusty-ass bitch, you got pinkeye!" — the day I stop having fun yelling that with my children will be the day that I die.

When Cardi B released "Up," she explained that it was kind of a zag. In an Apple Music interview, she told Zane Lowe, "My last song was very sexual, so I always want my next songs to be different than the one before." She went on to talk about her early mixtape days, about loving Chicago drill, and about wanting to make something that was "all about gangsta violence." When she mentions her "last record," she means "WAP," the extremely nasty Megan Thee Stallion collab that became a cultural phenomenon during the endless 2020 COVID summer. "WAP" is basically a novelty song. It's "very sexual," as Cardi says, but it's less sexy and more silly. There might be some "gangsta violence" in "Up," but it's honestly just as silly as "WAP." The two songs don't even really sound different. That's a good thing.

Even before she was a mixtape rapper, Cardi B was turning gangsta violence into deeply silly entertainment. In between her time as a stripper and her quick ascent to rap stardom, Cardi was in the cast of the VH1 reality show Love & Hip-Hop: New York. She really popped on that show, especially in the instant-meme moment where she said, "A girl have beef with me, she gon' have beef with me [spins around dramatically] foreva." When Cardi first started rapping, she turned that moment into her catchphrase. In 2016, Cardi released the mixtape track "Foreva," which was entirely built around that line.

That catchphrase is pretty much the message of "Up," too. On the hook, Cardi chants, "If it's up, then it's up, then it's up, then it's stuck." I have seen some people misinterpret that line in some very funny ways. It's not about a boner. It's Southern street slang about holding a grudge. If it's up, if I have problems with some other person, then it's stuck, we will continue to have those problems. Cardi says it's something that former Number Ones artist Offset, her husband at the time, would say around the house. She thought it sounded hard, so she adapted it.

That means "Up" is a song all about Cardi having problems with other people. She doesn't name those people, but she does spend two and a half joyously belligerent moments talking her shit about them. She talks that shit with great verve and style. "Big bag bustin' out the Bentley Bentayga/ Man, Balenciaga Bardi back and all these bitches fucked." "If I had a dick, you'd probably lick it like a lollipop/ Hoes speaking Capanese, hit 'em with karate chop." "Bitches want smoke until I bring it to they doorstep/ Tell that bitch, 'Back, back,' breath smell like horse sex." The English language is an incredible thing. There are so many ways to clown another person. Up until "Up," I'd never even considered the possibility that "breath smell like horse sex" could be one of them. That's just poetry.

Some of the thrill of "Up" is just hearing Cardi B say nasty shit. As in: "He nutted on my butt, I said, 'I'm glad that you came.'" (I usually don't rap along with that line when my kids are in the car.) But rappers say nasty shit all the time, and that's not enough to explain what makes "Up" special. What makes "Up" special is the sheer megastar charisma that the song radiates — Cardi's off-the-charts levels of personality, the way she seems to emphasize every syllable. It's also there in the production, a sleek pop-rap bounce that sounds absolutely nothing like the Chicago drill that Cardi mentioned when she talked about the song's inspirations.

Chicago drill, at least the stuff that Cardi was talking about in that interview, is raw, murky, harsh music. It seemed to come out of nowhere, and that's partially why it was so exciting. "Up" doesn't sound like that. "Up" sounds like a Cardi B track. It took a whole team of professionals to make "Up." Two of the song's producers are Hudson Valley natives James Steed, known professionally as DJ SwanQo, and Matthew Allen, better known as Sean Island. They've been working with Cardi since her earliest mixtape days, and most of his official credits are on Cardi tracks. Before "Up," SwanQo and Island's biggest hit was "Get Up 10," the anthemic intro song from Cardi's 2018 debut album Invasion Of Privacy. ("Get Up 10" peaked at #38.)

SwanQo and Island co-produced "Up" with Edis Selmani, a young man from Serbia who calls himself Yung DZA. A few days after "Up" came out, Yung DZA told Complex that Migos member Quavo found his production on YouTube and asked him to send over some beats. The original "Up" beat was one of the tracks that DZA made for Quavo, and Quavo apparently decided that was a Cardi beat and sent it to her. The day after his 25th birthday, DZA found out that his beat was the next Cardi B single. He says that SwanQo and Island changed "little things" about his beat but that it's mostly his. DZA hasn't had a hand in any big hits since "Up," but he's still got one more big hit than most people.

Cardi co-wrote her "Up" lyrics with her usual co-writer Pardison Fontaine and with Joshua "G6" Baker, a Florida rapper and songwriter with credits on tracks from Megan Thee Stallion and Flo Milli. Cardi's ghostwriters aren't really ghostwriters because she always gives them songwriting credit and because Fontaine, at least, got pretty famous after he started working with Cardi. (Fontaine's only Hot 100 hit is the 2018 Cardi collab "Backin' It Up," which peaked at #40.) Cardi doesn't write all of her lyrics, and she doesn't act like she does. But she does rap her shit like she means it. That's what she does on "Up."

"Up" moves with relentless force. The beat is simple and direct, and it's hits with a real sense of pulse. It's got a heavy piano, some 808 dings, and the squeaky-bedframe sound effect most famously used on Trillville's "Some Cut," a #14 hit in 2004. In that Complex interview, Yung DZA says it's basically a classic Memphis beat: "The kicks, that bass line, and that melody is something Juicy J and DJ Paul did way before I was even born." He also says that he discovered the classic Memphis sound when he saw those Three 6 Mafia guys on MTV Cribs: "Juicy J was crazy on that video, bro. He was wearing sunglasses with changing colors on the eyes, and I was like, 'I need to find out who this is.'" The world is an amazing place. Some kid out in Belgrade sees Three 6 Mafia on MTV Cribs, and that leads him to make Memphis-style beats, and one of those beats becomes a #1 pop hit in America. It's beautiful.

Cardi B never raps like she's from Memphis, but she knows how to put bounce in her delivery. On "Up," she's all brash, nasal confidence. Everything that she says works as a hook, and it all builds up to the irresistible call-and-response moment: "Broke boys don't deserve no pussy! I know that's right!" There's no melody in Cardi's delivery, but she still sounds like she's singing along to the bassline. As on "WAP," there are all these goofy flourishes. My favorite is the train whistle right after she says, "If that n***a had a twin, I would let him run a train." The comic timing is perfect.

At the very end of "Up," the beat drops out, and Cardi says, "Gotta play it safe! No face, no case!" As in: She's going to kill someone and then cut her victim's face off to keep the body from being identified, like the Russian hitman on season two of The Wire. It's so dumb and excessive and over-the-top, and I love it. Cardi B isn't cutting any faces off of any of dead bodies, but it's fun to imagine her doing it and then cackling, the way that she does on the song. All of "Up" works that way. The provocations aren't there to be disturbing. It's all just elite-level shit-talk, and that's why it's a great song to yell in your car with your kids. You can't do that with, say, "Drivers License."

For a while, it looked like Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" would keep "Up" out of the #1 spot. Cardi released "Up" in February 2021, when Rodrigo's song was steamrolling everything else on the Hot 100. As a result, "Up" debuted at #2. Cardi's single was boosted by a deliriously CGI-addled video from Tanu Muino, a Cuban-Ukrainian director whose work will appear in this column again. The clip is full of garish colors, theatrical haute-burlesque costumes, three-way tongue-kisses, and obvious champagne and vibrator product placement. It does what most of Cardi's videos do, which is turn her into a real-life cartoon character. I don't think Cardi needs all that extra stuff to be a compelling video presence, but she always uses it anyway.

After its #2 debut, "Up" hung around the top 10 for the next few weeks, with the release of "What's Next" and a couple of other Drake songs pushing it further down. "Up" would've probably kept sliding after that, but then Cardi B performed at the 2021 Grammy Awards in March. That was a weird Grammy year. It was the one time that the ceremony happened during deepest COVID, so the guests were all masked and distanced at rooftop tables, and all the performances happened in a big circus tent.

The show made a big deal about Cardi and Megan Thee Stallion, that year's winner for Best New Artist, performing "WAP" together. This was an insane folly, since only about 30% of that song's words could make it past prime-time network censors, but it ended up being a pretty fun spectacle anyway. Before "WAP" started, Cardi did about about half of "Up" while perched on a giant LED screen. It wasn't the most memorable performance, but that, combined with the choreography from the "Up" video going viral on TikTok, was enough to push the song to #1 for a single week. We'll see if any of this year's songs get a similar boost from last night's Grammys.

"Up" was Cardi B's fifth #1 hit. As of this writing, it's also her last. It would've been the logical thing for Cardi to use the success of "Up" to launch her sophomore album. Her first LP was already three years in the past, and that's a long time in rap. But instead of doing that, Cardi just continued to crank out singles, and she remained culturally present. Over the next few months, Cardi appeared on tracks from artists like Lizzo, Normani, and DJ Khaled, some of which were pretty big hits. (Lizzo and Cardi's song "Rumors" debuted and peaked at #4. It's a 7.) That summer, Cardi also had a cameo in the lackluster Fast & Furious sequel F9. She hosted the American Music Awards. She and Offset had their second baby before the year was over, which might explain why that sophomore album didn't arrive. She was busy.

Cardi's next single as lead artist was "Hot Shit," a 2022 team-up with Lil Durk and mid-meltdown Kanye West. That song was probably supposed to be huge, but it peaked at #13. I loved "Shake It," Cardi's collab with Bronx drill rappers Kay Flock, Dougie B, and Bory300, but it clearly wasn't supposed to cross over, and it peaked at #51. Cardi's big 2022 hit came when she teamed up with GloRilla, a Memphis rapper who'd just scored the out-of-nowhere viral hit "FNF (Let's Go)," which peaked at #42. Cardi appeared on "Tomorrow 2," the remix to Glo's song "Tomorrow." She rapped her ass off on it — "Bitches be on dick today, sing every word of 'Up' tomorrow" — and she helped establish Glo as a real-deal rising star rather than a one-hit wonder. ("Tomorrow 2" peaked at #9, and it's still GloRilla's highest-charting single. It's a 9.)

Cardi stayed busy. She won a huge lawsuit against a YouTuber who defamed her. She signed on to play the lead in a crime comedy movie and then backed out a week before production. She got into an extremely funny public feud with the weirdo who was posting celebratory pictures while his billionaire stepfather was missing (and, we later learned, dead) on that Ocean Gate submersible. Please enjoy her use of the phrase "shaking dicks," which been popping up in my brain at random intervals for the past two and a half years.

All this time, Cardi continued to pop up on other people's songs and to release one-off singles of her own. Some of those singles continued to chart, but she was no longer the consistent hitmaker that she'd been a few years earlier. The songs were still good, but they weren't inescapable anymore, and they usually disappeared after debuting pretty well. Early in 2024, Cardi reached #9 with "Enough (Miami)." (It's an 8.) Early in 2025, she got to #10 with "Outside." (It's a 7.) Those songs usually projected the same gigantic confidence as "Up," and they scratched a lot of the same itches, but her momentum was clearly slowing down. Somewhere in there, Cardi also had a third baby with Offset. While she was pregnant, she divorced him.

In September of last year, Cardi B finally released Am I The Drama?, her second album. It came out seven years after her debut, at a time when her career couldn't have been colder. Outside of "Outside," none of its singles charted particularly well. The album was a chaotic mixed bag, a seemingly random collection of songs that could've been leftovers from earlier deleted versions of that LP. It was still better than I expected, mostly because Cardi's towering charisma made it more fun than it should've been.

Cardi's unstoppable pop moment is over now, but she's not done by any means. She's got an arena tour coming up, and she literally just served as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live last weekend. (I thought she was good.) It would make perfect sense for her to transition out of pop stardom sometime in the next few years, to start hosting a talk show or something. She's the kind of celebrity whose charm comes through in different contexts. But Cardi is really, really good at rapping. I hope she keeps making music for the foreseeable future, and I wouldn't rule out the possibility of her appearing in this column again.

GRADE: 9/10

BONUS BEATS: Here's Tyler Perry performing "Up" in the 2022 motion picture A Madea Homecoming:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Big book bustin' out the Bentley Bentayga, man, Balenciaga Breihan back, buy the book here.