Joe Budden isn’t here for Cardi B’s latest track, “Imaginary Playerz.”
On the newest episode of The Joe Budden Podcast, the rapper-turned-podcaster criticized Cardi’s choice to sample Jay-Z’s iconic Imaginary Players, saying the weight of the original made it the wrong beat for her style.
“She shouldn’t do that again,” Budden said. “Don’t take any East Coast top three, four rapper beat, classic song, and redo that. … We gonna shout out the writers. The writers killed. This is not about the writers […] The bars are there. That wasn’t enough.”
Budden went on to say that while Cardi’s pen game was solid, her delivery didn’t live up to the weight of Jay-Z’s original.
“That delivery, those punch-ins, how choppy that was … ‘Imaginary Players,’ for y’all that wasn’t there, Hov, when that dropped, was a much better rapper than that,” he said.
“It was just fly because of the cadence and the flow and what he was saying, his aura and voice control. Cardi is in the same pitch, same tone, sounding choppy, not smooth. Bars are there, but this is not the beat for that.”
While breaking it down, Budden even played a fan edit making rounds on X that swapped Cardi’s vocals onto Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” instrumental—a version he said sounded “much better.”
“That’s because ‘Get Money’ doesn’t come with the flow and the aura, it’s very different,” he explained. “It’s only the ‘Imaginary Players’ beat that’s making her sound like you shouldn’t be on here. I used to have a rule when I was rapping, some beats just stay, you got it, we don’t need to do that.”
Budden also argued that the backlash to Cardi’s track might not have been as heavy if she had dropped it as a freestyle instead of positioning it as a single for her upcoming album.
Still, his critique hasn’t slowed down the momentum. In fact, Cardi’s “Imaginary Playerz” has given new life to Jay-Z’s original. Spotify revealed that streams of Hov’s classic jumped by 305% between Aug. 15 and 17.
