Cardi B had a message for anyone trying to downplay her Grammy win.
Speaking with Billboard’s Carl Lamarre, the rapper called out the double standard she sees among artists.
“Everybody always wants to downplay it but everybody wants one,” Cardi said around the nine-minute mark of the interview. “Every year people want to downplay the Grammys, but every year they submit their music. So it’s like, aight, what’s what?”
She pointed out that plenty of artists have been nominated without ever landing on the Hot 100 — including D Smoke, who came up through Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow.
“A lot of people will downplay it like, ‘Oh, it’s a label thing,’ but it’s art,” Cardi added. “It’s a lot of artists that people probably never heard of that still get nominated. It’s about the passion.
“I feel like the people from the board could tell when somebody put passion, put pain, put time on their shit,” she continued. “When I submit my album, when I submit my records: if I lose, I lose. And if I lose, I lose—it is what it is. But I’m not going to fucking hate on it … I’m not going to be like, ‘Oh, that don’t mean something.’ It do mean something. That’s why y’all chase it … Stop playing.”
Lamarre also touched on Doechii’s Best Rap Album win earlier this year, making her just the third woman to ever take home the award — following Cardi in 2019 with Invasion of Privacy and Lauryn Hill (with the Fugees) in 1997 for The Score.
Cardi shared that she didn’t get the chance to congratulate the “Denial is a River” star right away because Doechii and her mom were “very emotional backstage” after the big moment.
She reflected on how much her own Grammy meant to her at a time when her career felt uncertain.
“It meant so much to me because it was just, like, in such a time that I didn’t know the certainty of my career and I didn’t know nothing about my career,” Cardi explained, recalling the period when she was dealing with pregnancy, long studio hours, health struggles, new management, and legal issues.
Still, she said she pushed through: “Yes, I sold a lot of records and yes, I had a lot of hit records—and then being recognized for it with the most [prestigious] award? You can never take that from me.”
Cardi B’s long-awaited sophomore album Am I the Drama? arrives Sept. 19.
