“The goal is never going to be reached because I’m always hungry for more,” Cardi said of four of her songs surpassing 1 billion Spotify streams
Cardi B’s star power is at an all-time high thanks to her latest streaming milestone.
On Tuesday, May 14, the certified “Bongos” hitmaker, 31, appeared on the latest episode of Spotify’s Billions Club: The Series — the digital franchise that features artists celebrating the career achievement of surpassing 1 billion streams on the platform.
Cardi received plaques for four of her Billboard-charting hits — Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You,” “WAP” featuring Megan Thee Stallion, “I Like It” with J Balvin and Bad Bunny, and “Taki Taki” with Selena Gomez, Ozuna, and DJ Snake — which helped her enter the special club.
While waiting for an oxtail meal delivery, the “Up” rapper recounted special memories tied to each track, starting with “Girls Like You.”
“‘Girls Like You’ could never be me, bitch,” she joked, “A billion motherf—ing streams on you h—.”
The 2017 collaboration, released the same year as Cardi’s debut album, Invasion of Privacy, was “the perfect song to dedicate to my 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥,” she said during the episode.
“My daughter was in me when I did this song,” the Grammy-winning artist explained, “so when I perform the song, it touches me a little bit different.”
Cardi also shared that her record label, at the time, was “really against the record because they felt like it was going to compete against my [album], but I said, you know what? I love the song. I got to do the song, and then I did.”
She continued: “I never thought that a record would be so big. You always feel like, ‘Would any of my songs ever have this power again?’ So for a billion people to sing word for word, it’s just like amazing and a reassurance that you could do it.”
Speaking on working with Balvin and Bunny on “I Like It,” Cardi said she excitedly went to her grandmother’s house to play their verses for her family, bragging, “‘I have a song with Bad Bunny and f—ing J Balvin.’”
“I was very unsure of this record because I feel like it was Spanglish, [but] it resonated so well,” added the multi-platinum rapper.
Of shooting the single’s music video, Cardi recalled how her collaborators reacted to her being pregnant at the time before she revealed the news publicly during her famous 2018 Saturday Night Live debut.
“I didn’t want people to know,” she explained, “It was my first time meeting [them], and I just seen their faces. Like when they saw me, they were like, ‘Hey!’ And they just looked down at my stomach like, ‘Oh!’”
Looking at her plaque for “Taki Taki,” Cardi briefly touched on fans’ response to the 2019 song, explaining, “The ‘Taki Taki’ thing was really annoying because a lot of people thought it was like the chip thing.”
She continued, “Everybody keeps asking us like, ‘What does “Taki Taki” mean?’ And it’s like, we don’t know. It’s just a word that Ozuna just made up. I don’t freaking know.”
When her final plaque for “WAP” arrived, Cardi said, “I knew that record was going to be a GOAT.” However, she also revealed that she was particularly picky about how it sounded “a little bit incomplete.”
Apparently, the “Jealousy” performer left the record alone for “a long time” until a conversation with Megan changed her mind. “It just went perfect,” she noted. “It meshed very well, like butter and f—ing bread.”
“It was more than a big record,” Cardi continued, nodding to the raunchy collaboration’s political controversy over empowering women’s 𝓈ℯ𝓍uality. “Which kind of shocked me and kind of shocked Megan. This song is not that freaky.”
The hip-hop megastar concluded the episode by saying, “I just want to say thank you to my fans because, sometimes, I could be a little bit hard on myself. Sometimes I don’t appreciate who I’ve become because I just feel like, wow, the more money, the more problems. The more fame, the more depression.”
Cardi continued. “The more you get, the more you want, so I never feel satisfied. But then I sit back, and it’s like, look at your daughter’s f—ing bedroom, it’s bigger than your parents’ f—ing apartment that you grew up in.”
“I will never stop. I’m never gonna stop. The goal is never going to be reached because I’m always hungry for more,” she concluded.
After kicking off 2024 with her “Enough (Miami)” and “Like What (Freestyle)” releases, Cardi is expected to finally drop her long-awaited sophomore album later this year. The project does not have a set release date or title yet, but the multi-platinum artist has been dropping tiny hints about it over the last couple of months.
In a video posted on her Instagram Story in March, Cardi told fans, “I promise y’all this year, I’m not letting my anxiety, I’m not letting what haters say, I’m not letting what fans say” prevent her from dropping new songs.
“I’ve got no choice because I’m dropping my album this year,” she concluded, “so stay tuned for the announcement.”