Review: Cardi B’s Charlotte show becomes one long twerk-off — for better or worse
Somewhere in the middle of Cardi B’s Charlotte concert Sunday night, the music stopped — and it didn’t really start again for a while.
In its place: a 12-minute, $5,000 twerking competition, with a roving camera trained not on smiling faces but on the full moons of a ready-and-willing parade of exhibitionist members of her “Bardi Gang,” all apparently happy to be evaluated by an arena full of people suddenly screaming like judges on a very specific, very raunchy reality show.
It was a moment that felt both entirely on brand for Cardi, and at the same time faintly absurd.
It was also revealing in more ways than one.
Because while the 33-year-old Afro-Caribbean rapper’s Charlotte show (her first since a much smaller gig at the CIAA Tournament in 2014) could on the surface be viewed simply as a sold-out, hit-filled party, it was at its core a gloriously, sinfully hot mess. It was not just a concert, but something closer to a spectacle: part nightclub, part performance, and part participatory event.
Whatever the case may be, Cardi came out guns blazing — if not literally then figuratively.
Eschewing an opening act, she arrived on stage at Spectrum Center at 9:43 p.m., clad in a hooded, high-collared, floor-length leather dress, slinking her way through a wall of smoke and blinding white light. Once in full view, she dropped into a squat, extended two stiff arms out in front of her, and sprayed imaginary machine-gun bullets as dozens of fireworks exploded in the air around her.
The spectacle that followed maintained that rapid-fire approach for more than two hours, as she sprinted through 37 songs that often came in abbreviated form, in many cases just hitting the hooks before quickly moving on.
Aiding her visually was an army of 14 backup dancers that included six women eager to show off their moneymakers and eight men eager to show off their individual collections of six-packs; five increasingly elaborate costumes; and six distinct “acts,” each of which came with its own motif. A few of the most memorable set pieces:
- For the hard-hitting “Salute,” off her latest album “Am I the Drama?,” her male dancers moved militarily while wearing black eye patches, flashing abs and toting red rifles that spewed sparks.
- While shifting briefly into R&B mode, she delivered “Be Careful’s” emotional warning to an unfaithful lover with a ginormous birdcage rising around her.
- During what Cardi referred to as “my little Latino section of the show — … my little ‘Cucaracha’/Selena moment of the show,” her dancers donned boldly colorful outfits and waved full-size Latin American and Caribbean flags as the headliner salsa’d her way through 2018 song-of-the-summer “I Like It” in celebratory fashion so energetically that when done she declared, “B----, I’m tired!”
- And a run of her raciest tracks (including hits like “Thotiana” and “WAP”) was built around a candy-colored pole-dancing contraption that looked like a merry-go-round designed by a strip club.
Subtlety never stood a chance, with Cardi leaning fully into the chaos all night — chopping the air with her arms, sticking out her tongue, whipping her head, contorting her body, dropping into splits and backbends without warning.
She also filled the air in the arena with profanity-laced banter, boastfulness and overt sexuality at practically every turn.
Here, early on, she pointed out that she’d performed in Raleigh the night before, that “we gonna see which city really got the best motherf------ crowd,” and that she needed to loosen up her, um, private parts. There, during the pole-dancing section of the show, she brought “Pretty & Petty” to its climax with 20 seconds of twerking that her camera operator captured in close-up, eliciting deafening applause that prompted her to say, “Oh my Goddddd, y’all beat the f--- outta Raleigh!”
A song and a costume change later, she paused, took in the sea of people — overwhelmingly women, many dressed in a fashion that would get you kicked off of an airplane immediately, some who paid north of $500 for secondhand tickets — and grinned.
“B----, I’m having fun! This a good crowwwwd,” she declared. “I’m feelin’ goooood, I feelin’ sexy.”
Still, while at times it felt like Cardi B was running the show, at others it felt like she had simply turned it loose.
And for all the show’s colorfulness — the braggadocio, the pyrotechnics, the costumes that ranged from leather-dominated dominatrix chic to something resembling a sci-fi K-pop fever dream — it might be the twerk-off that lingers longest as the rest fades.
As the “Bardi Cam” proceeded to aggressively, unapologetically zoom in on them, woman after woman pitched their face away from it and popped their cheeks up straight into it. They dropped all the way down to the ground and climbed up onto industrial trash cans, shaking their booties with truly Olympic-level commitment while the rest of the building lost its collective mind.
Eventually, six “finalists” made it all the way up onto the stage, at which point the production went from bordering on the sublime to bordering on the ridiculous, one contestant — the eventual winner, no less — appeared to suffer a Janet Jackson-level wardrobe malfunction that drew both gasps and cheers.
The whole thing was, undeniably, hard to look away from. But perhaps not entirely for the reasons the show intended.
That’s because while there was fun and entertainment to be had, and while it could easily be construed as empowering (there is a real argument to be made there, about women owning their bodies, their sexuality, their presence), the segment also edged toward parody.
It’s a kind of tightrope act that ran through the entire show.
On the one hand, there’s something undeniably compelling about the way Cardi B hands over control — creating space for women to take center stage, to be loud, to be sexual, to be seen on their own terms in a room that feels fully theirs. On the other, the whole thing can feel like it’s drifting toward something bigger than her. Something that relies as much on the party as on Cardi herself.
But maybe that’s the trade-off.
Because the night started to feel less like something Cardi B was delivering and more like something she was ... unleashing — to the point where the energy in the room began to outpace the person who was supposed to be controlling it.
And yet maybe that doesn’t really matter in the end.
As Cardi herself might say: B----, you still had a good time, didn’t you?
Cardi B’s setlist
Act I
1. “Hello”
2. “Magnet”
3. “Salute”
4. “Check Please”
5. “Trophies”
6. “Enough (Miami)”
7. “Money”
8. “Press”
Act II
9. “Be Careful”
10. “Ring”
11. “Thru Your Phone”
12. “Killin You Hoes”
13. “On My Back”
14. “Safe”
Act III
15. “Taki Taki”
16. “Bongos”
17. “Bodega Baddie”
18. “I Like It”
Act IV
19. “Please Me”
20. “Principal”
21. “Pick It Up”
22. “Nice Guy”
23. “Better Than You”
24. “Up”
Act V
25. “Dead”
26. “ErrTime”
27. “On Dat Money”
28. “No Limit”
29. “Thotiana”
30. “Pretty & Petty”
31. “WAP”
Act VI
32. “Girls Like You”
33. “Finesse”
34. “Tomorrow 2”
35. “Bartier Cardi”
36. “Outside”
37. “Bodak Yellow”
