In her short, but vastly successful career Cardi B has accomplished many a firsts. Back in January of 2018, Cardi B became the first woman to have five top 10 singles on both the Billboard Hot R&B/Hip-Hop chart at the same time. Then, in July 2018, with the debut of her fourth single “I Like It,” the rapper became the first female rapper to achieve multiple chart-toppers when she rose and clinched the number one spot on the Hot 100. Later that same year in October, with the release of Invasion of Privacy, she became the first female artist to have all of her songs from one single album certified gold or higher in the United States. This month, Cardi B’s debut on the cover of Vogue U.S. marks another first for the Dominican Trinidadian rapper. 

On Monday, Vogue sneak peaked a digital preview of its January 2020 cover series. The cover marks the first time a rapper graced the cover of the Vogue U.S.

Vogue is bringing the heat for January with not one but four — and then some — marvelous cover stars. The smallest of them all is Cardi B’s one-year-old daughter, Kulture Cephus, whose modeling skills are proving to rival even her famous mom. The spread is just about all that Twitter is talking about, and we can’t get enough.

For her feature, La Caldi spoke about managing her temper and finding peace in her own appreciation for her work.

The rapper, who has managed to go viral on more than one occasion for her devastating and savage clap backs and rants on Twitter and Instagram in the recent past, says she’s actually a pretty “calm” person these days

“I’m the type of person now who like, if we talk about things and settle things, I will do that,” the rapper explained to Vogue while also sharing that she has become better at ignoring accusations about her former career as a dancer. “I just hate when people be like, oh, you used to be a stripper, so you’re a prostitute, you used to fuck guys. I never used to fuck guys. The thing about it is, when you’re known as a stripper that fucks guys for money, everybody hates you because you’re fucking up the game. You’re making guys expect more than what you should be giving, and the next bitch pays for it. I don’t have to give guys no ass. You want something from me? I want something from you. I want your money, you want my time. So I’m just gonna give you time. Once you start expecting more, my phone number’s disconnected. Bye.”

Touching more about her experiences with her attitude and outlook on life and how to handle, Cardi B admits in her interview that she had to climb herself out of a sinkhole to get to this point- and that her climb has been pretty steep.

Fans, of the rapper already know that Cardi B turned to stripping during a low point in her life. She’d been kicked out of her family home because she was fighting with her sister and moved in with her boyfriend at the time and his mother. “My boyfriend kept cheating on me. He and I used to get into arguments, hitting each other a lot. Girls like to say, ‘I will beat a nigga’s ass.’ I used to have that mentality,” she explained. “I used to hit my first boyfriend until he started hitting me back and it just got out of control. But I started stripping, and I made enough money to move out.”

Still, the rapper was quick to reveal that, though she’s been able to control her outrage more recently, she still has extremely negative and strong opinions about our president.

Cardi, who in recent months has expressed her staunch support for presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, says that she understands Trump more than most.   “I feel like not any of these Democrats have a really strong support base—I’m gonna say a fan base, because it’s almost like a fan base, what Trump has,” she told the outlet. “Because he was an entertainer, Trump knows how to get them to keep on talking about him. All these little antics that he do, like get into arguments with Chrissy Teigen, it’s just techniques to get attention. And I get that. You like a certain artist that do crazy shit. But this person is in charge of our country. This person is in charge of our well-being. When it comes to my president, I want my president to be, like, extremely holy. That is the person I want to look up to. I don’t want my president to have any hatred toward a certain type of people. I don’t want my president to be arguing with freaking celebrities or caring what people think of him. I want my president to tell me an answer on shit that.”

Reggaeton has infected the whole world with dembow, signaling a whole era of Latinx representation in mainstream culture. The infectious Latin Caribbean’s particular take on dancehall reggae has become a global movement that artists from all over the world want a part in. During this decade reggaeton has galloped into the Anglo-world, its flow has been Americanized, Europeanized, watered-down, dressed-up and recomposed to fit a thousand new contexts. So let’s look back on the last ten years to see how the genre has changed and what has become of the rhythm we all love. 

The decade started with a heavy EDM influence, case in point, Juan Magan’s 2011 album ‘Bailando Por Ahi’ or Don Omar’s hit, ‘Hasta que salga el Sol’.

The rhythm made inroads into the more frequently foursquare sound of EDM. The early 2010s were an EDM boom, a movement that established pulsating, treble-soaked electronic dance as not only the dominant form of crowd-pleasing live music, but the contemporary lingua franca for all of pop, and the default mode of the Top 40 back in the day. So it’s no surprise that reggaeton took in some of that influence to produce ‘Electrolatino’, music. The vivacious melodic reggaeton mixed with hard-hitting electronic beats saw its highest moment in 2015 with Bomba Estereo’s ‘Fiesta’ —the song even brought Will Smith out of a decade-long music hiatus when he reached out to the band to lend his voice for a remix.

Fast forward to 2017 and Daddy Yankee is featured on Luis Fonsi’s chart-busting hit, Despacito, making way for another reggaeton revolution.

By2018, the song’s unprecedented commercial success had even garnered Fonsi Guinness World Records recognition: it spent 16 weeks at No. 1 in the Billboard charts (a feat only topped by Old Town Road). It became the most-streamed song worldwide and was the first YouTube video to hit five billion views. And that was only the beginning.

Reggaeton’s latest commercial iterations rely heavily on trap and pop, harnessed by chart-topping artists like J Balvin, Ozuna and Arcangel.

 It’s upped the dancehall quotient at times, and dialled it down, incorporated more or less of its fundamental rhythm, dembow, and even spawned surprise mutations, like when Bad Bunny’s Tenemos Que Hablar folded in touches of pop-punk.

Halfway through the 2010s, Latin Trap, began to gain notoriety. 

instagram @badbunnypr

The less dominant wing of Spanish-language hip hip began to surge as a response to developments in American rap, it embraced the slow-rolling rhythms and gooey vocal delivery of Southern hip-hop. 

Now a variety of artists associated with the movement are riding high.

instagram @chrisjeday

Five of the Top 30 music videos on YouTube’s chart of 2017 involved artists associated with Latin trap – Bad Bunny, Chris Jeday, Karol G. Bad Bunny, the sound’s best-known proponent, also appeared three times in the Top 25 of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart on the same year. “It goes beyond trap: the music we call ‘Latin urban’ is now diversifying into many different forms,” Horacio Rodriguez, VP of Marketing for Universal Music Latino, said to Rolling Stone magazine. “It’s popping in the streets right now with zero radio airplay. It’s a counter-culture of young kids listening to this music.”

Older stars stampeded to endorse the latest style, boosting its mainstream exposure. 

instagram @jbalvin

The Colombian superstar J Balvin’s Energia album contained songs like “35 Pa Las 12,” a booming, American-rap-radio-ready collaboration with the Dominican singer/rapper Fuego. Farruko’s record dropped around the same time was titled TrapXFicante. Maluma, a supple pop-reggaeton heartthrob, anchored the hook of the Trap Capos single “Cuatro Babys,” which skyrocketed him to fame. 

Bad Bunny, the undisputed champion of Latin trap, sings and raps with an unhurried, conversational tone.

The video to San Benito’s hit “Soy Peor” now has 703 million views. He can do a song with Drake, he can do a song with Travis scott, he’s the guy who’s taken ‘Latin Trap’ mainstream. His music is a rich tapestry of trap, reggaeton and bachata. He can feature Ricky Martin on a self-love anthem, and with Solo de Mi, Bad Bunny fortified the song’s affecting lyrics with a message of solidarity with domestic abuse survivors in its music video. Most notably, though, his work is praised for its unabashed emotional vulnerability and, paired with Bad Bunny’s meticulous manicures and eccentric, neon-hued fashion sense, he’s presented male reggaetoneros in a different light altogether. 

Reggaeton and Urbano are, in some corners, also running parallel to the #MeToo movement.

Artists like Natti Natasha, Karol G and Becky G are flipping the genre’s overt male-narrated sexuality to the female POV, reclaiming agency with each beat.

The various styles that encompass música urbana —hip-hop, reggaetón, dembow, and champeta, to name a few— have reached a critical mass in the Americas.

Música urbana is American music. The loosely defined term encapsulates Spanish-language “urban” music with roots in the culture of descendants of enslaved peoples across North, South, and Central America. Toward the end of the decade, the genre became a worldwide sound, an art recognized by some of pop’s biggest stars. From Drake, to Beyonce and Cardi B, all have acknowledged the power and the audience of ‘urbano’. 

Language is no longer a barrier for its mainstream consumption. 

Any discussion of música urbana in 2019 inevitably begins with it’s biggest stars, the holy trinity atop the YouTube charts: J Balvin, Bad Bunny, and Ozuna. They were the three most-streamed artists in the world on YouTube in 2018. Which goes to show that the myth that Spanish language as a barrier to mainstream consumption has also been obliterated —according to a report from the music consumption company BuzzAngle, last year “Latin” music (measured by physical and digital sales as well as on-demand streams) represented 9.4 percent of listening in the U.S., overtaking country music (8.7 percent). 

Reggaeton is a fountain of joy for many, it offers close dancing and unrepentant sexuality as a form of catharsis. And as its prominence rose, spreading to other Latin American countries, the US, and ultimately the whole world, the genre became an unmatchable source of pride for Latinxs. This was the decade Latinxs demanded space and reggaeton became truly visible –and we invited the world the ride, one perreo intenso at a time.