Look what Cardi B did!!!!

It’s not difficult to know exactly what Cardi B was doing one year ago. That’s part of the nature of her fame. Her massively popular Instagram account (9.9 million followers and counting) leaves a robust bread-crumb trail from September 2016: She was hustling to promote club appearances in cities like Houston and Kansas City; she was basking in modest milestones like seeing one of her tracks playing on the Music Choice channel at a hotel; she was posting the few clippings that had acknowledged her presence at New York Fashion Week, like a small sidebar in an issue of the New York Post. No matter that the piece identified her as the “breakout” star of Love & Hip Hop: New York and mentioned only a few paragraphs down that she also happened to rap—she still captioned it

 “How cool is this,” followed by several flex emoji. But scroll up a few dozen flicks and, in mere seconds, you will be transported into the surreal daydream that is Cardi B’s present reality. September 2017: a video of Janet Jackson covering one of Cardi’s songs on her current tour. A Vogue headline reading “Cardi B Was New York Fashion Week’s Undisputed (and Uncensored) Front Row Queen.” A tweet indicating that Cardi’s song “Bodak Yellow” was the most-streamed single in America last week, played a total of 40.8 million times. For the past two weeks, the catchy, diamond-tough anthem has been sitting steadily at no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, second to only Taylor Swift. If it hits no. 1, Cardi will become the first female rapper in 19 years to top the chart with a solo single, a feat last achieved by Lauryn Hill.

Cardi B’s come-up has been quick, dramatic, and, above all things, transparent. When recording artists achieve the kind of mainstream success she has now suddenly attained, they sometimes have a tendency to erase or at least separate themselves from the less-than-illustrious parts of their past. But Cardi B presents her past as a crucial part of her present. She has worked her way up through several of the most stereotypically derided professions in American society (stripper, social media personality, reality TV star) without denying or diminishing any of those former selves in her process of becoming a formidable rapper. Actually, she’s found a way to put their hustle into her music. In the span of less than a year, the people who still do not take her seriously have become the punch lines.

“I remember walkin’ in the stores, I couldn’t buy nothin’ / They look at me stank,” she spits on her recent single, “Lick.” “Now I just walk in the stores, I like it, I cop it / I don’t even think.” It’s like rap game Pretty Woman, except she didn’t need Richard Gere’s credit card, because she’s got her own. You could call the Come-up of Cardi B a Cinderella story, but that wouldn’t be quite right: The Cinderella myth relies on some sort of ruse, a shamed secrecy about the truth of a woman’s past, and the outside agency of both a fairy godmother and a prince. Cardi B trimmed all that extra stuff from the story. She restructured the fairy tale into a one-woman show.

Or maybe a 10 million–person show, which is in its own way a thoroughly modern story. As is so often the case, Cardi B said it best herself, in a video she posted to Instagram about a year ago. She is addressing a criticism that so often trails powerful and sexually forthright women, that she “fucked her way to the top.” Lounging on a couch, she scrunches up her immaculately made-up face. “It’s like, do y’all know how I got put on? I got put on doing videos and people following me. Did I fuck my followers?”

She continues, staring defiantly into the camera. “Shit, I wish I fucked myself to where I’m at right now, that shit would have been easy. Fuck who? Who’s that powerful that I gotta fuck to get to where I’m at?”

Cardi (a proud Libra, just about to turn 25) was born Belcalis Almanzar, but at a certain point people just started calling her Bacardi. She is, to quote one of her most famous catchphrases, a “regula degula schmegula girl from the Bronx.” Her father is Dominican, her mother is Trinidadian, and her oversize attitude is classic New Yawk. She graduated from a performing arts high school in the Bronx, enrolled in a community college in Manhattan, and took a low-paying job at an Amish market to try to pay for her studies. When she realized she had to work much too hard to support herself through school—and, at the suggestion of a former boss at the market—she got a job at a strip club. Although she hid her profession from her family (“I told them I was babysitting for some real rich white people”), dancing in strip clubs gave her the funds to take control over many aspects of her life, like leaving an abusive relationship. “It really saved me from a lot of things,” she saidlater. “When I started stripping I went back to school.”

Her debut single, released during her first season on Love & Hip-Hop, was “Cheap Ass Weave,” a “remake” of Lady Leshurr’s viral freestyle “Queen’s Speech Ep. 4 (Brush Your Teeth).” Some were understandably skeptical that a social media celebrity–reality TV star could actually have bars, but the YouTube comments on the video were dotted with the word “actually.” As in, “cardi b actually sounds good” and “She can actually rap better than a lot of people” and “this sh!t actually sounds better than some of the dude rapping these days …”

Almost exactly 10 years younger than Minaj, Cardi B got her teeth fixed on reality television, mentioned it in her most famous song, and even tagged her dentist on Instagram. She has been open about getting her boobs done when she was 19, and she is still so pleased with how they turned out that last year she posted an Instagram video claiming that one of her greatest disappointments in life is that she cannot “suck [her] own titties.” When asked about her ass implants, earlier this month  on The Breakfast Club, she stopped to correct the interviewer—she gets ass injections, not implants. If you’re going to talk about Cardi’s body, her imperative is that you at least get the facts right. I’m not saying Cardi is an inspiration for getting plastic surgery (live your truth, whatever that means to you), but the finesse with which she has defanged the real-vs.-fake conversation is admirable and might make things slightly easier for some of the female artists who come up after her.

“Bodak Yellow” wasn’t even supposed to be The Hit. Shortly after she signed to Atlantic, Cardi’s new label put its promotional weight behind “Lick,” a hypnotic single featuring Migos member Offset (who’s now Cardi’s boyfriend) that appeared on her second full-length mixtape, Gangsta Bitch Vol. 2. But in keeping with the serendipitous and user-driven magic that has fueled Cardi B’s rise, it was this afterthought of a freestyle, riffing on Kodak Black’s “No Flockin,” that catapulted her to superstardom. Now, still without a proper album to her name, the woman who only just realized two years ago that she could actually rap is one of the most popular rappers in the country. A woman who, one year ago, was better known as an ex-stripper reality star than a rapper, is nominated for as many BET Awards as DJ Khaled and for more than Kendrick Lamar.

It is cosmically appropriate that as unlikely a pop hit as “Bodak” is, it must also contend on the charts with one of the most inevitable, by-default hit songs in recent history, Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” It’s a titan clash of new and old guard. Although Cardi, to her credit, seems to be one of the only people on the internet who has nothing bad to say about her rival’s song. On Thursday, she replied to one of Swift’s fans saying that Swifties sent their support and that “if anyone takes the number one spot from Taylor, we want it to be Cardi!” (She replied, “Awww that’s sooo sweet, I love me some Taylor Swift my freaking self.”) These are vertiginous heights for an artist like Cardi to find herself in this early in her career, and overnight success can easily evaporate in the morning. But Cardi’s come-up was never a Cinderella story. Glass slippers shatter, disappear, get left behind at the ball. Bloody shoes have yet to go out of style.