If you need more proof that reality television and social media are this era’s greatest cultural incubators, look no further than Cardi B (born Belcalis Almanzar), the twenty-five-year-old Bronx native who has taken an unprecedented but well-documented path to pop-world domination. In 2014, while working as a stripper, she launched a grassroots campaign for her personality on Instagram and Vine, posting bawdy, unflinching videos in which she monologued about whatever was on her mind—unfaithful boyfriends, the indignity of backhanded compliments, the relative merits of IHOP and Philippe Chow—in a thick New York Spanish accent. She sometimes wore nothing but a shower cap. “I ain’t gon’ lie to y’all, these terrorist attacks got my mental a li’l finicky. That’s why I been in the Bronx,” she said in one video, from 2015. “Keep me away from downtown. Ain’t nobody tryna blow up the hood. ”

These little gems of street wisdom got her cast in Mona Scott-Young’s VH1 reality series “Love & Hip Hop.” A chatterbox with a refreshingly unvarnished self-presentation, Cardi, in perhaps her greatest accomplishment, inverts the uses of the platforms she first called home: in her universe, social media and television serve as megaphones for candor and exuberance rather than for deception or artifice.

The music industry, of course, has its own entrenched structures of artifice. No realm of entertainment is littered with more outsiders made quickly into affable cash cows. Cardi, who quit stripping in 2015, decided to try rapping, despite being more Lucille Ball than Lauryn Hill. It was a canny move. After all, her main skill set—a knack for language and bombast—overlapped nicely with that of most successful hip-hop artists. Her first two mixtapes, “Gangsta Bitch Music,” Volumes I and II, from 2016 and 2017, had the feel of rough drafts. She gravitated toward a pummelling street sound, with skittering beats and menacing choruses that didn’t always capture the humor and charm she was known for; nonetheless, the efforts were lively. One of her tracks, “Lick,” was rereleased in a collaboration with Offset, a member of the chart-topping hip-hop trio Migos, who is now Cardi’s fiancé, but it was not until “Bodak Yellow” that she became a legitimate force. That song, a thunderous New York rap record with an off-kilter beat and a threatening mood, elbowed its way to dominance. Rapping had seemed like something of an extracurricular to Cardi’s career, but “Bodak Yellow” unseated a Taylor Swift single to become the top song in the country. Cardi was now, astonishingly, the first female rapper to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart on a solo track since Hill did, with “Doo Wop (That Thing),” in 1998.

Major labels have typically misused unconventional or Internet-viral talent, but Cardi’s début album, “Invasion of Privacy,” which was released earlier this month, signals that perhaps they are developing better strategies. The record is clearly the product of plenty of money and planning, but it bottles her vitality without allowing it to go flat. The record is stacked with appearances by hip-hop and R. & B. A-listers: Migos, Chance the Rapper, YG, Kehlani, and SZA. Such a name-laden track list usually indicates a shameless attempt to search-engine-optimize a bloated body of work, but “Invasion of Privacy” is a mercifully cogent thirteen-song breeze. It mixes hard-slapping street rap with dashes of velvety, heartbroken R. & B. There is also a crafty collaboration with the Colombian pop superstar J Balvin and Latin trap’s reigning king, Bad Bunny, on a song called “I Like It,” a swaggering update of Pete Rodriguez’s Latin-boogaloo hit. Cardi, who grew up on a diet of bachata and reggaeton and has never shed her Bronx accent, is a fitting hip-hop star for an era of Latin-pop crossovers.

Cardi’s trajectory has been idiosyncratic, but on her songs she is a traditionalist. She is the first to admit that rapping takes work, and that her progress has required intense study. This makes her an outlier. Hip-hop’s prevailing style is heavily improvisational, less about flow and narrative than about hypnotic chants and call-and-response choruses. Most of the biggest stars, particularly those from hip-hop’s capital city of Atlanta, do not put raps to paper before recording them; instead, they enter the recording booth when the mood strikes them, building on catchphrases and trying to capture an energy rather than tell a story. These songs have an offhand, whistle-while-you-work feeling to them. But Cardi, despite the stream of consciousness that characterizes her social-media posts, makes studied, premeditated songs. She is a formalist who wears the writing process—and her influences—on her sleeve, which means she is, in a major way, a throwback artist. Cardi adopted the measured but forceful vocal style and cadence of “Bodak Yellow” from “No Flockin,” a hit by the troubled Florida rapper Kodak Black. “Get Up 10,” the first song on “Invasion of Privacy,” is a careful homage to Meek Mill’s bait-and-switch street classic “Dreams and Nightmares,” in which, for ninety seconds, accompanied by a piano and strings, he raps about his triumph over his circumstances, until the turbocharged beat drops and his voice shifts to a frenzied bark, reminding listeners of his persistent hunger. It’s an important touchstone for the genre, and one that Cardi repurposes for her own rags-to-riches story. In interviews, she has credited Pardison Fontaine as a co-writer of her lyrics, turning what would be a shameful secret for most rappers into a simple fact of her process.

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In her videos on social media, Cardi plays a multitude of characters. In some, she’s a proud swindler giving her followers a peek into her bag of tricks. In others, she’s a gross-out comic or a vixen; often she is a hood headmistress, admonishing women for their transgressions or their missed opportunities. At her best, she is at the top of her lungs, filibustering about her everyday gripes and the misbehavior of the people—often men—in her life. This is the Cardi who dominates “Invasion of Privacy”: she’s at the height of success, while remaining disgruntled and aggressively on the defensive. The record is not a giggle but a pissed-off snarl, aimed both at her naysayers and at her romantic interests. “Li’l bitch, I cannot stand you, right hand to Jesus / I might just cut all the tongues out your sneakers,” she threatens, on “Thru Your Phone,” the track that sounds the most like one of her video rants. The song is a gripping torrent of fury and resentment, levelled at a cheating lover—and the other woman—but bolstered by moments of sideways levity.

The swirl of bluster and romantic sorrow on the album shows that love is one terrain that Cardi has yet to conquer. But she is a crafty exploiter of the tabloid gossip surrounding her relationship. Recently, she appeared on “Saturday Night Live,” and used her performance of “Be Careful”—a vulnerable and scornful interpolation of Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor”—to début her large baby bump. It was a jarring moment for anyone who might have believed that her romance was merely staged to drum up attention. Not since Lana Del Rey has an artist triumphed over such low expectations and landed as a bona-fide pop star.

In the past year, there’s been an uptick of people who are using hip-hop as a way to leverage the fame they’ve achieved in other realms. Currently, the industry is trying to make stars out of plenty of other Internet firebrands and meme-generators. There is Danielle Bregoli, a teen-age girl who went viral after a belligerent appearance on “Dr. Phil,” and signed a record deal as Bhad Bhabie. With the support of a handful of well-chosen beats, she makes a disconcertingly catchy trap-rap pastiche. There is also Jake Paul, a dopey blond vlogger and provocateur who recently secured a feature verse from Gucci Mane. The popular hip-hop-podcast host Adam Grandmaison, known as Adam22, is also entering the fray, along with many young Internet-famous video gamers. Cardi could be considered the figurehead of this era of rap as vocation rather than as creative pursuit.

You may get the impression that these artists are grabbing at dollar bills in the wind tunnel of hip-hop. There is something unsettling about this kind of gold rush—it’s propelled by a cynical assumption that hip-hop can be gamed, or that it is the easiest route to notoriety and riches for people who are lacking in quantifiable skills. Some of these artists will rise beyond sheer sensationalism; others will flame out quickly. But Cardi is a shining counterweight. In retaining her dogged openheartedness and honest work ethic, she has been able to prove that hip-hop is the land not of opportunism but of opportunity. ♦