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Joe Budden may have transitioned from the music studio to the podcast studio. But his passion for the business has still not wavered. And that passion was on full display on the latest episode of his show, The Joe Budden Podcast, when discussing rap star Cardi B’s latest single.
Joe Budden Gets Honest After Cardi Samples Jay-Z on New Single
With Cardi back in album mode, she released the first single off her long-awaited sophomore album, Am I The Drama? The single samples Jay-Z’s Imaginary Player off his 1997 project In My Lifetime Volume 1. But despite Cardi getting the blessing from HOV to go forward with the sample, Budden was underwhelmed by what she produced.
“She shouldn’t do that again. Don’t do that again,” Budden said. “Don’t take any East Coast, top 3 or 4 rapper, beat, classic song, and redo that.”
Budden went on to clarify that he wasn’t shading Cardi’s writers. But he had more of an issue with the rap star’s execution of the song. Ripping Cardi for her “choppy” delivery and noting she didn’t have the “cadence” to pull off the song the way that Jay-Z did in the original.
“We’re gonna shout out the writers. The writers killed. This is not about the writers. The writers killed,” he continued.
“That wasn’t enough. That delivery, those punch-ins, how choppy that was… ‘Imaginary Players,’ for y’all that wasn’t there, Hov, when that dropped, was a much better rapper than that. It was just fly because of the cadence and the flow and what he was saying, his aura and voice control. Cardi’s in the same pitch, same tone, sounding choppy, not smooth, bars are there, but this is not the beat for that.”
The single itself has also underwhelmed. It came in #147 on the U.S. Spotify chart and #56 on the Apple Music chart. Am I The Drama? drops on September 19.
