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As anticipation mounts in Los Angeles’s Kia Forum for the first of Cardi B’s two sold out shows at the arena, the rapper plays an extended visual depicting a murder of crows. The image nods to the cover of her latest studio release, 2025’s score-settling Am I the Drama?, in which the birds surround the rapper behind a storm-laced sky ready to burst. The reference is intentional: crows are whip-smart, cunning and capable of clinging to deeply held grudges for decades. Cardi’s arrival on stage tonight further underscores the ominous feeling; she appears with a long shadow behind her as a slice of album opener Dead plays: “I’m collecting body bags like they purses / I don’t even rap no more, I drive hearses.”
She emerges in a haute couture trench coat resembling battle armor and with a shock of white in her dark hair, like Cruella de Vil if she’d grown up in the Bronx. Cardi then launches into braggadocious Hello with pyrotechnics and smoke effects, the message clear: when someone crosses her, she doesn’t just want to embarrass them. She wants them in the ground.
On Am I the Drama? Cardi is at her most incisive when she’s ripping into an enemy. On the aptly named Pretty & Petty, she focuses her ire on the rapper Bia, who dissed Cardi on a 2024 track by brutally snarling: “Name five Bia songs, gun pointin’ to your head / Bow, I’m dead.” Similarly, the highest points of the musician’s ambitious LA show also revolve around snarling back at haters with expressive aplomb as she blitzes through three dozen songs in just under two hours.
Cardi begins the six-act concert with a series of brutal numbers, including the ferocious Magnet, her vocals seething as she dials into a nemesis she deems “trash since birth”. An ode to the rare people with integrity, Salute, follows, where she clutches a fake rifle from below the stage, firing off sparks into the sky. After the menacing double hook of Check Please and Trophies, Cardi appears almost taken aback by her own savagery. She playfully proclaims to the crowd: “We started very motherfucking violent!”
For the show’s second act, Cardi turns her focus to the lovers who scorned her. A poignant rendition of Ring, a plaintive duet with Kehlani about trying to understand why someone stopped calling, is performed supine on the floor and trapped in a birdcage suspended from the ceiling. Dancers act out scornful scenes of suspected cheating, most viscerally with Thru Your Phone, a 2018 track that details catching a paramour whose lies were undone by technology.
Besides gleeful revenge, Cardi’s calling card is rampant horniness, and she romps through raunchy numbers including her remix of Blueface’s Thotiana, employing a chair for a seductive dance routine. Her timing was a little off here: at her Las Vegas show two days prior, she briefly fell off the chair during this number and cheekily blamed “the government” for the error – suggesting that she’s still got some kinks to smooth out in the show, particularly during the more tamped-down energy of tonight’s fourth act when she seemed a little winded. But the crowd is with her throughout the spectacle, bellowing the words and grinding during the final two acts, when Cardi unleashes her most high-octane hits and choreography where she sizzles on a revolving carousel resembling a strip club.
The most stirring moments of the show nodded to Cardi’s Latin roots, with an act featuring her boogaloo trap hit I Like It and the breakneck-speed Bodega Baddie. In the latter, a defiantly merengue-steeped ode to her lineage, she salsa dances as her dancers hoist flags of Latin American countries high onstage. It’s a pointed touch for Cardi B, who made a crack about her fans “jumping” ICE at the tour’s opener last week. Her message was clear: let them eat crow.
