2020 is dead, long live 2021! Cardi B dropped her latest music video for her new single “Up” at midnight on Friday (February 5), and with it, a eulogy for a bum year. The follow-up to the record-breaking smash collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, “WAP“, which released seven months prior in August, she’s put the past behind her and is looking toward the sky — or at least toward an album release, set to arrive in the coming months.
“Up” is a bumping bop that riffs from the catchy refrain: “If it’s up, then it’s up, then it’s up, then it’s stuck.” The video kicks off with Cardi twerking in a graveyard over a crypt marked “R.I.P. 2020” in full, chandelier crystal-encrusted funeral attire, complete with a fishnet veil and signature red-bottom shoes. From there, the visuals whip through a dizzying montage of sex and glamour. At one moment, Cardi’s ghost-riding as the blinged-out trophy on the hood of a Bentley. In another scene, she’s whipping out a vibrator in a pearly, all-girl ménage à trois inside the mouth of an oyster. In Cardi’s quintessentially provocative fashion, there are some truly mind-boggling WTF moments, too: Are those barbie doll heads really singing from inside her curls?
Ahead of the video’s release, Cardi said in a YouTube livestream, that she hoped the song would sound more “hood” than previous releases. “I wanted to do something more gangsta, more cocky,” she said, per Rolling Stone. And things are already looking for the rapper this year: In just hours after its release, the “Up” video had already topped 3 million streams on YouTube alone.
