What feels like long ago now, in a magical time called 2018, Cardi B put out another single from her debut album, Invasion of Privacy. Called “Be Careful,” it was released in late March before the April 6th album drop. Clearly, Cardi’s “woman scorned” tone was a warning to Offset, even if she claimed that the lyrics were inspired by an amalgam of relationships gone wrong. And if her past relationships were so riddled with the betrayal of a serpent, she was likely in need of ensuring the same wouldn’t happen again by making a threatening manifesto toward her heart’s new desire. Considering the long-standing reputation Offset has always had for being, shall we say, a himbo, Cardi was most definitely still too naive in 2017 to realize that marrying him after barely a year might have been slightly imprudent. And, not to be jaded, but surely she also knew that it couldn’t hurt her career to jump on as many collaborations with him as possible, striking while the iron was hot in terms of publicity surrounding their whirlwind romance.
The best thing about “Be Careful” though is that Cardi hadn’t yet started to exhibit so much Offset tunnel vision, as she would on the December 2017 single, “Bartier Cardi,” in which she has the gall to rap, “Cardi put the pussy on Offset/Cartier, Cardi B brain on Offset.” When the rumors of his cheating reached a fever pitch by early 2018, Cardi’s logic in deciding to stay with him was, “What you want me to do? Go fuck me another n***a? Start all over again and get cheated on again? This shit happens to everyone.” But it seemed to happen a lot more to Cardi, who revealed in mid-2018 that she and Offset had been married since September 17, 2017 in a bizarre plot twist that negated any reason for Offset ever needing to publicly propose. She also revealed after the birth of their daughter that the two had fallen “out of love.” For the flame that burns brightest always burns out the quickest, no? Cardi explained, “It’s nobody fault, it’s just like, I guess we just grew out of love but we are not together anymore.” For most of December, Offset vies for Cardi’s forgiveness, securing it once more by January 2019 when she moves back into their house.
Things appear to remain in relative bliss for a while, with Offset seemingly imagining himself getting the Beatrix Kiddo treatment if he acts up again. Except Cardi won’t just kill him, she’ll cut off his dick first (and let’s not forget that she’s perfectly capable of drugging men as well). With this in mind, the Jora Frantzis-directed video for “Be Careful” that would come out in May of 2018 was a blatant nod to The Bride motif in Kill Bill, with Cardi in one segment walking down the aisle in white and the next attending the groom’s funeral dressed in black. Indeed, the video opens with the “mourning” version of Cardi walking through a desert holding a giant cross (one that she will ultimately use to mark his grave–therefore the grave of their “marriage”), the only thing we see of her thus far being the end of her pink ponytail.
As Bride Cardi walks down the aisle, she puts her faith in a man she already had suspicions about, evidenced in the sampled lines, “Care for me, care for me/Always said that you’d be there for me, there for me” (taken from Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor,” which borrows from Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple,” which, in turn, borrows from Barbra Streisand’s “The Way We Were”–talk about a songwriting credit cluster fuck). When the cinematography of the video shifts midway through to make way for Funeral Cardi’s much darker aura, we can feel her pain and rage in the lyrics, “Between a rock and a hard place, the mud and the dirt/It’s gon’ hurt me to hate you, but lovin’ you’s worse/It all stops so abrupt, we started switchin’ it up/Teach me to be like you so I can not give a fuck/Free to mess with someone else, I wish these feelings could melt/’Cause you don’t care about a thing except your mothafuckin’ self.” That much was a prophecy as Offset would be guilty yet again of cheating on Cardi this year, finally testing her last nerve on being made a fool of. Plus, with her new ascent to the Queen of Rap (much to Nicki Minaj’s eye rolling) after “WAP” bumped her into a higher tier of stardom by way of notoriety, she knows that Offset is nothing more than dead weight, and that she likely got the best thing out of him she ever could: a spawn.
In point of fact, it seems fitting that while performing “Be Careful” live for the first time on SNL (with the bittersweet retrospect of being introduced by Chadwick Boseman), a slow reveal by the camera of a full-body shot would show audiences that Cardi was pregnant. It was as though the singing of that song while introducing Offset’s loin fruit for the first time created some kind of cosmic “it is written” irony. A foreshadowing that even armed with his child, Cardi B couldn’t “offset” her husband’s inability to resist the temptation to wet his dick in another “WAP.”
