![]() The album’s opener, “Not There Yet,” is a forceful announcement not of an arrival but of the insecurity of navigating the early stages of notoriety. Perhaps the most bracing moments of “UNDER8ED” are those that harness the brooding, contemplative energy of songs like Cardi’s “Be Careful” or West’s “Violent Crimes.” These moments also feel the most revealing. The next, he’s bombastic and cartoonish-as on “Shea Butter,” an immensely fun riff on Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s club classic “Shimmy Shimmy Ya.” Fontaine can find others’ voices with ease, but at times he struggles to locate his own point of view as a solo star. One moment, Fontaine is introspective and humble. “UNDER8ED” is a polished, competent, but not especially innovative blend of New York and Atlanta street rap, of hypnotic trap and boom-bappy beats. ![]() Fontaine is foremost a writer style and sound come second. It’s no wonder that Fontaine could so effectively inhabit the mindset of Cardi B, given that he seems to spend much of his time thinking about her female peers. “I’m the new LL,” he announces on “Shea Butter,” a song from his new album, “UNDER8ED.” The line deftly captures the role that he plays in his own music: a tough, measured, sweet-talking Casanova whose main concern is women-scorning them, seducing them, hyping them up. If he was effective as a ghostwriter because he could verbalize complex, sometimes morbid dynamics between men and women, his new material is simpler. These days, Fontaine is moving out of the shadows and releasing material under his own name. If rap is now pop, it’s only fitting that its songwriting resembles that of conventional pop hits. It’s a sign not just of loosening attitudes but of rap’s newfound place at the core of the pop mainstream. Given the scrutiny levelled at someone like Drake-and countless others before him-after allegations that he’d used a ghostwriter, the freedom with which ghostwriters can now be celebrated marks a somewhat shocking shift. The resulting song, “Violent Crimes,” told the story of a man newly attuned to women’s experiences after becoming a father. When Kanye West assembled a team of writers for his 2018 album, “Ye,” he specifically requested the presence of whoever had written a line that he especially loved on Cardi’s album: “I gotta stay out of Gucci / I’m finna run out of hangers,” from the song “Drip.” Fontaine flew to Wyoming, where the album was recorded, and gave West lyrics that he’d written about his daughter. Fontaine, whose name appears in the credits for twelve of the thirteen tracks on “Invasion of Privacy,” was clearly not just a sharp writer but someone who could, on a dime, inhabit the forces that define an artist’s persona. The track seemed specific to Cardi B and the circumstances of her highly publicized relationship with her now husband, Offset, a member of the Atlanta rap trio Migos. But her confession was also jarring, because the song in question was such a potent expression of female pain. From one angle, Cardi was just being savvy-discussing a taboo subject on her own terms before others could use it as a cudgel. It was unusual for a star rapper to admit that someone else had written one of her most notable songs. “Just make sure you kill it,” he told her. (Fontaine’s demo track of the song had already leaked online.) “My boy Pardison . . . In the lead-up to the album’s release, she did an interview with the veteran hip-hop radio host Ebro Darden, in which the two discussed “Be Careful,” a song that riffed on Lauryn Hill’s “Ex-Factor” and portrayed Cardi in a new, emotionally complex light. When Cardi released her landmark début album, “Invasion of Privacy,” last year, she was frank about something that was usually verboten-the help that she’d received from songwriters, namely a slick-talking New York rapper named Pardison Fontaine (born Jordan Thorpe). ![]() For one, she shifted the fraught dynamic between rap’s stars and the people toiling in their shadow. But she also helped reshape hip-hop in more subtle ways. ![]() In her wake, the possibilities for social-media celebrity, for genre melding, and for multilingual pop hits are greater than ever. The rise of Cardi B so dramatically remapped what success could look like in music that it’s difficult to recall the landscape that preceded her. ![]()
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