The 2020s File Feature
WAP
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP": Chart History and Cultural Impact "WAP" by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion was released on August 7, 2020, and…
01 The Story
Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's "WAP": Chart History and Cultural Impact
"WAP" by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion was released on August 7, 2020, and became one of the most culturally significant and commercially dominant singles of that year. The track arrived during a turbulent summer in American public life, and its immediate impact on charts, streaming platforms, and public discourse was extraordinary. It was issued through Atlantic Records and represented a defining collaboration between two of the most prominent women in contemporary hip-hop.
On the Billboard Hot 100, "WAP" debuted at number one, a position it achieved through record-breaking first-week streaming numbers. In its debut tracking week, the song generated approximately 93 million streams in the United States, setting a new record for the largest streaming week for a song by a female artist at that point in history. The debut figure also ranked among the largest single-week streaming totals in Hot 100 history at the time of release. The combination of video streams, audio streams, radio airplay, and digital downloads overwhelmingly supported its number one debut.
The song was produced by Ayo & Keyz, a production duo known for crafting bass-heavy, sample-driven beats within the contemporary hip-hop tradition. The production interpolated a well-known element from the Frank Ski track "Whores in This House," which provided the musical scaffolding over which Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion constructed their verses and contributed to the song's recognizable sonic personality. The songwriting credits include Cardi B (Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar), Megan Thee Stallion (Megan Jovon Ruth Pete), and the production team, among others.
The accompanying music video was directed by Colin Tilley, one of the most prolific and successful music video directors in hip-hop, and featured a parade of celebrity cameos including Kylie Jenner, Normani, Rosalia, Rubi Rose, Sukihana, and others. The video's visual world, built around an extravagant mansion populated with exotic animals, elaborate fashion, and confident, choreographed performance, became a major cultural event in itself. Kylie Jenner's appearance in the video drew particular media attention and sparked discussions about colorism, access, and representation in hip-hop visual culture, with many commentators questioning the decision to feature a white celebrity prominently in a video centered on Black women's artistry.
The song's release prompted immediate and wide-ranging public debate. Conservative commentators in the United States, including politicians, engaged in extended criticism of the track's explicit content. These responses generated enormous additional media coverage that further amplified the song's cultural footprint. The controversy around "WAP" became a Rorschach test for broader cultural debates about female sexuality, free expression, and the relationship between hip-hop and mainstream public norms. Feminist critics and cultural analysts widely celebrated the track as an assertion of female sexual agency and autonomy, connecting it to a broader tradition of women in hip-hop claiming space that had historically been coded as masculine.
On the Hot Rap Songs and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs charts, "WAP" also reached number one, giving Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion simultaneous chart leadership across multiple Billboard rankings. The RIAA certified the track Diamond, the highest level of RIAA certification, recognizing a combined total of ten million equivalent album units sold in the United States. This certification placed "WAP" among a very small group of songs to have achieved that threshold and cemented its status as one of the best-selling singles in American music history.
The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rap Song at the 2021 ceremony, a nomination that was itself seen as a statement of institutional recognition for a track that had been dismissed by some as too explicit for mainstream awards consideration. The nomination and the broader awards season attention the song received in 2020 and 2021 underscored how thoroughly "WAP" had become embedded in the serious cultural conversation about music, gender, and power during that period.
The track appeared as a standalone single rather than as part of an album at the time of its release, though it was later included on Cardi B's subsequent project. Megan Thee Stallion was herself in the midst of a turbulent personal period at the time of the song's release, having been shot in an incident that became the subject of its own prolonged public controversy. The fact that she delivered such a commanding performance under those circumstances was noted by critics and fans as a mark of professional resilience. "WAP" ultimately represented a moment when two artists at the peak of their commercial powers combined to produce a record that transcended its genre and became a genuine cultural landmark of 2020.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Cultural Meaning of "WAP" by Cardi B Featuring Megan Thee Stallion
"WAP" by Cardi B featuring Megan Thee Stallion is a work that operates simultaneously as an explicit celebration of female sexuality, a political provocation, and a commercial entertainment product. Its cultural meaning cannot be separated from its context: released in August 2020 during a summer of pandemic, protest, and political polarization in the United States, the song's unapologetic assertion of female sexual agency landed with unusual force. It was heard by many listeners and critics not simply as a pop record but as a statement about who gets to speak, on what terms, and with what degree of explicitness in the public cultural sphere.
The song's most significant cultural argument is about ownership and agency. Women in hip-hop have historically occupied positions defined by others, as objects of desire in male rappers' narratives, as supporting acts in visual or commercial terms, or as artists who must moderate their self-expression to avoid the penalties that explicit content attracts for women while often generating acclaim for men in identical territory. "WAP" refused all of these positions. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion spoke in the first person about their own desires with the same directness that male rap artists had employed for decades without facing equivalent levels of public censure, and the contrast was noticed.
The public controversy that followed the song's release was itself a form of meaning-making. When politicians and pundits characterized the track as harmful or obscene, they were, often without intending to, demonstrating the very double standard that made the song's assertion of female voice politically resonant. Cultural critics across publications noted that the intensity of the reaction was disproportionate to the explicitness of the content relative to decades of male-performed hip-hop that had received far less condemnation from the same quarters. The reaction thus confirmed rather than undermined the cultural point the song was making.
Both Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion brought specific biographical and cultural contexts to the collaboration that deepened its meaning for audiences who followed their careers. Cardi B's journey from the Bronx, through social media visibility, to commercial and critical superstardom had been heavily narrated in public, and her voice in "WAP" carried the authority of someone who had arrived at self-expression through lived experience rather than industry construction. Megan Thee Stallion, who had faced a serious physical attack that became public knowledge shortly before the song's release, and who was simultaneously navigating her grief over the death of her mother, brought a dimension of resilience to her performance that many listeners found deeply meaningful.
The music video's visual world, with its lavish mansion setting, its choreography, its parade of confident women from different backgrounds, and its deliberate aesthetic extravagance, can be read as a construction of an alternative space where female desire and female power are the organizing principles rather than the decorative additions. The cameos by other artists and public figures, whatever controversies some of those choices generated, signaled the song's ambition to be a collective cultural event rather than a simple single release. The video invited participation and identification, creating community around the song's central propositions about pleasure and autonomy.
In the longer history of women's self-expression in popular music, "WAP" belongs to a lineage that includes figures from the blues and early R&B tradition who sang about desire in plain terms, as well as more recent precedents in hip-hop. What distinguished "WAP" in 2020 was the scale of its platform, the precision of its commercial execution, and the historical moment in which it arrived. The song's meaning accumulated through the collision of its explicit content with a cultural moment when questions about women's bodies, autonomy, and public voice were being contested in multiple arenas simultaneously. That collision made "WAP" into something larger than a song: a cultural document of its particular moment in American life, one that will likely be studied as a case study in how popular music engages with social power for many years to come.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging