The Number Ones: Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

The camera pans in through CGI wrought-iron gates, to a CGI fountain with a spinning CGI statue of two women, both spraying CGI water from their nipples. Some of that CGI water gets on the camera lens, but the camera keeps moving — right up to the stately CGI mansion, where more CGI water spills under the door and all down the front steps. Suddenly, we’re inside a kooky Seussian-proportioned blue hallway, where water — real this time, not CGI — soaks the floor. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion step out in bodysuits with long gloves and capes, staring down the camera. The camera pauses its long zoom to cut away to the sculptures mounted on the walls — a bronze butt, some bronze boobs that are spraying more water even though boobs do not, in my experience, typically spray water.

While the camera finishes its Evil Dead-style journey into this mansion, a repeated, droning message appears on the soundtrack: “There’s some whores in this house, there’s some whores in this house.” Welcome to the house. Suddenly, Cardi B, her cartoonishly long nails twirling around her million-dollar face, stares right into the camera and begins her address: “I said certified freak, seven days a week/ Wet and gushy, make that pullout game weak.” That’s not really what she says, though. The title “WAP” does not stand for “wet and gushy.” It stands for something else, and you already know what it is. That tiny little nod toward decency makes the whole thing even funnier.

The video for Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 blockbuster “WAP” is set to the song’s radio edit. This is ridiculous. The idea that “WAP” would even have a radio edit is ridiculous. “WAP” is a song that delights in its own freakiness. It sells itself on pure raunch. It’s got plenty of competition, but “WAP” is probably still the most gleefully obscene song ever to reign atop the Billboard Hot 100. It’s an ebullient, energetic extended dirty joke, and part of the fun is the very idea that a song this nasty can serve as a unifying cultural event. It’s not innuendo. It’s more than innuendo. Never mind a double entendre or even a single entendre. Can you have less than one entendre? Because that’s what “WAP” is. So when the radio version subs out the song’s actual title for “wet and gushy,” we get a phrase even more evocatively tactile than the actual thing they’re saying.

Yeah, you fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy. Just to give you the full, proper experience, here’s a fan edit with the song’s dirty version.

This column has lately covered a whole lot of noisy collaborations that debuted at or near #1 during the endless COVID-lockdown summer of 2020. Most of those songs evaporated instantly, leaving very little impact on our shared cultural memory. Even the songs that had to fight their way to #1 — like last week’s vaginal-secretion number, Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar” — never exactly became blockbuster events. “WAP” was something different. It had all the hallmarks of those meaningless, evanescent hits, but it was too brash, too flagrant to go away. It left an impression, and that impression lingered. “WAP” could not evaporate. It was too wet.

Five years later, “WAP” stands as a crowning achievement in the careers of the two women who made it. Working together for the first time in the midst of newfound fame, turbulent personal lives, and a full-on global pandemic, Cardi and Megan made a confident freak anthem that cut through all the clutter around it, dominating the conversation for a few fun moments in the time before reactionary bigots — the other kind of freaks — sucked up all the air in the room. “WAP” is too fresh in my memory to function as just a song, though I think it’s a very good song if you just listen to it on that level. The electric charge of that moment still sticks with me even more than the track itself. It’s an achievement on multiple levels.

Rap music doesn’t rely on singular focus. That’s one of the great things about it. The music is built on improvisation and free-association. When you’re rapping, language itself can tell you where to go. Connections only reveal themselves through the process. In recent decades, rappers rarely even write anything down or type anything into their phones. It’s an in-the-moment art form, generally immortalized in weed-fogged late-night sessions where a line about missing a dead relative can lead directly into a line about popping Percocet on a private jet. But “WAP” is focused on one thing and one thing only. Bring a bucket and a mop: It’s some wet-ass pussy.

“WAP” started off as an instrumental track from two producers, Orlando’s Austin Owens, known professionally as Ayo The Producer, and Buffalo’s James Foye III, who goes by the name Keyz. The two of them met in Atlanta in 2010. They became best friends, and they started producing together, making tracks for R&B singers like Chris Brown and Omarion. In 2018, the two of them co-produced “Bickenhead,” the Project Pat-sampling track from Cardi B’s debut album Invasion Of Privacy. (“Bickenhead” never came out as a single but still peaked at #43.) One night at an Atlanta club, the two of them heard an old Baltimore club track, Frank Ski’s “Whores In This House.” They looked at each other, and a lightbulb flicked on. Now, get ready for a motherfucking detour. I am not going to waste the opportunity to write about Baltimore club music in this space.

“Whores In This House” came out in 1992, which means it dates back to the very beginnings of Baltimore club, an underground form of breakbeat-driven Black house music that emerged out of my hometown in the early ’90s. I love Baltimore club music so much. To my mind, it represents everything that makes the city of Baltimore great. It’s a raucous, organic cultural phenomenon that came out of a particular community at a particular time, and it had decades to develop before anyone from out of town noticed. Over the years, club music developed a whole canon of sample-jacking dancefloor clarion calls. It’s some of my favorite shit. When I hear the “Samir’s Theme” horns, I become Colossus. I’m strong as shit, my skin is made out of shiny metal, and I’m about to throw Wolverine at you.

Club music got heavy late-night Baltimore radio play when I was growing up, and I had no idea that people didn’t listen to that stuff in other cities. These days, they do. Club music eventually spread up to Philadelphia and then to New Jersey, and now there’s a whole lot of mainstream-ish music that plays around with its textures, sometimes to great effect. But that stuff doesn’t really have anything to do with “Whores In This House.” “Whores In This House” is club music in its early elemental form — a hyper-local variation on the stuff that Detroit techno DJs like Green Velvet were making.

For decades, Frank Ski was a beloved fixture on Black radio in Atlanta. Before that, though Ski was a radio DJ in Baltimore, and he was part of the club music phenomenon in the early ’90s. Ski was half of 2 Hyped Brothers & A Dog, the short-lived duo who made the 1991 club-rap track “Doo Doo Brown.” When I was a kid, a middle school dance wasn’t really a middle school dance until “Doo Doo Brown” came on. On the strength of that single, the duo signed to the New York indie Warlock. Ski started working with a New York producer named Al “T” McLaran. Ski and McLaran liked working together, and they made “Whores In This House” in 1992.

When “WAP” came out and blew up, my friend Al Shipley, who just published the book on Baltimore club that he’s been writing for years, tracked down Al “T” McLaran and got him to tell the story about making “Whores In This House.” McLaran is from Brooklyn, and he got involved in hip-hop in the late ’70s and became part of the same circle as the early electro group Newcleus. In 1984, McLaran recorded a rap single called “Drunk Driving” under the name Tuga. It came out on MCA, but it went nowhere. Tuga went off and served in the army; that’s him chanting about whores in this house in a military cadence. After he got back home, he worked as an A&R rep at Warlock. McLaran apparently produced and wrote most of “Whores In This House” himself, with Frank Ski only contributing backing vocals, but the single came out under Ski’s name. That means that Frank Ski has writing credit on “Whores In This House,” and Al “T” McLaran does not.

“Whores In This House” is a party track. It was always supposed to be funny, and it was made specifically to appeal to Black fraternities in the early ’90s. It came out on the same 12″ single as “Tony’s Bitch Track,” a showcase for the late drag performer Miss Tony. The song stuck around, first as a local classic and then as a regular source for samples. Rappers have been using “Whores In This House” samples since at least 1994, when former Number Ones artist Juicy J ganked it for a mixtape track. Big Boi, another former Number Ones artist, quoted the song on OutKast’s 1996 track “Ova Da Wudz.” Before “WAP,” “Whores In This House” samples appeared on songs from Lil Jon, Joe Budden, the Pack, and Lil Wayne, among others.

Ayo & Keyz built a spare, bouncy beat out of their “Whores In This House” sample, and they sent it over to Cardi B in 2019. She recorded a demo over that beat, but she didn’t do anything with that demo until a year later. During the COVID lockdown, Cardi and her engineers quarantined at a rented house in Los Angeles. There, Cardi went through her old demos, trying to decide whether there was anything worth finishing, when she came upon the “WAP” demo. She’d forgotten all about that song, and she thought it had potential. So Cardi kept working on the track, writing alongside her regular collaborator Pardison Fontaine. (Fontaine’s only Hot 100 hit is the 2018 Cardi collab “Backin’ It Up,” which peaked at #40.) Cardi was thinking about potential collaborators when she got to know Megan Thee Stallion. Cardi and Megan’s stylists were friends, and those stylists connected them for a socially-distanced hangout session, probably right around the time that Megan’s “Savage” remix with Beyoncé reached #1. They liked each other.

When they first met, Cardi and Megan decreed that they should make something together, and they sent each other a couple of in-progress tracks. One of them was “WAP.” Megan Thee Stallion knew what to do with “WAP.” She got hold of that beat, and she ripped it to pieces. Megan only needed a few days to send back “WAP” with her verses. I really like how Cardi’s business partner Brooklyn Johnny describes that moment in this Billboard interview: “It’s almost like when ketchup met French fries. Like cereal and milk. Like, ‘Oh, shit! This is it!’ They complement each other. Two different flows, two different energies, two different accents, two different dictions, two different deliveries. In that moment, it just reminded me of old school hip-hop. And I was like, these two girls are about to create history together.”

I guess it’s time to talk about the content of “WAP.” I’m an adult. I can talk about the “WAP” subject matter if I want. You’re an adult, too. Or you should be an adult, anyway. If you are a child, what are you doing here? Go outside. Make some friends. Don’t read long articles about the #1 hits of the past. Save that for when you’re grown and your time means less. If you’re still here, I am going to assume that you can read about “WAP” without getting weird. Give me everything you got for this wet-ass pussy.

“WAP” is about pussy. Specifically, it’s about wet-ass pussy. That’s the entire point of the song. “WAP” fits into a long tradition of nasty-ass sex songs from female rappers. It’s part of a lineage with Lil Kim, Trina, and especially “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” the deadpan classic that the Tampa rapper Khia took to #42 in 2002. In the years just before “WAP,” the Chicago rapper CupcakKe became an internet favorite by perfecting a particularly vivid version of this kind of thing. But the specific point of “WAP” — an entire song of just Cardi and Megan rapping about wet-ass pussy — is something I hadn’t quite heard before.

Male rappers have been celebrating their own dicks since the very beginning of rap music. On the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 single “Rapper’s Delight,” the first rap song ever to make any commercial noise, Big Bank Hank tries to get Lois Lane to dump Superman and get with him instead: “He can’t satisfy you with his little worm/ But I can bust you out with my Super-sperm.” (Maybe that’s him bragging about his sperm more than his actual penis, but I think it qualifies. “Rapper’s Delight” peaked at #36.) That tendency isn’t limited to rap, either. For the most annoying possible version, consult the column on Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-A-Ling.” Women in rap have done something similar over the years; Foxy Brown did call her debut album Ill Na Na. But there was still a ridiculous, fun charge in hearing two big stars getting into granular detail on a giant pop single. They’re talking WAP WAP WAP — that’s some wet-ass pussy.

Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion didn’t record their “WAP” parts together, and the song’s engineers switched the verses’ order all around to give it maximum flow. But I still hear a kind of lively competition in “WAP.” Cardi and Megan don’t work against each other, but they both seem to want to get the dirtiest line in there. Cardi: “I don’t wanna spit, I wanna gulp, I wanna gag, I wanna choke/ I want you to touch that lil dangly thing that swing in the back of my throat.” Megan: “If it don’t hang, then he can’t bang/ You can’t hurt my feelings, but I like pain/ If he fuck me and ask ‘Whose is it?,’ when I ride the dick I’ma spell my name.” Cardi: “My head game is fire, punani Dasani/ It’s goin’ in dry, and it’s comin’ out soggy.” Megan: “Gobble me, swallow me, drip down the side of me/ Quick, jump out ‘fore you let it get inside of me.” Who wins that contest? We do. Us. The listening public. That’s who wins.

Megan and Cardi sound nothing like each other, and that’s one of the reasons that “WAP” flows so well. Cardi is a big, over-the-top personality who transmits wild charisma all over everything. Megan is the technician, the one who supplies the Southern fast-rap bounce that the song needs. Megan sounds like she’s staring you down, calling your bluff. Both of them come off serious, which makes things funnier. It’s fun to hear them ad-lib each other’s verses and use different approaches to say the same thing. Cardi gets the last word, though. The first time you hear the track, it’s almost unbelievable, this constant cascade of knowingly ridiculous sex-talk. Then Cardi comes in with that one final line — “Macaroni in a pot, that’s some wet-ass pussy” — and it’s somehow more vivid and visceral than everything that came before.

Everything about the song works — the loopy getting-away-with-it energy, the two rappers’ styles clashing, the escalating absurdity of the lyrics. One of my favorite things is the use of cartoon sound-effects. Cardi says her pussy is wet, come take a dive, and we hear a water drip. She says she wants you to park that big Mack truck right in her little garage, and a horn honks. Megan says she’s never lost a fight but she’s looking for a beating, and a ring bell dings. Even the minimal repetition of the “Whores In This House” sample adds to the heightened cartoon feeling. “WAP” is about as simple as it could possibly be, and that’s enough to make sure every vivid lyrical image stays in your head. You can’t escape.

Once the song’s final mix was finished, Cardi B and her team had to figure out how to come from the top and make it drop with some wet-ass pussy. They knew they had a hit on their hands. It’s a summer song, they wanted to make sure it came out before summer ended, but for understandable reasons they didn’t want to put it out during the protests against George Floyd’s murder. They also had to submit a whole bunch of edits to the people at iHeartRadio before those guys accepted a radio version. They somehow kept the song from leaking while planning all this out, even as they shot the elaborate video with director Colin Tilley.

The “WAP” video is ridiculous. I started to describe it at the beginning of this piece, but it just keeps going. Cardi once said that the video cost a million dollars, with the budget going up because of COVID protocols. I can’t believe they shot this shit mid-lockdown, and I’m sure it wasn’t that safe, but they pulled it off. Cardi and Megan really had snakes crawling on them in that one scene. They weren’t in the same room as the tigers and leopards, and COVID might’ve had something to do with that. (Can tigers catch COVID? I know cats can.) But the big cats were still on set. A bunch of other famous hot ladies also showed up for cameos: Kylie Jenner, Normani, Rosalía, Rubi Rose, Sukihana, future Number Ones artist Latto.

The “WAP” video came out at the same time as the song, and it definitely helped the song feel like a big deal. If the “WAP” rollout had gone exactly as planned, it would’ve made a whole lot of noise. “WAP” was Cardi’s first song of 2020; her previous single “Press” came out more than a year earlier and peaked at #16. When “WAP” arrived, people figured that Cardi’s next album must be on the way. They figured wrong. That album wouldn’t come out for another five years. It finally dropped last month, and “WAP” is on it. But without an album, Cardi remained culturally relevant. In the early COVID days, Cardi said one very memorable phrase in an Instagram video — “Coronavirus, shit is gettin’ real!” — and a producer named iMarkkeyz sampled that line and turned it into a viral track, which Cardi cleared for release. She thought it was funny. She was right.

Megan Thee Stallion, meanwhile, was coming off of the out-the-gate success of her “Savage” remix, and she suddenly found herself at the middle of a much bigger story. In July 2020, just before “WAP” came out but presumably after she shot the video, Megan went to a Hollywood Hills party at Kylie Jenner’s house. She was there with the Canadian sing-rapper Tory Lanez, and they got into what sounds like a nasty, drunken argument. At some point, Lanez pulled out a gun and shot Megan in both feet. The details of the shooting came out slowly but noisily. Police arrived and arrested Lanez on a gun charge. A few days later, Megan publicly accused Lanez of shooting her. Eventually, Megan testified against Tory. In 2023, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

This was a hugely visible case involving two rising stars. Tory Lanez wasn’t as big a deal as Megan Thee Stallion, but he was still pretty big. Tory’s highest-charting single as lead artist, 2016’s “Luv,” peaked at #19. Tory was also a featured guest on future Number Ones artist Jack Harlow’s “What’s Poppin’” remix, another of the biggest hits of summer 2020. (“The What’s Poppin” remix peaked at #2. It’s a 9.) The week that “WAP” debuted at #1, the “What’s Poppin” remix was still sitting at #4. This might be the only moment in Hot 100 history that one artist in the top five shot another artist in the top five. It was fucking insane.

Megan was OK, by which I mean she wasn’t grievously injured. But she spoke openly about the trauma that she had to deal with. For years, the fallout bled into everything surrounding Megan. Many of Tory Lanez’ male rap peers sided with Tory, with some advancing goofball conspiracy theories that Megan couldn’t have been shot, that she was lying about the whole thing. Some of the most famous rappers in the world — Drake, Eminem, frequent Megan collaborator DaBaby — made light of the shooting in one way or another. It was gross. Even though Megan was the victim of the crime, the noise surrounding the shooting could’ve derailed her entire career. It’s good that “WAP” came out when it did. That song gave her a second chart-topper and a chance to control her own story.

“WAP” was huge from the moment of its release. It sold more than 100,000 downloads and broke the record for the most first-week streams in history. I basically wrote a version of this column when the song was just days old. Everyone wrote about “WAP.” There were lots of thinkpieces on the song’s version of female sexual agency. That’s there, but I wish the online-writer world could just let a fun song be a fun song. Then there was the right-wing response — the predictable apocalyptic howls from professional outrage farmers like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens. iMarkkeyz, the producer who turned Cardi’s line about coronavirus into a viral hit, naturally took the audio of Shapiro derisively reading the “WAP” lyrics and turned it into something.

Look, some of us make our livings in the take economy. God knows, I’ve probably written dozens of pieces about the cultural significance of some fucking popular thing. It’s what we do. I don’t want to knock the hustle. I mean, I do want to knock the right-wing hustle. Those fucking freaks have taken over, and I couldn’t possibly be more bored with their endless shtick. It’s not the same as talking about “WAP” as an empowerment anthem. But that got boring, too. It’s a whole dance that everyone does, and it hasn’t led us anywhere good. “WAP” was probably designed at least partially with the inevitable thinkpieces in mind, especially since it came out at a time when it couldn’t achieve its destiny as a strip-club staple because strip clubs were closed. But “WAP” is also just a ridiculous, fun song, and I would prefer to remember it that way.

If “WAP” was just a conversation-starter, it would’ve gone away. It didn’t go away. Last month, the song went platinum for the ninth time. Cardi and Megan performed “WAP” together for the first time at the 2021 Grammys, and they had to twist the track up into unrecognizable shapes so that it could play on prime-time TV, even as they just straight-up scissored each other on-camera. The FCC was flooded with complaints.

A few months after “WAP” dropped, Megan Thee Stallion released Good News, her first official non-mixtape album, and her single “Body” reached #12. Early in 2021, Megan and Doja Cat both appeared on Ariana Grande’s “34+35” remix, a #2 hit. (It’s a 7.) Over the next couple years, Megan made some more big songs that didn’t quite reach the top 10. The fun bounce “Thot Shit” peaked at #16 in 2021, while the forgettable Dua Lipa collab “Sweetest Pie” got as high as #15 in 2022. Cardi and Megan reunited on “Bongos,” a 2023 single that felt like a faintly desperate attempt to recapture the “WAP” moment, and that one only reached #14.

But even though Megan struggled to come up with another track that connected like “WAP,” she was an inescapable cultural presence, showing up in commercials and TV-show guest spots all over the place. She’s not a consistent hitmaker, but she’s a star. Eventually, she made at least one more big hit. Megan Thee Stallion will appear in this column again. So will Cardi B.

GRADE: 10/10

BONUS BEATS: There are so, so many quasi-ironic “WAP” covers, and I will only post one of them here. As part of a 2020 Daily Show bit about the cultural noise surrounding “WAP,” the alt-country star Margo Price sang a solo-acoustic country version of the song. Here’s that whole thing:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: When Cardi B played Lollapalooza in 2021, her sign language interpreter went viral for what she did with “WAP.” Here, look:

BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: In the raunchy 2023 comedy Joy Ride, there’s a whole sequence where our heroes pose as a K-pop group and improvise a version of “WAP” on the spot. Here’s that scene, minus one memorable shot:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Give me everything you got for this good-ass booky.