Cardi B is defending herself after she was criticized for cursing at her production team mid-show in a performance over the weekend.
The now-viral incident happened Friday when the “WAP” rapper performed at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles as a headliner for the BET Experience concert ahead of Sunday’s BET Awards ceremony.
During the show, Cardi apparently had to navigate a slew of technical problems, and called out the production team mid-performance.
In a clip shared on social media, Cardi addresses the crew: “Y’all messing up my pyros, the fans is off, y’all messing up my music. Fuck am I paying y’all pussy n***as for? What am I paying y’all n***as for? Turn my fucking fan on, bitch.”
The New York rapper’s reprimand caused a stir on X (formerly Twitter), prompting one user to declare that “no one should ever be disrespected like this in a workplace,” BuzzFeed reports.
Cardi, born Belcalis Almánzar, fired back in a heated response.
“Girl shut up.. when you do a show you don’t pay after you pay before,” she replied. “I paid 350,000 up front the least they could do is get my pyro ready and turn the fans on because guess what??? At the end of the day that money is not returnable.”
Many fans on X sided with Cardi.
The rapper explained in a separate tweet that she had to pay out of pocket for certain elements of her performance, including dancers, pyrotechnics and more.
“You pay your production team ..light people, pyro, music production, djs, dancers ETC,” she wrote.
Amid the support from fans, Cardi offered more details about the technical problems in an additional tweet Saturday.
“Thank you for understanding. Let me tell you about yesterday! I spent $100k on pyro, that we couldn’t use because the production team failed to have the fire marshall go over safety with my team which is so simple to do,” she wrote. “Spent days in rehearsal learning choreography just for them to have the wrong mix, and we had to swap it out.”
She added: “Booked four fans so they could be turned on during ‘Bartier Cardi’ and that never happened. You wanna know why? Because they didn’t bother to show up to rehearsal while hundred thousands of dollars was put into this show. Don’t play with my money in this economy, honey.”
Representatives for the arena did not immediately respond to a request for comment.