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Cardi B Is the Perfect Match for Ellen's Relentless Optimism

She discusses her Coachella and SNL performances, possible baby names, and feeling no shame about her past as a stripper.

It's been quite a time watching Cardi B's Bronx-bred and Instagram-honed charisma unleashed onto an unsuspecting middle America following the success of her debut album Invasion of Privacy. She's hit pretty much every talk show from coast-to-coast, but it's only today that she talked to daytime titan Ellen DeGeneres.

The interview serves as something of a primer on the Cardi B story for those who aren't familiar, detailing where she got her rap name from, her ascent from reality TV stardom, and the many, many events of the past two weeks like her Coachella and SNL performances. Of course, Cardi humorously and transparently riffs on these, calling her twerking during her Coachella set "how I got pregnant" (which seems to prompt a genuinely flabbergasted response from Ellen) and commenting on how her underarms started itching from nervous sweat before revealing her pregnancy live on stage at SNL. As per usual, it's endlessly endearing to see someone as straight-laced as Ellen get thrown off balance by Cardi's freewheeling approach to interviews.

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In some more serious tidbits, Ellen asks Cardi if she was happy to be a stripper, to which Cardi gives an enthusiastic "hell yeah!" and remarks that she had "about $20,000 saved up by the time [she] was 20" which she says she used as investment in herself and "[her] dreams." She says that her personality was her greatest asset, and says that it was apparent and valuable even when she was in school. "I made teachers cry when I left," she says, "It was like 'we love you so much, Belcalis [Cardi's birth name], we're really gonna miss you.' But the smartest person, the teachers wasn't crying for them." Essentially, it's a "fuck intellectual elitism" thing; just because Cardi isn't a doctoral candidate or something doesn't mean she's not worth discussing or paying attention to. There are many other snippets, such as Ellen trying to convince Cardi to name her child "Ellen," so watch all the segments below.

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