Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion‘s new video has everything: bikinis, booty, and … a low-key shout-out to Beyoncé?
Cardi, 30, and Megan, 28, dropped “Bongos,” the spiritual successor to “WAP,” on Friday, September 8, and shortly after it was online, some fans remarked the colorful video had some Bey vibes to it. Viewers specifically clocked that the mansion featured in the video was the same luxury palace Beyoncé, 42, used in her “Mood 4 EVA” visual. “Did anybody catch this?” remarked one fan. “Come on, Black Is King Mansion,” commented another.
Others compared the scene with Meg and Cardi on the beach to how Beyoncé performed “Standing On The Sun,” with flowing dresses and tons of skin. “Very standing on the [sun emoji] inspired,” one fan tweeted while showing a side-by-side of the two performances. “Queen recognized Queen!” snapped a second fan, adding that the video was “giving colorful realness like Beyoncé.”
“Bongos” marks Cardi’s fourth major single of 2023, having teamed with husband Offset for “Jealousy,” with FendiDa Rappa for “Point Me 2” and Latto for “Put It on da Floor Again.” The song will once again raise questions about whether she plans to release her sophomore album, the follow-up to 2018’s Invasion of Privacy, before the year ends.
“I’m keeping it under wraps. I’m kind of still working, but I have a date in mind,” Cardi said of the highly-anticipated album while speaking with Whoo Kid for his SiriusXM show Whoo’s House. When Whoo Kid mentioned that Cardi’s birthday – October 11 – might be a good time to drop the album, she shut that down. “It’s not coming around my birthday. It’s not. It’s not. … Matter of fact, I don’t want nothing coming out in the month of October. October is my month.”
During the conversation, Whoo Kid mentioned how Beyoncé sent Cardi flowers “last year or [a] year before” before asking if Bey would be on the next album. Cardi brushed off the question but wasn’t so coy when discussing Megan’s involvement in “Bongos.”
“The part where Megan is kind of at in the song, because we chopped the song a lot, like the part where like she’s at, it be like ‘Bong, bong, bong,’ and I was planning for that to be the hook, but it just sounded so incomplete. Then, we just like, ‘This song needs a feature,’” she said.
Cardi continued: “So it’s like a lot of people wanted it to go the Spanish route with it, and I’m like, ‘I could see that.’ I could see that, definitely. Of course, you could feel it, but I was like, ‘I feel like I hear Megan on this.’ It’s like, ‘Really? You don’t think …it’s more like of the Latin part,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but I hear her on this. Like, I know it. I know I could hear her on this.’”