NEW YORK — “I’m not like Normani. I can’t sing and dance at the same time, girl — I get tired.”
This was Cardi B, midway through her set at Madison Square Garden on Friday night, taking a quick water break and, as is her wont — her gift — advertising the fact that she was taking a quick water break so endearingly that you almost overlooked what was really happening.
This time last year, she had a couple of big singles, a famous boyfriend and a growing profile. Now she has one of the year’s most impressive albums, an unbroken string of smash hit guest appearances, a boyfriend-turned-husband who’s soon to be her ex, and a daughter.
And she was the headliner of this year’s installment of Z100’s Jingle Ball, part of a traveling set of end-of-year revues in support of, and sponsored by, iHeartRadio pop stations around the country.
By any metric, her ascent has been rapid. But there she was, the 12th performer of the night, one of the most successful of the group, and the only one who bore almost no traces of the old star-making machine.
So no, she is not a Normani, formerly of the girl group Fifth Harmony, now in the early stages of a solo career. Not someone who brings military precision to her stage show. Not someone who’s graduated from live-performance boot camp.
Even though Cardi’s set was boisterous, bawdy and brutally effective, cramming in bits of more than 10 songs, she is not quite a performer yet. She was often the least energized person onstage — there were, at times, 10 backup dancers, which felt like overcompensation. Filling an arena requires different skills than filling a phone screen.
For Jingle Ball, she is a different sort of star: one who hasn’t spent years training for moments like this. And she is indicative of a future in which pop stars will be able to arrive at full saturation without necessarily going through the old preparations.
With a handful of exceptions, almost everyone else on this bill — Shawn Mendes, Camila Cabello, Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha and more — came by their success the old-fashioned way: extensive practice, songwriting-by-committee, record label largesse, radio-airplay complicity.
Within this ecosystem, there are performers who rise to occasions like these, which are often graceless, and those who see it for what it is — a transactional arrangement that in essence promises them extended radio exposure. (It seems likely that a decade from now, or less, sponsoring stack-em-and-pack-em concerts like these will be more the preserve of streaming services than radio conglomerates.)
In that first category was Mendes, who performed early in the night, presumably because he had somewhere more meaningful to be at the dinner hour. He had the radiance of someone around whom light naturally falls, and the ramrod posture of a very good boy. His voice is thin, but getting more interesting as he ages — he was guttural at the outset of his cover of Kings of Leon’s “Use Somebody,” and he brought a lithe lilt to “Lost in Japan.” “Treat You Better,” still his best song, was zippier and a little more punk than the original. Even though his songs vibrate with anxiety, he did not. (Cabello is in this group too — her performance was committed but rote.)
In the other category was Alessia Cara, a soul singer with a detailed voice a couple of decades older than she is and an apparent allergy to fame’s dictates. “New York, you doing good?” she asked, then pivoted, continuing, “This song is about not doing so good.” That was “Not Today,” which, like several of her best songs, are about feeling awkward (see also: “Here”) and a few years of pop success haven’t changed that.
By comparison to the rest of the performers, she was a live-wire dissenter. She wore a stylishly ill-fitting suit. Her dance moves consisted of jumping up and down like an exuberant tween. Midset, she performed the holiday novelty classic “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas,” serving a little surrealism in the pop vortex.
Her performance was one of the night’s best, even if it wasn’t received as rapturously as Calvin Harris’ zip file of a club set, or Meghan Trainor’s almost parodically retro soul-pop (though she delivered it sharply, especially the country-esque gusto on “Like I’m Gonna Lose You.”) Lipa was as ill-suited to this format as Cara, but for different reason: She is an effortless channeler of the club music of the early 1990s, and her performance felt micro, better suited for a dank club than a spacious arena.
Jingle Ball doesn’t reward subtlety — bad news for Khalid, who sang well and glowed with kindness, to little effect — or reticence. It is a marketing opportunity masquerading as a concert, and sometimes not even: literal ads run in between performances (including one for Cocofloss, which appeared to be some sort of venture-capital, subway-ad-takeover dental floss).
As compared to previous years, this lineup was comparatively low wattage: Bazzi performed his algorithm pop early in the night, followed by a struggle-pop performance without energy, edge or charm from onetime Disney Channel star Sabrina Carpenter. Apart from Cardi, the only other rapper on the bill was G-Eazy, who is white, and who didn’t perform one song that didn’t feature someone else on the hook.
In the middle of the show was Rexha, a not-quite-pop-star with a big voice and bigger ambition. She was dressed like an encrusted elf, and she was backed by a band that applied bar-rock pungency to her pop hits. There is dignity to be found in chafing at these sorts of events, and Rexha’s intense, perhaps overintense set was admirable in its way. But she wasn’t there not to play nice. Near the end of her performance, she made sure to thank the night’s real engine of support: “Big shout to Capital One!”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.