Jay-Z might have given Cardi B his blessing to sample his 1997 track “Imaginary Players,” but Joe Budden is not feeling her new single “Imaginary Playerz” and is calling on her not to sample another top East Coast artist again.
“She shouldn’t do that again. Don’t take any East Coast top three, four rapper beat, classic song, and redo that. We gonna shout out the writers. The writers killed. This is not about the writers. The bars are there. That wasn’t enough,” he said on a recent episode of the Joe Budden Podcast.
Joe Budden, back from vacation, shares his thoughts on Cardi B “Imaginary Players” record and whether she can hit 200k first-week sales in today’s climate, where Gunna sold 80k, Clipse sold 118k, and Nicki Minaj sold 228k. pic.twitter.com/4P0YHF2rWL
— joebuddenclips/fanpage (@Chatnigga101) August 20, 2025
He continued, “That delivery, those punch-ins, how choppy that was … ‘Imaginary Players,’ for y’all that wasn’t there, Hov, when that dropped, was a much better rapper than that. It was just fly because of the cadence and the flow and what he was saying, his aura and voice control. Cardi is in the same pitch, same tone, sounding choppy, not smooth. Bars are there, but this is not the beat for that.”
While Budden did not appreciate Cardi’s nod to Jay, her new release led to a 305% increase in streams for Jay’s original hit between August 15-17.