Songfacts®:

• Cardi B tapped Colombian reggaeton singer J Balvin and Puerto Rican trapper Bad Bunny to contribute for this Latinized trap banger. Bad Bunny raps in his native Spanish, while Balvin croons Puerto Rican slang lyrics. "These are guys at the top of their game. They were mad humble, thanking me," Cardi B told Beats 1's Ebro Darden.
• The song flips elements of Pete Rodriguez' 1967 boogaloo hit "I Like It Like That," which was covered by Tito Nieves and the Blackout All-Stars in the mid-'90s. Rodriguez is a Bronx native, like Cardi.
• The song was produced by J. White Did It, the man who supplied the beat for Cardi B''s breakthrough single "Bodak Yellow." He told Billboard about the track:
  
  "It's just celebrating success, achievement, talking about what she likes. Pretty much, if you ain't working, you ain't eating. I had the opportunity to work with the great Craig Kallman on that record, from Atlantic, and I worked with Tainy as well, another amazing producer out of Miami. I think we made a great record that the world is going to really enjoy."
• Cardi B was not expecting Bad Bunny and J Balvin's contributions. "I remember I got a call and they told me that they wanted me to participate in Cardi B's album," Bad Bunny recalled to Billboard. "They told me the track was a surprise, even for her. The producers were working on it. She didn't know that track was being made."
• The song's music video was directed by Eif Rivera and filmed in March 2018 in Little Havana, Miami. "The minute I heard the song, I was like, 'I need this. Don't give this to anyone,'" Rivera told Genius. "We went down to this location in Miami called Calle Ocho. Cuban area, a lot of Cuban scenes and everything else. I found this one block that had enough elements in there that I knew could work. Then we came in and kind of dressed it up some more."
• The video features scenes of the trio in a neighborhood and a nightclub. "I wanted Cardi to have a neighborhood feel, I wanted Bad Bunny to have that street hood feel, and then I wanted you to go into Balvin's world and kind of see this whole club scene," Riveria explained. "I wanted the viewer to live in all these different spaces as they go along within the video."
• This climbed to #1 on the Hot 100 dated July 7, 2018. On reaching the peak position, Cardi B became the first female rapper with two chart-toppers. Her debut hit "Bodak Yellow" reached the summit in October 2017.
• This was the first Hot 100 #1 hit for both J. Balvin and Bad Bunny. Balvin's previous best had been the #3 position his "Mi Gente" remix with Willy William and Beyoncé reached on the chart dated October 21, 2017. At that time, Cardi B's "Bodak Yellow" was at the peak position.
• This song drew renewed attention to the song it sampled, "I Like It Like That." In July 2018, weeks after "I Like It" went to #1, Concord Music bought the rights to the Fania Records catalog in a deal that included "I Like It Like That" and many other Latin classics by the likes of Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco.
• Rodriguez didn't know about Cardi's version until his grandkids clued him in. "I've been out of the loop for a while," he told Entertainment Weekly, "but I've watched some of her videos now and my favorite is definitely 'I Like It.'"
• This was Billboard magazine's Best Song of 2018. They said:
  
  "There's a moment at the very start of Cardi B, Bad Bunny and J Balvin's bilingual song-of-the-summer contender…where the beat snaps, the bass kicks down the door, and you just know that you're in for a hit. It only gets better: Enter a revved-up Cardi, listing out her favorite things … followed by two of Latin trap's biggest stars filling in the gaps in thick, slurring Spanish. There are lyrical gems ad-libs galore and enough shakes of timbales to leave you dizzy."
• Cardi B was joined by Lil Jon in a 2019 Super Bowl commercial for Pepsi that featured this song. In the spot, Steve Carell explains that Pepsi is more than just OK.
• Shakira and Bad Bunny sang this at halftime of the 2020 Super Bowl between the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs.