Songfacts®:

• "WAP" finds Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion exchanging dirty talk about their lady parts (the song title stands for "Wet Ass Pu--y"). Released on August 7, 2020, the thumping banger is the debut collaboration between the two rap queens and Cardi's first solo material since May 2019's "Press."
• The song both starts and ends with a sample of Frank Ski's 1993 club single, "There's Some Whores in This House."
• The Colin Tilley-directed video finds Cardi and Megan exploring a luxurious mansion that features some of their celebrity friends dancing behind certain doors. They are, in order of appearance, Kylie Jenner, Normani, Rosalía, Mulatto, Sukihana and Rubi Rose.
  
  Cardi told Zane Lowe she wanted female rappers she enjoys listening to. "That I like their music. That I really feel they are going to go mainstream, to me. All the girls right here, there's different things that I like about them."
• "WAP" is filled with filthy talk about what the two women get up to in the bedroom. The video uses the censored version of the single "because the song is so nasty that YouTube was like 'hold on, wait a minute that song might be too nasty,'" Cardi B explained.
• Cardi B and Megan Thee released a censored version for radio that uses the same cleaned-up lyrics as the music video except "wet, wet, wet" is substituted for "wet ass p---y."
  
  Cardi isn't a fan. "I hated it," she grimaced to Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper. "That wet, wet, wet - I just hated it."
• The video features several exotic wild cats including tigers and leopards. Tiger King star and Big Cat Rescue CEO Carole Baskin spoke out to Billboard about the clip "glamorizing the idea of rich people having tigers as pets." PETA also issued a statement where they criticized the two rap queens for using "suffering big cats as props."
• Filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the video was unusually lavish and involved significant expenses to ensure everyone was safe and well.
  
  "It was kind of weird shooting the video in the age of corona," Cardi told I.D. "Like, we had to spend $100,000 dollars just on testing. Everybody on the shoot had to get tested for coronavirus. We had a tiger and a leopard there, but we didn't film with them in there because of safety and because of the pandemic. We spliced those scenes together."
• The song drew 93 million US streams in the week ending August 13, 2020, the most for any track ever in its first week of release, besting the previous record held by Ariana Grande's "7 Rings" (85.3 million).
• The song topped the US chart, becoming Cardi's fourth #1 and Megan's second. Ben Sisario of the New York Times commented that it "is almost certainly the most explicit song" to reach #1 on the Hot 100.
• According to Cardi B's recording engineer, Evan LaRay Brunson, the rapper recorded the first verse of "WAP" back in 2019 before putting it aside and moving onto the next idea. Cardi was staying in a house in California with Brunson and some others during the coronavirus lockdown, and they started going through some of her old demos. "She was like, 'I like this,' Brunson recalled to Grammy.com. "She caught the vibe again and laid the second verse down."
  
  Megan Thee Stallion got added around late April/mid-May 2020 after Cardi B's stylist suggested putting the Texan rapper on the track. The pair then connected through Megan's own stylist.
• The song climbed to #1 after four weeks on the UK singles chart. It was the first UK chart-topper for both artists and also the first-ever female rap collaboration to reach the summit.
  
• Atlanta production duo Ayo N Keyz supplied the beat. They previously collaborated with Cardi on her Invasion of Privacy cut "Bickenhead."
• Keyz explained to Genius that the duo maintain a database of potential songs to sample (for "Birkenhead" they flipped Project Pat's "Chickenhead"). They heard DJ Frank Ski's "Whores In This House" playing in an Atlanta club and immediately recognized it as a great track to use on a beat.
  
  Ayo added that when they heard Cardi was working again, they sent her a pack of beats, including the one they'd done based around "Whores In This House."
  
  "It was like, 'If it doesn't fit her, let's go for the City Girls or Megan Thee Stallion,'" he said. "It's crazy that it ended up being Cardi B featuring Meg."
• "WAP" was named Best Song of 2020 by NPR, who described it as "raunchy, fun and infinitely quotable."
• Cardi and Megan performed this song (the clean version) at the Grammy Awards in 2021. Host Trevor Noah offered this advice to parents with children who might be watching: "Tell them it's about giving a cat a bath."