Remy Ma isn’t holding out for a reconciliation, and she isn’t pretending one is on the way. On “Rem the Pen,” the standout cut from her new EP “Alimony,” the Bronx rapper says it plainly: “Me and Nicki will probably never speak again.”
The project dropped September 25, and while that line is only a sliver of the track, it’s the one people keep running back.
It sits in the middle of a song that’s mostly about sizing up where women in rap stand right now, and who Remy thinks actually earned their place.
The full passage goes further. “Me and Nicki will probably never speak again, even that bitch told y’all I got a pen, you not blackballed bitch you just not Rem, you can’t pop shit and hang with my friends,” she raps.
That second line is the sharpest part. Remy is holding up Nicki’s own past acknowledgment of her writing ability as a receipt, turning a rival’s compliment into ammunition.
The “blackballed” bar reads like a jab at anyone who claims the industry shut them out, though Remy never spells out exactly who she means.
The rest of “Rem the Pen” is surprisingly generous. Remy shouts out Cardi B, Lil Kim, Rah Digga, Missy Elliott and Monie Love, handing out flowers across several generations of women who shaped the genre. Dropping Nicki into the same verse as all that praise makes the contrast hard to miss.
None of this came out of nowhere. The two have been circling each other since 2007, when Remy heard shots aimed her way on Nicki’s mixtape “Playtime Is Over.”
Nicki was still coming up at the time, and Remy was already one of the most respected women in New York rap.
For a while, it looked like time had
