The Week Remy Ma Went At Nicki Minaj’s Neck – Stereogum

Jay Z won. I believed this in 2001, and I believe it now. In 2008, I wrote a whole chapter in the anthology Rock And Roll Cage Match about how I believe Jay won his grand 2001 feud against Nas, and I don’t want to rewrite that whole chapter in this paragraph, but I’ll sum it up as quickly as I can here. Jay won based on what came after the feud, when Jay became rap’s all-time corporate magnate and Nas continued to be a guy who raps. Jay cemented things in 2006, when he signed Nas to Def Jam and got to come off as a magnanimous ruler, forgiving an old rival his transgressions by throwing him a bone. But he won it in 2001, too, by sounding calm and controlled and regal and confident and above-it-all on “Takeover.” He sounded like he didn’t take Nas seriously, but he still precisely filleted his whole existence.

When Nas fired back at Jay on “Ether,” he was not calm or controlled or regal or confident or above-it-all. He was incensed. He was mouth-frothing, wild-eyed furious. He was haywire with rage. He sounded like a man backed into a corner, throwing everything he had at his enemy, just to survive. Some of his attacks landed. Some of them didn’t. Some of them were so out-of-pocket dumb that they made Nas look bad: “Rockefeller died of AIDS, that was the end of his chapter / And that’s the guy that you chose to name your company after?” Sixteen years later, that quality is what’s most compelling about “Ether.” It’s not a good song, the way “Takeover” is. It’s not even trying to be a good song. Instead, it’s a panic move, a sweaty palm slammed down on the nuclear-launch button.

In the years since then, plenty of rappers have used that “Ether” beat to target an opponent, but none of them has managed to capture that same frantic intensity. Or, rather, none of them did before this past weekend, when Remy Ma released “Shether” and declared all-out war on Nicki Minaj. “Shether” is such a savage, brutal, merciless attack that it barely even registers as a piece of music. And it’s not a good song. It’s “Ether” stretched out to seven minutes, which is not anything that anyone ever needed. It has no hook, no structure, not even a central idea beyond “fuck Nicki Minaj.” But that’s why it works; it’s what’s impressive about it. Remy spends the entire track hammering the shit out of every weak spot in Nicki Minaj’s armor. It’s just ridiculous.

As with “Ether,” some of those attacks don’t land, and some of them are just downright petty. Who cares, for instance, who Nicki has slept with? If that was the only real point of contention, the track wouldn’t register, just as Meek Mill didn’t dent Drake when he only went after the ghostwriting allegations. Remy has her own ghostwriting allegations, but she has plenty else as well. She’s got Nicki’s butt implants: “Talking ’bout bringing knives to a fight with guns / When the only shots you ever took was in your buns.” She’s got the business sense that led Nicki to sign an exploitative 360 deal: “Your money go through five niggas before you touch it / Any videos, promotions come out of your budget.” She’s got the idea that Nicki is a bad influence: “She the one misleading the black girls / All these fake asses, influenced by that girl / Dying from botched surgeries, what a sad world.” And, crossing about 15 different lines, she’s got the fact that Nicki’s brother was indicted for raping a 12-year-old: “You paid for your brother’s wedding? That’s hella foul / How you spending money to support a pedophile?” That moment when Remy brings Nicki’s brother into it is the moment “Shether” stops being a diss track and becomes something more like a massacre.

There is backstory here, if that matters. In 2007, when Nicki was still in her Smack DVD phase and Remy was still a force in New York rap, Nicki said some things that Remy didn’t like over Terror Squad’s “Yeah Yeah Yeah” beat. Nothing really came of it. Then, a year later, Remy went to prison for shooting her friend in the stomach. She stayed in prison for six years, the exact stretch of time that Nicki found stratospheric fame. (This is not lost on Remy: “Jealous bitch, you was happy when they took me / Best thing that happened to you was when they booked me.”) When Remy finally got out, she and Nicki seemed to be OK with one another, but they’ve been throwing decreasingly subtle shots at each other on records and in freestyles for months now. And on the back of last year’s surprise-hit Fat Joe collab “All The Way Up,” Remy is once again a force in New York rap. Plato O Plomo, the collaborative album that Remy and Joe released a little while ago, didn’t leave much of an impression, but she is still very much back. And on top of that, she’s a hard and nasty and fearsome rapper, and Nicki can’t ignore her. So it didn’t make any difference that Nicki is way, way more famous and popular than Nicki. Those little darts mattered.

 

The final straw, it seems, came last week, when Nicki seemingly devoted her entire verse on Gucci Mane’s “Make Love” to Remy: “You see, silly rabbit, to be the queen of rap / You gotta sell records, you gotta get plaques / S, plural, like the S on my chest / Now sit your dumb ass down, you got a F on your test.” In most situations, this would be a pretty effective slap-down, even if she never mentioned Remy’s name. But it is not “Takeover.” And in retrospect, it needed to be “Takeover,” especially given how Remy flipped that whole verse back on her, turning it into a ghostwriting allegation: “To be the queen of rap, you gotta actually rap / The whole industry know that your shit is a wrap.” Nicki will have to respond to Remy. This whole thing has captured people’s imaginations, and Nicki’s vague Instagram response will not be enough.

Source: The Week Remy Ma Went At Nicki Minaj’s Neck – Stereogum