Remy Ma released the official video for “Rem The Pen” Tuesday night (Oct 13), giving the opening track of her Alimony EP a visual nearly three weeks after the six-song project arrived on streaming services on Sept. 25.

It is the record that sent fans straight to the comments the day the EP dropped, largely because of one couplet about Nicki Minaj. “Me and Nicki will probably never speak again, but even that b*tch told y’all I got a pen,” the Bronx rapper says, before turning the next line on someone she never names: “You not blackballed, b*tch, you just not Rem.”

Dom Bruno directed the clip and handled the edit and color himself, with casting by ExitFame. Most of the song is generous. Before she reaches Minaj, Remy runs a roll call of Cardi B, Lil’ Kim, Rah Digga, Missy Elliott and Monie Love. The lineage stretches from Monie’s Native Tongues days and Digga’s run with the Flipmode Squad to Cardi’s chart-topping present.

Remy has said that was the design for the whole project. In a statement shared with Complex, she described Alimony as a record meant to “feel like a conversation between women,” and explained what pushed her toward it: “For the past few years, there have been so many conversations about me, and so many people telling my story.”

The loudest of those conversations has been her marriage. Papoose filed for divorce in May 2025, and two weeks before Alimony arrived he answered her single announcement with “Jezebel,” a record that reads like an itemized ledger of the years he supported her through her prison sentence. Remy kept to her own calendar. She released the EP on the date she had promoted for weeks, with the Keke Wyatt duet “Why I Get Married?” leading the rollout under a title that needs no decoding.

The Minaj bar lands on nearly two decades of history. Remy heard a shot at herself on Minaj’s 2007 mixtape Playtime Is Over. The temperature dropped after Remy came home from prison in 2014, far enough that she publicly congratulated Minaj on a 2016 BET Awards win while Minaj talked openly about wanting to work with her.

That thaw ended in February 2017 with “Shether”, the nearly seven-minute answer Remy aimed at Minaj’s verses on Gucci Mane’s “Make Love” and Jason Derulo’s “Swalla.” Minaj came back within weeks with “No Frauds,” featuring Drake and Lil Wayne, and Remy answered that one with “Another One” before the summer.

Cardi B joined her onstage at Hot 97’s Summer Jam that June to perform Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” By November, Remy had brought in Lil’ Kim for “Wake Me Up,” the heist-themed video they shot in the Bronx, a song Kim insisted at the time was not about Minaj.

Three of the women Remy salutes on “Rem The Pen” stood beside her during that stretch. On the new record, Minaj arrives in the very next breath after them, as the one name attached to a door Remy considers closed.

The credentials behind the boast go back two decades. Remy came up in Fat Joe’s Terror Squad, earned the first of her two Grammy nominations on 2004’s “Lean Back,” and released her solo debut, There’s Something About Remy: Based on a True Story, in 2006, before the conviction that kept her off records until 2014. Her second nomination came with “All The Way Up,” the 2016 reunion with Fat Joe that pushed her back onto the Hot 100.

Alimony went out through Reminisce Records, DNA Music Group and Hitmaker Distro, with Hitmaka and Ron Browz among the producers on the six tracks. The project followed a busy year of loose records, including the French Montana and Max B reunion on “Ever Since U Left Me (Big Bronx Remix)” and the freestyle “W.Y.F.L.,” which listeners widely took as a reply to Papoose’s claims that he had written some of her material.

Papoose’s legal team later sent a cease and desist over “W.Y.F.L.” and its follow-up, “Wanna Go,” which means the question of who holds the pen in that household has already been argued on records and in a lawyer’s letter.

She also runs Chrome 23, a battle rap league where writers are judged line by line in front of a live crowd. The “blackballed” bar borrows that room’s logic, telling a peer that the problem was never the industry’s gatekeeping, only the verses.

The streaming credits for “Rem The Pen” list a single composer, Remy Smith.