On Sunday night at Hot 97 Summer Jam, Lil Wayne was at the end of his mini-set, in the middle of his protégée Nicki Minaj’s performance, when he gleefully rapped his verse from the Chris Brown hit “Loyal,” concluding with the incessant refrain: “These ho’s ain’t loyal!”
Ms. Minaj wasn’t having it. “Wayne, what you mean these ho’s ain’t loyal? It’s loyal women in the building,” she retorted, with a combination of indignation and theater, extending her microphone into the crowd to capture the supportive screams of thousands of women.
“Don’t be mad,” she added, because men could use some work of their own.
“Damn, you just gonna call me out like that?” Lil Wayne replied.
She closed the thought: “Ladies, why they be mad when we do them dirty? Who did it first?” Again, she aimed her microphone at the crowd, picking up umpteen female roars.
Those women are capable of loyalty, sure, though probably not to partners who dismiss them out of hand so casually, and who capture that sentiment in song. “Loyal” is one of the most heavily played songs on hip-hop radio at the moment, and its hook isn’t much more than just that opinion — remade as “These girls ain’t loyal” for the radio version — sung oh so sweetly and repeated ad nauseam. It’s draining.
Worse is “Cut Her Off,” by the Atlanta rapper K Camp, with its proud assertion at the chorus that “It ain’t nothing to cut that bitch off.” Any doubts about the severity of “Cut Her Off” — which K Camp has said was inspired by being stood up by a female friend — are allayed by the song’s video.
Throughout, K Camp is being yelled at by various women — all easily out of his league, but we’ll suspend disbelief for the moment — as he plays video games, gets his hair cut, drives his S.U.V. and generally indulges in the immature behavior of someone not used to taking others’ feelings into account.
The savvy and grotesque twist is that while you see the women screaming, you can’t hear them — they’re on mute. K Camp barely makes eye contact with them. When he looks at the camera and raps the song’s hook, he gestures with his fingers like scissors, cutting, cutting, cutting.
Talk about the silencing of women’s voices and needs. Plenty of pop is corrosive in one way or another, and hip-hop and R&B radio is a cornucopia of tough sex talk, aggressive seductions and more. But outright five-alarm misogyny has become increasingly rare. In the Drake era, especially, emotional accountability is at a premium and not a sign of outsiderness.
So there’s something dishearteningly retrograde about these songs, and how they diminish women with lack of imagination and ease.
And yet both “Loyal” and “Cut Her Off” are aesthetically enjoyable songs with detestable sentiments at their core. There is no real line in the sand that’s been crossed here. Plenty of immoral or emotionally dim work is great. Take the current R&B hit “Paranoid,” by Ty Dolla Sign, about a two-timing man whose bad behavior has come home to roost. It’s witty, reflective and slightly silly.
Even in the case of “Loyal” and “Cut Her Off,” guest stars leaven the mood and the nasty sentiment. Lil Wayne on “Loyal” and 2 Chainz on “Cut Her Off” are less directly offensive than the song’s stars, and also more humorous and lyrically clever, elevating a dispiriting conceit into something at least slightly less vapid.
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“Loyal” is especially discomfiting coming from Mr. Brown, a young singer with a troubled personal history, including his 2009 assault of Rihanna, then his girlfriend. Mr. Brown was released from jail on Monday, after finishing a one-year sentence for a probation violation, and he still faces assault charges in Washington for an incident last year.
It should be noted that Mr. Brown is capable of unexpected tenderness. He practically floats on “Fine China” — like “Loyal,” a single from his long-delayed album, “X” — a Michael Jackson homage that is one of the most tender pop songs of the last few years
And he’s the driving force behind “Show Me,” the Kid Ink single that has perhaps been this year’s most ubiquitous pop-minded rap song. (It recently surpassed Juvenile’s “Back That Thang Up” for the record of most consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Rap Airplay chart.) On that song, Mr. Brown is a raunchy but attentive lover — he almost sounds as if he cared.
These are characters, of course — lousy cad one minute, dreamboat the next. (K Camp has a shorter résumé than Mr. Brown, and not much balance on it.)
But it’s notable just how out of step with the times songs like “Loyal” and “Cut Her Off” feel. Decades of hip-hop cross-pollination with R&B have softened many of the genre’s roughest edges, and its ever-widening fan base is increasingly content with new narratives.
Coarseness will never be expunged from pop, nor should it. When it’s delivered with wit and charm and tackled from unexpected angles, it can make for essential listening. Just ask one of the most inventive rappers of the day, who also happens to be one of the bawdiest and the testiest — Ms. Minaj.
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