To a certain extent, sure: the screaming women in K Camp’s music video are on mute. And when you hear this song, or “Loyal,” on the radio, it's not likely you'll hear a follow-up response from a female voice. In fact, you’re more likely to hear “Cut Her Off” follow “Loyal” than you are anything remotely like a rebuttal. And I appreciate Caramanica’s prominent response to a topic that not only usually gets glossed over in rap criticism, but that at this point even gets blandly name-checked. That is, acknowledging an awareness of misogyny in hip hop is often treated as just another mark in The Responsible Critic’s notebook, like referencing the “correct” musical influences, or acknowledging the right producer’s vinyl collection, as guided by the specific mentor so-and-so, who was raised in the school of—trails off into jerkoff motion. But rap, and most popular music across genres, has long adopted, and continues to take on, a misogynistic narrative. There is nothing “retrograde” or “rare” about this inclination, in hip hop or elsewhere.

This isn’t a critical failing, it simply underscores the importance of perspective: women who listen to hip hop are generally not surprised by the “disheartening” nature of songs like “Loyal” and “Cut Her Off,” by their willingness to “diminish women” with a “lack of imagination and ease.” Women who listen to hip hop are “disheartened” by the nature of hip hop’s narrative as a consistent, ongoing arc that diminishes us not only with ease, but also with a seemingly willful tendency toward callousness and a total lack of ingenuity.

But even with that fatigue, most women who listen to rap would concede that the music has long sustained and even nurtured a dialogic approach to its perceived moral failings. Think Yo-Yo combatting Ice Cube on “It’s A Man’s World,” Lil’ Kim flipping the R&B seduction standard on its head in “Dreams,” Trina taking Trick Daddy down a notch in “I Don’t Need U,” La Chat getting in her words on Project Pat’s “Chickenhead,” Nicki Minaj going on Hot 97 to engage with Peter Rosenberg’s criticism, and so on: this is a music constantly in conversation with itself, and always open to the other side’s dis. The critical feminist response to “Loyal,” for that matter, was sudden and emphatic—a fact that Caramanica doesn’t acknowledge.
So let’s review what women had to say about "Loyal" before a man went so far as to call it wrong. One of the first times I heard the “Loyal” beat, I remember, was from an idling car on a street corner in Brooklyn last winter. I recognized the voice as Keyshia Cole, and I noticed that the hook had a hell of a melody: “Just got rich,” she sang in the opening bars, “being broke was a bitch/ These niggas ain't loyal/ Fuck it, all the shit that he did!”