Degrees
After you pass two or three million, you are
now popular music. If that's the definition,
fuck it, I'll take that title.
— Nelly, The Source, July 2002
The hip-hop hegemony keeps trying to suggest
that because Nelly's crossing over, his music
is bad, but his populist attitude is a big part
of what makes him good.
— James Hannaham, Village Voice 1 July 02
The boycott, that's the will of God. I said,
"Yo, we should boycott Universal Records and
Nelly to send a message to the recording
corporations of the United States that says
there are people in hip-hop culture who, if
they say this is wack, you lose sales." We need
to take that stance and let these corporations
know hiphop is a viable culture.
— KRS-One, MTV.com
Summertime. It's hot and everyone's feeling it -- the humidity,
the sunshine, the long days and sweaty nights. It's the season
when consumers are besieged by images of astonishing bodies,
lounging by water, playing games or cooking out, slithering and
squirming, showing off their lovely curves with minimal
disguise. It's a special time, when consumers are expected to
meet standards. To get in, you need a carefully worked-out or
genetically blessed body.
These are the hot bodies, the ones you see on MTV. Like in the
video for "The Thong Song," where Sisqo flips and skips with an
array of unstoppable, ridiculous bodies. This year, in addition
to the usual outdoor fetes -- the yacht parties, beach parties,
Puffy parties, or dirt-bike parties (and the Murder, Inc. crew
is everywhere in the 02) -- music videos are dishing up shots of
parties inside nightclubs, where the temperature is very, very
high. On screen, these interiors look fabulous: burnished
multi-culti figures, DJs playing exactly the right groove. The
room caters to desire, induces confidence. It's the room you see
in the videos for Faith Evans, Missy, and Freeway's "Burnin' Up"
(remixed by P Diddy, who did, we now know, invent the remix),
Britney's Neptunes remix of "Boys," and Nelly's first single off
his already-platinum second album, Nellyville -- "Hot in
Herre."
This is a seriously summertime video. No story, no characters,
only a thrilling loss of sense and self, limits melting away in
the metaphorical heat. The boys shrug and move a bit (including
St. Lunatic Slow Down, who must be burning up in his trademark
mask). The girls are gorgeous and willing to strip. When this
crowd perspires, they never look wilted or pathetic, just
ravishing, like Gatorade commercials, faces gleaming purple.
It's a great look, the current favorite summer-anthem-vid. It's
the ode to and of the moment, a seething celebration of
hard-bodied beauty, sweat, and heat.
This is the ideal club, at the center of the ideal urban
enclave, Nellyville. Much has been made of this fantasy location
that Nelly has cooked up. The story has been told again and
again -- while test-driving an SUV near St. Peter's, Missouri,
Nelly saw the town was for sale. Though he decided against
buying, he opted for conjuring: Nellyville, the ultimate
elsewhere, where he's the mayor and no one's going to deny it.
"Nellyville," he tells MTV, "is everything that's in my world,
how I see it. How I [perceive] different people now, 'cause I
see them in a new light, and how people see me."
Likely, his perspective has changed quite a bit recently. It
was only two years ago that the former Cornell Haynes Jr.
dropped his first album, Country Grammar, selling over 8
million copies worldwide. The seeming instant popularity of
Nelly's sound made it look suspicious, and more than one head
complained that 1) he's "manufactured," prefabbed by his label
and rotated incessantly by Viacom, and 2) he doesn't even rap.
In other words, he's not "authentic," by hiphop standards.
For the first charge, true that. Nelly is as brilliantly
promoted and annoyingly overpromoted as any teenie-pop act,
Mandy Moore and Eminem included. He's got the look, the pose,
the jewelry, the grin coming from under his cap bill. For the
second, Nelly doesn't "rap," so much as he sort of sings, sort
of lilts, rolls his raspy voice just above and behind the beat.
For the second, the N-E double L-Y claims both/and. He's upfront
a consummate performer, knowing just when to rock back, when to
lean in, when to turn his Band-Aided cheek toward the camera,
for the most sinuous effect. Sometimes he sounds like he's
crooning, with a bit of swing ("Midwestern Swing," it's called),
and like most crooners, he's interested in meeting "baby girls,"
"mixing Cris' and Bacardi," and "tryin' to fulfill my dreams."
At the same time, Nelly's got a bonafide urban past, not
poverty-stricken, but running the streets, living in and out of
relatives' households (he's now reconciled with his mama, bought
her a nice house, too). His background is specific enough to
sound like his own, typical enough to sound familiar and so,
identifiable. He was born in Texas, spent a couple of early
years in Spain (his dad was in the Air Force), then moved to St.
Louis. He took to the city, assuming its rhythms and
expectations, working at McDonalds and on the streets, doing
what he needed, honing his craft, and securing his crew. In
1993, they named themselves the St. Lunatics -- Kyjuan (born
Robert Cleveland), Murphy Lee (Tohri Harper), Slow Down (Corey
Edwards), Big Lee (Ali Jones), and Nelly's half-brother City
Spud (Lavell Webb), currently serving a 10-year sentence for
armed robbery, and the namesake of the St. Lunatics' first
album, Free City (2001). When Nelly landed his contract
with Universal records, he ensured contracts for his crew too.
All this business dealing piled on top of his crossover
popularity, itself pushed along by his savvy decision to be the
only boy (with the Lunatics) on the TRL "girls" tour in 2000
(with Destiny's Child, Eve, 3LW, Jessica Simpson, and Dream),
and secured in his appearance at the Superbowl with Aerosmith
and Britney, and again with 'NSync at the MTV Music Video
Awards, for the Neptunes remix of "Girlfriend"; a remix video
followed, and just like that, Nelly was boybanded, swaying his
hops alongside Justin and nuzzling an anonymous shorty in the
backseat. From here, the Nelly blitz has only expanded. He's
completed filming Snipes, with Dean Winters and Fat Joe,
and he's reportedly in talks with Paramount Network television
to star in a sitcom (it worked for Big Willy and LL). Motorola
has created a Nelly celly, equipped with games, customized Nelly
ringtones and "the opportunity to have the rapper's voice handle
your voicemail." And he's got the requisite clothing line,
Vokal, focused on the usual -- shorts, tracksuits, jeans. At
least he hasn't signed on for a reality series. Yet.
Then again, his rising star story quite resembles reality tv:
unbelievable, infuriating, irresistible, a function of his time.
If Eminem cuts all ways with his outrage and outrageous rhymes,
and 'NSync get over by working extra-hard, Nelly slides across
all boundaries with something approximating ease. He manages all
this by accommodating contradictions -- he contains multitudes,
or at least, a series of affects: openness and guardedness,
innocence and experience, toughness and sweetness, down-home
sincerity and commercial slickness. Nelly Nel flows. He's the
unrealest, unscariest of hiphop artists this side of Lil Romeo,
even if his do-rag got him kicked out of St. Louis' Union
Station Mall back in April (the mall has a particularly strict
anti-"gang-related paraphernalia" dress code). The incident only
makes him seem more of everything, cannily straddling that
unreal-real line, a victim of profiling in the very hometown
he's put on the hiphop map.
Busted by the mall police, and voil`: Nelly looks "real." Or,
real enough. The difference is a matter of degrees. With all due
respect to earnest and politically minded hiphop, the commercial
arena has expanded definitions and possibilities. At this point,
the difference between what's real and what's not, while hardly
irrelevant or even uninteresting, is not the only or most
important distinction to mark. Like pop stardom, authenticity is
a construction, and more often than not, it's an easy one to
sell (check Avril, this month's authentic gamma girl). Fans
process music and videos -- product -- in ways that have become
infinitely more complex and fluid, a process that allows for
movement and hybridity more than it demands a fixed allegiance,
identification, and location.
While Nelly's smooth 'tude can hardly be mistaken for softness,
his ability to ride with Justin Timberlake and them makes him
seem a "nice" hiphop artist, blending uptempo beats and party
lyrics with lively, affable raunch. His massive appeal has to do
with generational shifting. This isn't to say that crossing
between pop and hiphop is a new idea, or that old schoolers
can't get with the program. It does mean that younger hiphoppers
pop more easily and more often than those with longstanding
investments in a certain style of realness.
In fact, the most visible bump in the road appears to be the
so-called "battle" with KRS-One, started when the Blastmaster's
complained that pop is not the real hiphop (assuming, of course,
there is an identifiably real hiphop). Nelly responded first in
his movie-soundtrack single, "#1" ("I'm tired of people judgin'
what's real hiphop, / Half the time you be them niggaz who
fuckin' album flop"), then again, more directly, on "Roc the Mic
Remix" -- "You the first old man should get a rapper's pension,
/ No hits since the cordless mic invention." KRS has responded,
on "Ova Here," that Nelly "sounds like 'NSync commercial."
While the battle doesn't exactly meet "classic" criteria, or
even reach the skills, entertainment, and outrageousness value
attained by Nas and Jay-Z's beef (while the rhymes were one
thing, it was another level when Nas wanted to "lynch" Jay in
effigy on stage), KRS did recently essay another type of another
level: to underscore his point, KRS called on heads to boycott
Nellyville, a call that, even as it reached some, clearly
did not reach all within hearing range. The record has been
number one on the Top 200 for three weeks running.
The sales are no accident, of course. This summer, Nelly's been
all over tv and radio, hit Leno and MTV's Jammed, and
been plenty visible on newsstands, on the covers of Sister 2
Sister, Vibe, Murder Dog, and The
Source, all interview stories that reveal the same
information, regarding his familial background, affection for
St. Louis, sports skills (basketball, football), and the two
kids he refuses to discuss (he puts it to Blender this
way: "My private life is shhhhhh").
The repetitiveness underscores the point: the Nelly image is
carefully erected and protected. He'll go to clubs with
reporters, he'll show them round his condo and his tour bus, but
he's in control of each situation, setting limits and closing
doors when time is up. No doubt, this constant surveillance
brings pressure. His lakeside home outside St. Louis is on the
market, partly due to the onslaught of fans who learned his
address after the house was featured on MTV's Cribs, and,
he tells MTV, he misses "the ordinaryism of not having to
second-guess anything you do... You've always got to think
there's somebody watching, there's somebody with a camera. I can
only be me, but just definitely be more responsible about it.
The lack of privacy is the hardest thing to deal with."
The fine lines that divide privacy and publicity, authenticity
and performance tend to collapse regularly, especially when it
comes to business and art. What counts as real one moment
couldn't be farther from it at another. For now, it appears that
Nelly has his finger on some kind of zeitgeisting pulse, one
that isn't so invested in knowing his secrets or even in caring
whether he's authentic. On "Splurge," he sing-says, "You see the
magazines and / Me on your TV screens and / You think you know
me but you really don't." The question is: do you care? On "Pimp
Juice," he struts, describes his '74 Coupe de Ville. "Bitch
please, get in, but don't you slam that do' / Dust your shoes
off befo' you touch that flo' / Cause you wanna put your feet on
my rug, don'tcha?" This isn't Ice T-style pimping, not hos down
pimping. It's a metaphor. "Pimp juice" isn't only for pimps;
it's a measure of nerve and power. "Bitches got the pimp juice
too," and oh yes, "Pimp juice is color blind." Everyone can
play.
It's all about crossing over. As if to underscore the point,
Nelly is bringing out the big pop guns, with Kelly Rowland
guesting on the album (on "Dilemma," she sings, "No matter what
I do, all I think about is you. / Even when I'm with my boo,
y'know I'm crazy over you"), as well as his boy JT. And here
again, he shows how he gets his own appeal, sideways: "I don't
want Justin singing about my hood or about diamond rings and
chains and cars because that wouldn't be believable. I wanted
something he and I could feel comfortable with, and what better
than girls?" Check. The premise for their collaboration, "Work
It," is about as basic as can be: "Keep yo hips poppin', what's
up with all these questions? / And what planning baby? / You
talking to me like you talking to an adolescent. / I like to
jump off, jump off, / Clothes -- come off, come off. / Her
place, freaky beats, and so and so on." Call it an experience
beyond words.
But, of course, she's not in her place, in Nellyville. As the
New York Times' Kelefa Sanneh notes, the Mayor of
Nellyville describes St. Louis, with arches and such, but not
exactly: "The city itself comes across as an abstraction, a
generic gangsta's paradise where everyone is entitled to '40
acres and a pool.'" This abstraction is seductive, uplifting,
and pleasurable. On "Nellyville," he invites you to "Imagine
blocks and blocks of no cocaine, blocks with no gunplay. / Ain't
nobody shot, so ain't no news that day. / Ain't nobody
snitchin', they refuse to say. / Every month, we take a vote on
what the weather should be."
The most popular choice, this time of year: hot. Back inside
the club, the roof is on fire, the Dj's spinning, the hot bodies
sweat and strip. In "Hot in Herre," Nelly insinuates and
tantalizes, slides and slinks: "No deceivin', nothin' up my
sleeve, no teasin'. / I need you to get up, up on the dance
floor, / Give that man what he askin' for, / Cuz I feel like
bustin' loose and I feel like touchin' you. / And can't nobody
stop the juice, so baby, tell me what's the use?" That juice
again. The video for "Hot in Herre" shows dancers in stages of
undress ("Me and the rest of my heathens"), reflecting one
another, close up on one another, a mass of movement, not going
anywhere. Nellyville, so audacious and dynamic, so lavishly
conjured. It hardly matters where it is.
— 25 July 2002
