Why Nelly is worth saving

August 30, 2024

Indirectly rebirthing Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is one of the best things the Internal Revenue Service has ever done.

On Sunday, TMZ reported that the rapper has been hit with a $2,412,283 federal tax lien back in August. Over at SPIN, we hatched a harebrained scheme: to determine how many times Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” would need to be streamed on Spotify to pay off the debt. After some iPhone calculator mathematics, SPIN tweeted the answer: “Nelly Needs At Least 287,176,547 ‘Hot In Herre’ Streams to Pay Off His IRS Debt.” Black Twitter picked it up, and Nellyville was repopulated once more.

#SaveNelly and #HotinHerreStreamingParty quickly trended. The pledges came within hours: some Say No Mores, playlists composed solely of multiple “Hot in Herre” listings and the novel idea of having the single on repeat (and on mute) during a night’s sleep. This was a righteous abuse of a streaming system that continually abuses artists — and this was for a star who was a nostalgic afterthought just last week. Nelly had a fair number of hits in the past six years (2010’s “Just a Dream” peaked at No. 3), but his last album, 2013’s “M.O.,” sold a paltry 15,000 copies in its first week. To compare, his first two albums — his diamond-selling debut “Country Grammar” and follow-up “Nellyville” — are two of the highest-selling hip-hop albums of all time.

But the Nellyville cavalry came in time to fend against the IRS’ heat. My homegirl texted me as soon as the #SaveNelly campaign went into full swing.

“Are we actually saving this man’s career tho?!” she asked, and punctuated herself with six flame emoji.

Why save Nelly? A large part of the cavalry are 20-somethings who were going through the physical cruelty of puberty when “Hot in Herre” caught fire in 2002. For middle-schoolers, the jam was a lubricant for inter-gender relations. Nelly stretched it into slogans and half-finished thoughts cartoonishly strung together by drawl-accented melody and the Neptunes’ zestful production. The ass is bodacious, but with Nelly as the headband-sporting Svengali, we kept heart at school dances. Our bodies changed, and still we rose.

Of course “Hot in Herre” isn’t Nelly’s only hit. Despite being from St. Louis, he made an anthem for Air Force 1s — sneakers with a New York nickname. The true tragedy of Donald Trump is how he undermines the racial progress that Tim McGraw and Nelly started. He had Kelly Rowland texting him through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Nelly generates an almost Pavlovian reaction for many, yet he’s often mentioned alongside millennial ephemera — ringtone rap, Apple Bottom jeans and “The Parkers.”

But #savenelly isn’t just about nostalgia. It’s about “the Culture.” The Culture with a capital “C” doesn’t really have a set definition. It could be used as a shorthand for “hip-hop culture,” but — thanks, in part, to the sloganeering of famed podcaster Taxstone — it’s evolved into something of a hip-hop syllogism, a nebulous but black way of saying “just do you”: Something is valid because that’s how I feel, who I am.

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Nelly’s legitimacy was lambasted by those (conservative white America, respectability politics-toting African Americans) who wrongheadedly still believed hip-hop wasn’t a real art form even though it had become a widespread cultural force by 2000. Moreover, he’s been pilloried by hip-hop traditionalists who canonize lyrically dense Nas raps, but don’t quite “get” Migos. Imagine spending much of the late ’90s watching Puff Daddy’s jiggy anthems push hip-hop into the mainstream, and then having to deal with Nelly on the radio at the turn of the decade. He wore headbands regardless of whether he was doing any strenuous physical activity. He wasted bandages. He wasn’t even from New York, the Mecca of hip-hop. Nelly as a concept didn’t make sense.

To many, neither did his fellow black Generation Y icon Allen Iverson. In a weird bit of symmetry, “Hot in Herre” peaked during Iverson’s NBA prime, 2000-2002. And just before “Hot in Herre” caught fire again, Iverson got his deserved praise at the NBA Hall of Fame ceremony this weekend.

Like Nelly, being an anomaly became an essential part of Iverson’s legacy. While hip-hop and the NBA have made connections through the ’90s, Iverson was the first artist to really wear hip-hop on his sleeves — the unapologetic rebelliousness, the braids, the tattoos. His appearance repped the Culture and was simply an expression of who he was, a roguish act in the eyes of many. Former commissioner David Stern once recalled how the media attributed the Malice at the Palace brawl of 2004 to a perceived “thug” culture that spread through the league. It was open season on hip-hop: In 2005, the commissioner implemented the infamous Dress Code, which banned attire associated with the Culture. The lifestyle that represented Generation Y — and that Iverson exuded — was being actively sterilized. Where the league saw a thug, we saw ourselves. With Nelly, where others saw sellout, we saw a relatable expression.

A decade and some change after Iverson and Nelly’s careers peaked, former tweens and teens have grown into developed voices with the platform to use them. Iverson’s Hall of Fame speech was riveting not because he nearly broke down multiple times; it was also a sendup of the culture that molded his character: Nobody has ever name-dropped “Chappelle’s Show,” Jim Jones, and Fabolous in one speech. #SaveNelly was an informal canonization that carried its own importance. In the face of the against-the-Culture IRS, here was a generation restating that — in spite of critics, the test of time and the death of Apple Bottoms — Nelly is part of its biography.

Thus, he’s worth tax salvation. It was an easy decision to stream Nelly from the waters of federal debt for the Culture. There’s a Vokal tank top in all of us.

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