Hall & Oates.
Hall & frickin' Oates, man. James Brown? Sure. Parliament? Would have been so expected as to seem a little cliché. Heck, even Lionel Richie and his Jheri curl wouldn't have come as a surprise. But an unabashed declaration of love for the skinny white dudes who rocked puffy bouffants and Whoa-oh-oh'd their way through the '80s is not what you might call a predictable sound bite for a guy like Nelly.
Seriously, Hall & Oates? It's that kind of here-and-gone, "Wait, what?" tidbit that almost demands an interruption and a request for clarification. But hold up. It ain't over yet. No, that was just a little piece, just a microphone check, so it'd probably be a good idea to shut up and let the man keep talking, let him spit another verse of uncut, gasp-for-air, we-didn't-bother-getting-clearance-to-use-this-sample, freestyle verbal napalm—just in case he shoves another lyrical bomb out of the belly of his B-2 bomber brain and into the middle of the next verse.
Like this one.
"For people to say that we've done nothing for this city is a asinine statement, because we've done the biggest thing for a people, and that's give them hope. You know what I'm saying? We gave this city hope, man. Nobody else showed you that it could be done, that, yo, you can be yourself, be a guy from St. Louis that lived in this city, and take music from your perspective and make it so that the rest of the world can love it. That's what we showed. We showed you the biggest thing. Now you mad because we won't hold your hand through the process? Incredible. In-fucking-credible."
Can ya'll hear him in the back? This is where the hook should come in, add a little context to the flow, give everyone a chance to take a break from this syncopated rhythm of candor. But he's not done yet.
"So just because Nelly's made it, he can not make stars. You can't make stars. Either you a star, or you not a star."
And now, a brief interjection, because without one, there's no guarantee that this kamikaze flow won't continue unabated and put the kibosh on any attempts to convey the following: 1) Nelly has a way of sing-speaking (he literally ends some sentences by running up the scales, do-re-mi–style) that takes some of the edge off of comments that probably seem … emotionally charged on paper. For what it's worth, keep that in mind. 2) He's got an album, Brass Knuckles, dropping—very tentatively, it should be noted—in August, which is why he's doing the whole local press junket thing right now, here in Skybox, the bar on Laclede's Landing that he co-owns with Larry Hughes, Marshall Faulk and Darius Miles. And given the fact that since he released his last album four years ago, he's been called out by Oprah for being a misogynist, by a local rapper named Huey for being a hater and by huge portions of the hip-hop–listening public for being wack, he's got a few things to say. 3) No matter what he says, St. Louis, he still loves you. Really. Most of you, anyway.
So back to this business of "Nelly can't make stars."
"You got people in the music industry that feel like just because you're not saying that they're the next hot thing out the city, then you're not doing anything for them. It's that kind of ungratefulness that makes you feel like, ‘Yo, B, everybody wants to get into this room.' St. Louis is outside the door. The hardest job about getting in that room is opening up that door. Sure, everybody can get in that room once that door is open, but nobody was able to open that door. So here's this kid come along, and he opens that door. And now everybody's standing in the room, and they're like, ‘Yo, what we supposed to do now?' Well, let's ask the kid: ‘Yo, kid, what we supposed to do now?' I opened the door for ya'll. Ya'll want me to tell you what to do when you get in the room, too?"
(This was, it should be pointed out, in response to the question "Why stick by St. Louis to the level that you have?" And considering the, uh, intensity of his response, it wouldn't be a stretch to assume that he's been thinking about this just a tad.)
Cry me a river, Nelly. Right? That's what you're thinking. You poor thing, Nelly, with your big houses and your expensive cars and your bling. People are ungrateful. The world is for shit. Boo-hoo-hoo. Yeah, sure, you might have a point. All this griping and "I'm not your daddy" might be a little melodramatic. But first of all, he's not worried about that ("I try not to fight battles I can't win. Doing that, it's a no-win situation."), and second, there's no time to stop and really think about that right now. The words. Just. Keep. Coming.
"When we came out, we didn't look like nobody from St. Louis. We didn't dress like nobody else. When we walked in, our sound didn't sound like nobody else from St. Louis. We wasn't even thinking like regular rap artists from St. Louis. Now everybody looks the same. Everybody trying to come out, they look the same. There's no stars. Where's the stars? Where's the charisma? Where's the creativity?"
Let's leave him there for a second and take a break …
The ironic part? That creativity, that "we didn't dress like nobody else," it got Nelly and the rest of his crew, the St. Lunatics, laughed at back in the day. The haters were clowning the kid who would go on to make stacks of cash and sell 30 million records and make people on both coasts cock their heads to the side and ask, "Where's St. Louis?"
"We could go back and show you tapes of rappers from '96, when we were doing talent shows, and compared to everyone else, we were freak shows," says Ali, who brought the Lunatics together back in the mid-'90s. "We'd get bitter at times, because there'd be laughter. ‘Look at them, with baggy shorts. And they got one shoe red and one shoe blue. Look at their hair. That one guy's got dreadlocks. It's terrible.' Now everybody looks like us."
Who's laughing now, and all of that, right?
The really ironic part? Nelly wasn't necessarily into that look. Or the no-guns, no-bitches, let's-have-fun-and-party sound that Ali wanted the group to take on. "He was one of the ones that kind of wanted to talk about shooting and stuff, but he still wanted to be a part of the situation," Ali says. "He tried to change what I was thinking, but I was like, ‘Nah, we going to do this.'"
Turns out that style worked just fine for Nelly. A couple of years later, the boys who would be the St. Lunatics—Nelly, Ali, Kyjuan, Murphy Lee and City Spud—were hanging out, smoking, drinking, working on raps. They'd got ahold of a beat from Jason "Jay E" Epperson and were trying it out, but nobody liked it. Except for Nelly. "He loved it," Ali says. "He was like, ‘This beat is crazy. This is it. This is hot.' We were like, ‘Uh, I don't get it.' It was like slow and draggy. I just couldn't get it."
While the other four rolled their eyes, Nelly took their rhymes, put them together and rapped them over the beat in his own melodic style. They were dumbfounded. "It was the birth of the sing-song rap, right there," Ali says.
That song? "Country Grammar."
And we're back: " … But people ain't doing that. Nobody's taking the time. Everybody wants to fall in line with what's going on because they feel like what's going on is easy enough that they can participate. To be different is to think, and it's harder."
(It's right about now that this comment from Nelly's manager, Tony Davis, seems strangely relevant: "One time, we had a conversation, and he said, ‘Man, I really be wanting your opinion. Don't feed me no bullshit. I don't want you to ever feel like you can't express your opinions around me.' I think he respects that.")
It would be entirely possible—but not exactly wise or productive from a storytelling perspective—to maintain this pace, to let the dude keep up the lyrical barrage of nouns and verbs and adjectives and yos, to let him tick off the laundry list of indictments against those who have sinned against him, but we need a narrative here. We need to get from Point A to Point B, and we may have already steered too far off course.
So let's find a new starting point, a Side 1, Track 1. Why not this bar? That seems like a logical, no-room-for-controversy place to start. It has TVs. It serves alcohol. Straightforward enough, right?
"We're still working on it," he says. "We're still working on the patio, trying to get the outdoor stage right. We're still working on putting the boutique hotel upstairs. None of the suites are alike. A little swanky, a little contemporary. I just wanted to make a place where I felt … We got a lot of sports bars, but they all seem old to me. They don't seem young, where the young people want to hang out, you know what I'm saying? When I do businesses, I like to do things that are relevant to my everyday life."
Nelly has business ideas like he talks: All the time, and without a filter. "I got a lot of ideas, man," he says. "Some of them good, some of them great, some of them terrible."
"When you've got someone like Nelly, who's had so much success, he'll come up with these off-the-wall ideas at 3 in the morning, and you got to figure out, ‘How I'm going to get this done?'" Davis says. "He's a visionary, as far as he love going places and seeing something new and being like, ‘We don't have that in St. Louis. Let me bring that here.'"
"The city, as a whole, needs a face-lift," Nelly says. "This city really has the chance to be that next city of a higher tier. This city has to get hip. There's a lot of old money and a lot of old people here in St. Louis that have to get with it if they want to be a marquee city. Because being a marquee city ain't geared to elderly money. It's geared to the young money."
OK, this is progress … sort of. We're getting somewhere. How about the album? Four years is a long time, especially in a market as fickle as hip-hop.
"Taking this time off has been the best thing for me. I really got a chance to fall in love with what I like to do again, as far as being in the studio, creating. I really got a chance to see how people, quote-unquote, perceive you, in a way where they think you're not on the level of where you were, as far as stature or as far as relevance."
Here we go.
"You're always going to have doubters. It's like if a guy comes outside of his house every day and he's like, ‘Yo, it's going to rain today,' and it doesn't, over and over, but then finally it does and he's like, ‘I told you!' And that's what I get: ‘Yo, Nelly, he's not going to do it again, he's not going to do it again, he's not going to do it again.' When you say he's not going to do it again, what do you mean? ‘Well, I mean he ain't going to sell 10 million records.' Well, damn. Who is? So what people really do, they compare me to myself."
And there it is. Now that there's a break in the action and time to think about it, there's the response to your Cry me a river, Nelly reaction. It's been right there this whole time, the gift and the curse—hell, it's probably always right there under the surface for him, ever since "Nelly" and "St. Louis" became interchangeable back in 2000. Whether or not he meant for it to happen, all that "I'm from the Lou and I'm proud" that he was yelling out, the wearing the Rams jerseys and the Cardinals hats—the things that made everyone here love him because he wasn't afraid to rep this city that half of hip-hop heads couldn't find on a map—it doomed him. It turned him into the savior of St. Louis—and let's face it, by extension, the rest of the Midwest—the Moses Def who was supposed to lead his people, the hip-hop hayseeds, out of the cornfields and on to L.A. and New York. But he didn't. Not really. And not because he didn't want to, but because that's kind of a tall order for one guy.
So the doubters, they're not just comparing Nelly now to Nelly then. They're comparing St. Louis now to St. Louis then—at least, comparing it to what it was supposed to be. And the picture isn't so rosy. At least not as rosy as the doubters want it to be, anyway.
Right or wrong, that's his cross to bear. Of course, that's not exactly the way he puts it.
"It's one of those situations where you like, ‘Yo, if that's the case, if I'm really not doing nothing for the city, then what am I doing here?' I need to just go to L.A. with everybody else. Or move to Atlanta like everybody else. I mean, shit, Lil Wayne is from Louisiana, but he lives in Miami. Fat Joe's from New York, but he lives in Miami. Missy [Elliott] is from Virginia, but she lives in Miami. I'm the only idiot that stayed home."
Home is a complex subject for Nelly, but he'll tell you all about it. He'll tell you how he grew up in a mess of homes. He'll tell you how he lived with his dad, then his mom, then his grandma, then back with his mom, then his friends. He'll tell you that all those different homes and neighborhoods gave him depth, more layers of complexity. He'll also tell you it messed with his sense of self a little.
"When you move around as much as I did as a kid, you get to asking yourself, ‘Does anybody want me?' Because you don't know. It's like, ‘Everybody else is living with they mother and father. Why I ain't living with my mother and father? They still alive. It's not like my father's dead or my mother's dead.' So you get to asking yourself those questions."
What he might not tell you, though, is that it almost kept him from being the first member of the St. Lunatics to go solo. As Ali tells it, Nelly didn't want to go out on his own. He wanted to stay with the crew. "At the time, he was 18 or 19, and it was the first time when he had, like, a family," he says. "We all started to gradually depend on each other, and then we just became family. So when we came to a point in life where we all said, ‘Yo, Nelly, you move out by yourself,' for him it was like, ‘Yo, this was a family thing. Now I'm back in the same thing where I'm by myself again. And ya'll pushing me out to go by myself.' We had to make a deal with him: ‘I ain't doing it by myself. If I got to do interviews, everybody getting up with me at 5. You staying with me.'"
All of which makes that talk about moving to Miami seem a little … suspect. Not because he doesn't have the guts to leave, but because behind the swagger and bluster, the kid who repped St. Louis is still there. The kid who wanted St. Louis to be something it had never been—even if he wasn't down with doing it entirely on his own—still wants that. But more than anything else, if Nelly is St. Louis and St. Louis is Nelly, what's St. Louis if Nelly leaves?
"I'm here, man," he says, sinking back into a leather couch in Skybox. "I'm just being grumpy, pissed at people. Where am I going to go? I love this place. My family's here. This is home for me. I like cruising the riverfront in my new car sometimes, just seeing who's out. Come on, man. This is my city."
