The 2000 song that reminds Nelly of his St Louis home
Nelly was born in Austin, Texas, but that’s not the place he considers home. The ‘Hot in Herre’ rapper moved to St Louis, Missouri, as a teenager, and that’s where his heart truly lies.
The young Nelly ended up in St Louis after his parents split up, and his mother took him to Missouri to start again. It would prove a consequential move, as his Midwestern identity would come to form a key part of his appeal during the early stages of his rap career.
Nelly started rapping in high school in St Louis as part of a group called St Lunatics, and they started to make a name for themselves locally, but outside of Missouri, things were tougher for them, and they struggled to gain much attention. Without a record deal on the cards, Nelly made the decision to go solo.
His choice was swiftly justified, and in 1999, he secured a record deal with Universal Music Group, although his relationship with the label wasn’t entirely without friction during the early days. It’s been said that record execs at the time weren’t initially fond of his sound.
But Nelly did have something the label liked: a Midwestern identity. This period of the late ’90s was still a time in which hip hop was dominated by the East Coast, the West Coast and increasingly the South. Midwest rap had not yet come into its own, but clearly, there was potential for that to happen.
The label promoted Nelly as a distinctly Midwestern star, which proved to be a winning tactic. His first ever single, ‘Country Grammar (Hot Shit)’, was a success, reaching number seven on both the American and British singles charts; Nelly was a star in the making.
This song itself, ‘Country Grammar (Hot Shit)’, was firmly rooted in St Louis, as Nelly acknowledged to NME in 2021. Characterising it as one of his favourite songs from his catalogue, he noted that the “special” track was the one that most reminded him of his home city.
He noted that he had written the track before he had ever gotten his record deal, before he ever knew “that the rest of the world would get a chance to hear it”. This was not a song for the wider world, but one that was “made strictly for St Louis”.
Nelly was proud that this was the song, so imbued with a sense of his home, that made him famous, claiming, “Nobody from St Louis had ever been on the type of level that we wound up being on. So for that song to introduce me to the world was very special”.