The Rapper Who Likes Bowling

By JOSH TYRANGIEL/Santa Fe Monday, Sept. 20, 2004
    • MATTHIAS CLAMER FOR TIME

    EASY RIDER: He travels the territory between hard-core hip-hop and sugary pop

    Some people carry the weight of the world. Others carry rolling papers and a bowling ball with an airbrushed painting of Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Mo. Nelly, the multiplatinum hip-hop star whose songbook can be fairly divided into two categories — songs about parties and songs about parties in which people get naked — is a bowling-ball kind of guy. Actually, he's a two-bowling-ball kind of guy. On a recent stay in New Mexico, where he was shooting scenes for an Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard , Nelly took along a strike ball, a spare ball, customized shoes, a wrist brace and a sweat rag. "I need all the equipment," he said, before ordering mozzarella sticks, French fries, ranch dressing and several ice-filled buckets of Corona from an alley waitress. "You never know when you'll get a chance to roll, and you should never waste a chance to have a good time."

    For Nelly (Cornell Haynes Jr.), bowling is not an ironic thrill. He holds the house record, 257, at the Pin-Up Bowl in his native St. Louis, but more to the point, he knows no such thing as an ironic thrill. Ever since he became an instant gazillionaire thanks to his 2000 nursery-rhyme hit, Country Grammar , his life has been dedicated to the fulfillment of a Maxim -style populist fantasy: fun, all the time. He owns a massive house by a Missouri lake, a clothing line and a slice of an NBA team, and, if they kept charts on such things, he would easily be the No. 1 artist in the history of the exotic-dance industry. (Strippers love his stuff.) On two new albums — the rap-tilting Sweat and the R&B-tinged; Suit , both released Sept. 14 — Nelly reveals a bit more depth, but he still clings to his major themes: smoking pot, throwing parties, smoking more pot. Others have covered this territory before, but Nelly does it in such a warmhearted, jolly, singsong style that it's hard to begrudge him a single toke.

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    As you might expect from an advocate of licentious utopianism, Nelly is the world's least conflicted famous person. "What's wrong with being rich and famous?" he asks. "It's better than being broke and not known!" This he knows from experience. In his poor-and-anonymous days, Nelly, 29, supported himself with jobs that ranged from sorting packages on the graveyard shift at UPS to dressing buns at McDonald's. "It's not all smiles like you see on TV," he says. "The McDonald's I worked at used to have a heavy-ass lunch rush — a week's work in three hours. But when I was there, I discovered that I'm pretty good at working hard. If I had to, I could pull a 9-to-5 and then some. But I wanted to get rich, and that doesn't happen at McDonald's."

    After he left the grill, his life followed the ur-rap narrative — sell tapes from the trunk of a car, sign a record deal, buy a De Beers mine — but Nelly remained committed to the ideal of serving billions and billions. "I was never interested in just playing to one market or genre," he says. "I want everybody to get my music." So far, everyone has. His first two albums sold 15 million copies, and in many ways he has become the hip-hop Shania Twain (another ex-McDonald's employee who grew up poor and writes songs designed to ring registers in every genre). But whereas Twain takes pop songs and countrifies them or vice versa, Nelly is an integrationist. His exuberant rolling delivery — he has never met a hard consonant — naturally places him between the commercial lodes of hard-core rap and sugary pop, while his lyrics invite everybody into the hot tub in the middle. His current single, My Place , sounds like a collaboration between Hall and Oates and Tupac.

    Nelly has genuinely broad tastes. Between frames at the bowling alley, he sings along full throated with everyone from Hoobastank to Michelle Branch, never missing a lyric. And, as befits the mayor of all good times, he also enjoys all kinds of people. Although other hip-hip artists might view collaborations with OTown or Justin Timberlake as potentially fatal assaults on their credibility, Nelly embraces them as marketing and friendship opportunities.

    Of course, there are those who view that eagerness to cross over, particularly when it involves collaborations with white pop stars, as a negative. Nelly has been hit with charges of Hammerism, most notably from aging rap legend KRS-One, who issued a commercial fatwa against Nelly and his label, Universal Records, and then backed it up as "the will of God." What KRS was presumably trying to do was inspire a battle in which he and Nelly would go back and forth on record, gaining publicity while insulting each other, before ultimately calling on someone else seeking publicity to broker a peace. Nelly, though, doesn't battle. "In Midwest hip-hop, we just don't do it," he says. "It's not our forte like the East Coast. We aren't trying to mess with anybody. It makes no sense, and it makes no dollars, either. With [KRS], I was just like, 'Yo, B, I don't even know you. What is your beef with me? Call me up, tell me what's wrong. Let's talk it out.' Maybe we could have done a record together."

    As aw-shucks as that sounds, Nelly really does put collaboration over competition and only in part because he wants everyone's ears (and everyone's money). "Everybody that I work with, I like to call them friends," he says. "These aren't people that I just send a CD to and they do it. From Justin to Mobb Deep and Fat Joe, I'm tight with these people." There are so many friends on Sweat and Suit that the albums deserve their own Electoral College votes. Christina Aguilera, Tim McGraw, Ron Isley, Stephen Marley, Pharrell and Mase all drop by, and there's even a John Tesh sample on the hysterically over-the-top Heart of a Champion . Like all double releases, Sweat and Suit are a little bloated, but the good stuff, like the giddy Getcha Getcha and soulful Over & Over , sounds like a cohesive compilation of pop music at this very moment.

    The albums are also unremittingly fun, and that has nothing to do with the guest appearances. Even during moments of seriousness — for instance, when a 200 game is in sight — Nelly sings and bops and jokes incessantly. When, in the last of eight games, he wins a bet that means a writer must perform a song of Nelly's choice in an adjacent karaoke bar (his Pin-Up Bowl record is mentioned only after the interview), he spends a good long time perusing the songbook — "Boy, there's just so many good ones!" — while star-stunned teenagers in cowboy hats cover his greatest hits. Finally, he grabs the mike to wild applause and says, "Please give it up for a very special man from a very special magazine who's going to sing a very special song." The song? It's Raining Men . Naturally, Nelly sings along.