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-- by Shaheem Reid, with additional reporting by Sway Calloway and
Shari Scorca
Cornell Haynes, Jr., is dead broke.
Yes, Nelly — the same rapper whose debut LP, Country
Grammar, went eight times platinum late last year — is sitting in
a $500-a-day room in New York City's ultra-spiffy Trump International
Towers scrounging for cash.
"This is all I have, dirty," Nelly calmly says to his bodyguard, Big B,
pulling two $1 bills, some lint and a few pieces of scrap paper out of his
pockets.
Could it be that all those good times have finally caught up to the 24-year-
old? Has he squandered all those millions of duckets he gained from selling
all those millions of records and performing at all those hundreds of shows?
Of course not.
The St. Louis rapper is an ATM away from a kingdom's ransom, and he's
not afraid to floss it. The Vokal shorts he's looting are literally his
— Vokal is Nelly's clothing line. He's doing better than fine.
"Nellyville is life after 8 million," he says of his new album. "I felt
it was my duty to spill a little something on that. Obviously there's a lot of
good in that, but it does come with some backlash. I ain't had a lot of good
times [growing up], and I'm getting them now, so I like to rap about them.
I'm sorry!"
Nelly's apologies are sarcastic, obviously. The kid from the Lou isn't into
copping pleas. These days, he's spitting back at his detractors. He's heard it
all: "Nelly is too commercial." "Nelly was a fluke." "Nelly's doing songs
with 'NSYNC." "Nelly is soft."
"I don't pay no attention to [people criticizing Nelly]," says friend Jermaine
Dupri. "It ain't even about the rap. It's a style, that's his style. He's gotta do
what he do. So f--- what people got to say about Nelly."
"People know that if you're trying to get real hardcore street gangsta, then
Nelly ain't ya man," Nelly says. "But if you're trying to get your groove on,
if you got that girl in the car, then I'm with ya, dirty. If I'm riding, hell, I
might not even be listening to my thing — we're probably on some
Scarface.
"I'm here to make an option," he continued. "I'm not here to be a takeover,
I'm here for the alternative. I'm not trying to overshadow nobody. That's
why I did the '#1' joint. Don't take sh-- from me."
"#1" set off an exchange of potshots between Nelly and hip-hop legend
KRS-One. On the record, Nelly says he's tired of cats talking what's "real
hip-hop" — a blanket statement to naysayers, according to Nelly. But that's not how KRS-One heard them.
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Photo: Universal
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