Rap Music Lyrics Controversy: Nelly

Cornells Haynes Jr. was born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 2, 1974. Better known today Nelly, he grew up in the mid-western town and experienced first hand the danger and temptation of life on the street. He got into a lot of trouble in his youth and as a result was moved around to live with various family members. He continued living with different family members until he moved to University City, a suburb of St. Louis. It was here that he fell in love with baseball and because of this he was distracted from the street life. He became very good at baseball and during this time he started a rap group with his St. Louis friends Murphy Lee, Kyjuan Ali and his younger brother City Spud.

Nelly continued playing baseball while he was establishing his rapping skills. In 1996 Nelly’s group the St. Lunatics released their first single “Gimme What Ya Got,” and the song topped the city’s hip hop station at #1 along with selling over 7,000 copies. The group put out another hit titled “Who’s The Boss” and this song was also a hit but didn’t grab the attention that they were looking for from record companies. The group realized that Nelly would have the best chance of getting a record deal as a solo artist and he did with Universal Records.

Nelly put out his debut album in June of 2000 “Country Grammar” and ended up the number one album on the billboard charts. He has released a couple more albums since then and even brought along his St Lunatics group to the mix. They released their debut album in 2001 with the debut of “Free City.” The group received national attention and it wasn’t until 2004 that they received some negative feedback.

The video for the song “Tip Drill” was released which stirred up some controversy especially with the women of Spelman College. They said that the video was degrading to women and were very upset for how much air time the video was receiving. The main part of the video that they were upset about was when Nelly swipes a credit card through the buttocks of a female stripper. They didn’t understand how these girls would even want to be a part of this video. In Nelly’s defense he claimed that the women all willingly participated.

Spelman College protested against Nelly and his affiliation with a bone marrow drive that he was going to help promote. The school protest did end up back firing on them and MTV released a story that implied Spelman College was to blame for the drive not happening because of the protest to one music video.