second round

(2) nelly, “hot in herre”
sheathed
(7) Fatboy Slim, “Weapon of Choice”
223-194
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the song/essay with the most votes at the end of the game. If there is a tie at the end of regulation, we will play a one-hour overtime (and repeat until we have a winner). Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/15/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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Weapon of Mass Dancestruction: Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” by anne weisgerber

It’s hard to say something original about a work so famous. A funky dance song interpreted by an Academy Award-winning actor; a low-battery color palette duking it out with a thunderstorm of motion; a celebrated don of bass players penning and singing lyrics that popped the Dune fanbase like a Lacoste collar.
The video for Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” (2000) won six 2001 MTV Video Music awards: Breakthrough Video, Best Direction, Best Choreography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography. It won the Best Short Form Music Video at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards show (2002). VH1 ranks it best music video of all time. The song, which reached #1 in the UK, was released in November 2000.
The star of the “Weapon of Choice” video, Christopher Walken, remembers how, in the aftermath of the video’s release ca. 2001, “I happened to be traveling all over the world, and it was amazing to me how many people saw it…. not only different countries but the different ages of people, young people, old people. (It) really brought home the power of television to me.”
Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, also recognized the power of this collaboration with Walken, music legend Bootsy Collins, and Director Spike Jonze, calling it “as much of a turning-point in my career as anything. It launched me worldwide.”
 “Weapon of Choice,” filmed over two December-2000 days in a Los Angeles Marriott, has been awarded, lauded, studied, celebrated, deconstructed, essayed, and memed six ways to Sunday, with hundreds of millions of plays and views since it debuted at the start of the new millennium. It flies through every new sound delivery innovation: vinyl, mp3, MTV, social media, P2P, Vevo, YouTube, streaming. A sleek 4K remaster of the original 35mm film in 2021 kicked out the jams once more, giving this cultural touchpoint a fresh boost.  
In the lead-up to 2000, Disco was dead (as were Kurt Cobain and Bradley Nowell), AIDs and HIV had treatments, and the coming stock market and housing crash dimly tweaked in distant financial reports. The World Trade Center, an international symbol of global commerce and peaceful trade, yet glistened at sunrise.
Public fears about computer shut-downs at the turn of the century (something programmers never accounted for) were palpable. All the same, Y2K came and went without chaos: the grid kept griddling, networks kept chattering, water flowed from kitchen spouts.
By 2000, I was 35 and married for seven years, had three children, and was four years into being a stay-at-home mom. I had been a radio DJ in the 80s, and an award-winning national salesgal in the 90s—the trophy says I made eagles fly—but my eyes were always toward family. To keep my brain solvent, I picked up freelance writing jobs for The Echoes-Sentinel, my local weekly, and was spending days with playgroups—ball-pit birthday parties at Chuck-E Cheese and Romparound—my evenings interviewing Kissinger, Cronkite, and Russert. I was on my own with the babies a lot, my partner is an artist who travels to the jobs, plus living through a home renovation and kitchen demolition…. I have vague memories of washing dishes in the bathtub, the winter-of-the-microwave-pancake, but I have a blind spot with music for about eighteen months. I, so sleep-deprived, missed how clubs were scrambling to install projectors and screens so that Walken could soar over dance floors. I wasn’t there. Even so, that video found me a short year later.

“Weapon of Choice” Appears

It wasn’t until my littlest enrolled in full-day kindergarten that I considered working again. I knew, good as the pay was, I didn’t want to go back to the corporate soul-suck. I enjoyed freelance writing, but invoicing a few hundred dollars here and there isn’t part of my Jersey playbook. I had won the 1999 first-prize for features writing from the SPJ, and parlayed that into being a guest speaker in local schools. I really enjoyed it, so thought I’d try substitute teaching, which was a lot of fun. Fast forward, I sail through hoops, sign checks, and get certificated, landing a job as an English teacher at a public Magnet High School in 2002.
Let me tell you this: If you want to feel better about the world, surround yourself with teenagers who like to read and write. Because of my Marketing background, I taught a Communications Media class. I asked them to apply a media literacy paradigm to a school-appropriate music video, and the day came and students presented videos from Franz Ferdinand, Shania Twain (mimicking Robert Palmer), and Fatboy Who??’s “Weapon of Choice.” We were projecting it on a big screen in the computer lab in the dark, and up comes this tight little movie, a perfect film. It was a revelation to me. I remember the dive over the balcony taking away my breath and all of us whooping and clapping!
That was 2002. I’ve used it in lessons ever since. Any time I want my students to write about a film, I give them a list of critique points and we practice with “Weapon of Choice.” It touches upon every aspect of great cinema. Over the years, I’ve accumulated some things my students have said about the video, and I always feel a fondness for this film in their musings.

Emphasize the Lead

For instance, what is this film about? Its plot, its verbs, its narrative? Do you care about it?  My student consensus on the subject: A businessman sits in a hotel lobby, appearing slumped, burned out, and defeated. He hears some music, and begins to nod in time with it, then stands. Suddenly, he launches into a dance, energetically racing and leaping and smiling. He eventually dives over a mezzanine railing and flies around the main lobby area, and hangs for a moment in front of a large painting of a boat at sea. Then he comes back down to earth, and after some thought and a sigh he returns to his chair and his old sad self.
As for the song itself, Cook said his arrangements were less intentional. In an April 2023 interview with Karl Boltzmann, he said, “I just wanted to make a record with Bootsy and see how much fun we could have.”
So, there may not be an underlying message for the musical composition, but there really is a main idea at work in the film. My students often sum it up like this: you can fantasize about a different life, but if you don’t actually get up and move, you’re doomed. Dance makes life better. Music makes life better. The video businessman reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s take on Cinderella in his great “Shapes of Stories” lecture; although Cinderella lost everything at midnight, she doesn’t return to her lowest starting point; she will always remember that dance. Walken’s character channels that enchantment.
The video’s singular focus evinces a philosophy its lyricist and singer, Bootsy Collins, learned at age 18 when he was bassist for James Brown’s band. In a 2018 interview with Mitch Gallagher, Collins shares Brown’s phenomenal advice, instructing Collins to reign in his guitar-style bass-playing and emphasize the lead beat in an 8-bar measure, what Brown called The One. This unlocked the teen’s first lesson on being a bassist. Collins said, “I was a busy player, I was playing all over the place, but (The One) made me come back, and it helped me stabilize.” Later in the interview, Collins says that “knowing where The One is at allows you to either play with it or off it.” The kick drum, he says, will always be there. The One, said Collins, has always helped him know where his “groove is at.”
It is from Brown that Collins mastered his signature style that inspires countless bassists (including Norman Cook who had a hit with the Housemartins). Collins says the concept of The One also applies to life. “You got to figure out what that one is for you, and keep coming back to it. And for me, that meant being in a great band. Playing it is one thing, living it is a whole 'nother one.” 
For Collins, Cook, and Walken, the creative focus is performance: bands, DJing, and dance.

Screen shots from Mike Judge Presents: Bootsy Collins (Season 2, Episode 4) original air date 22 November 2018 on Cinemax. By the way, a whole episode of Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (Season Two) has an animated explanation of The One, succinctly narrated by Hank Hill. Mike Judge not only produced and narrated the series, but his characters Beavis and Butthead often reviewed Spike Jonze videos when the cartoon was on MTV. Here’s a link to them watching the Beastie Boys “Sabotage.”

Content Mirrors Life

As for themes within the Jonze canon, Paula Murphy, in her July 2018 thesis on Jonze’s work, says “One can trace common themes and techniques across Jonze’s short films from the 1990s to the present, illustrating the coherence of this body of work, despite its obvious range.” She lists themes of marginalization and isolation; destructive, self-sacrificing love and desire; and the relationship between love and violence. She also notes there are repeated dramatic techniques across Jonze’s short films, “including the use of incongruity, mirroring, as well as the collision of real and fictional worlds and characters.”
This video pegs many hallmarks of Jonze’s style. The businessman schtick was in Jonze’s original treatment for the film. When he was brainstorming components, he wanted Walken to star. 
In a 2018 interview with The Nine Club, Jonze recalls pitching the Walken concept to Fatboy Slim. Cook said, “If he’ll do it!” So Jonze wrote up a treatment. “It was really kind of simple, kind of like when my dad would come to town and he’d stay at one of those hotels by the airport, one of those Marriotts, and I’d imagine my dad traveling around all those hotels around the country at the Marriott kind of hotel, and just… the mundane, repetitive, numbing quality of that. And sort of the idea of that was like the fantasy that comes out of that.”

Triple Threat

Walken goes far with little. In terms of acting, he’s believable, he seems real, his timing is natural, and he owns the space. My students, whose ability to identify Walken erodes year-to-year, still call him as they see him: an energetic dancer, able to evoke the character’s attitude of both defeat (at the open and close), and freedom through all the dancing and flying. “He transmits a feeling of anarchy and energy;” “his moves are an appropriate commitment to the theme of the film;” “It’s funny to see this guy in a role where he does not play a psycho;” “Love the doggy move.”

Ronald “Christopher” Walken (who began using Christopher the year Cook and I were born) was 57 at filming. This 1978 Best Actor Oscar-winner for Deer Hunter (Russian roulette guy!) had, in 1993, acted in a Madonna video as the Angel of Death. Walken had never heard of Spike Jonze before his agent mentioned it, but loved the idea of a dance feature.

Weapon of Choice was not the first Jonze/Cook collaboration. In 1999 they had worked together on “Praise You,” the Torrance Community Dance Group one starring Jonze himself. “I wanted to do dance again,” Jonze said, “but I didn’t want to do lo-fi, amateur dancing. I wanted to do a real dance production thing. Amazing dancing… and then I was like ‘who do I want to film dancing? And from, like, years earlier, I remembered Christopher Walken on Saturday Night Live, and, that would be amazing. So, I talked to Norman Cook from Fatboy Slim and told him my idea is, basically, filming Christopher Walken dancing.’
Jonze remembered “watching Deer Hunter with my dad, and so there (was) that connection with Christopher Walken and my dad, when we would drive on road trips my dad would sing show tunes, so somehow this all made sense.
“And then I somehow got Christopher Walken’s number. We talked to his agent, and I pitched it to his agent, then I pitched to his manager, and then they pitched it to him, and then Chris got on the phone.
“He basically was like, asking a lot of questions, and kind of not sure about it, and then at a certain point he just got quiet and he was like, ‘You know, I’m 57-years old and don’t know when I’m going to get to do this again.’”
The video was a phenomenon.

Walken’s dance training is extensive, and if socks need knocking off, here is the man doing a tap-dance striptease in 1981’s Pennies from Heaven.
Jonze has said of his casting decision, “I did know (Walken) could dance…. And so, while I was thinking about it, I also love making dance videos. I love filming dance. And I did this Bjork video, called “It’s Oh So Quiet,” and that was the first one I did where I got to do choreography and dance, and then I just kept doing more.” 
The Bjork project foreshadows many themes and motifs in “Weapon of Choice:” somersaulting businessmen in suits and mundane interiors (a tire shop) come to life in a big dance number. Bjork elevates above street level, right into the camera eye.
Meanwhile back at the music studio, Cook revealed how excited he was to have Walken on board. In his Higher Frequency interview with Nick Lawrence, when asked how he managed to get Walken for the project, Cook replied, “He volunteered.”
Jonze got the go-ahead from Walken’s agent, then, Cook said, “Spike went outside and phoned me and said: ‘Mr. Walken. Tap-dancing in the video,’ and I was like ‘Yes!’” Cook added, “I think it's full of irony, and to see an actor that I really admire but who's famous for playing psychopaths, to see him do that silly un-psychopathic dancing made me smile and made everyone else smile.”
Walken does an audio commentary of the video, and reveals some gems. “The dance sequence was shot on two floors, the ground floor and the mezzanine level in this hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and (Jonze and the crew) kind of knew the layout of the space.
“When we got there, there was stuff in the hotel that was good, and that went into the number.”
Jones has been asked about directing Walken, specifically, about the use of the call bell and the baggage trolley, if that was the actor’s doing, and said, “that’s him.”
And Walken didn’t walk in unrehearsed for the gig. Zach Schonfeld asks about it in his 2016 Newsweek Magazine interview with Walken, who said, “the choreographer was Michael Rooney, who's Mickey Rooney's son. I worked on it for weeks. I rehearsed with him. Then we went in and we shot it in the lobby of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles. We shot it in one night when there weren't a lot of people around. It was a lot of fun to do.”

Mind Yer Tone

There’s no dialogue, per se: there is an expressive actor commanding a space, there are actions, camera angles, lighting, and point of view. Therefore, it’s the lyrics that inform Walken’s movements and transmit clues about what is happening.
Collins recorded the vocals live in studio. He also penned the lyrics, which directly reference the 1990s Dune film, most notably in “the tone of my voice,” and “walk without rhythm.”
The lyrics emphasize tone in a way that’s figurative and literal. Inferring that a voice is a weapon of choice is not only straight up Frank Herbert/Paul Atreides dogma, but also indicative of the sound engineering on the track.
Cook recalls, in his interview with Karl Boltzmann in April 2023, that “Bootsy wrote the lyrics,” and as it turns out he was a fan of Dune. Cook said the first Dune had just come out, and as far as the references to the film, for Collins, “I think it was just something that turned him on.”

Karl Boltzmann does an excellent deconstruction on the song, and Cook joined him and provided generous commentary. Boltzmann and Cook spend a bit of the interview discussing Collins’s vocals, and how the audio was processed. The lyric “don’t be shocked by the tone of my voice” is broadcast in two channels, one eight octaves lower than the other.
YouTube yields a short clip from @secretsofdune, connecting the Dune fan world to Walken, and, fun bonus: the narration is in Collins’s unaltered voice from the “Weapon of Choice” studio session.

     If, like me, you get a bang out of Walken, there’s a montage tribute to his dancing, set to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” worth having a look. It’s an edit compiled by KM Music, a discontinued Greek YouTube Channel operating from 2014–2022. The video is now listed on the <3 MUSIC NON-STOP YouTube channel, and highlights Walken dance moves in all his feature films. What impresses are the joyful expressions his dancing partners make plain.

333 South Figueroa Street

And then there’s the holy humdrum of corporate hotels. As luxe and spacious as that Marriot in Los Angeles might have been, the low light suggests something sinister camps in the shadows. The hotel evokes contemporary corporate interiors, contrasting the dancing. Walken’s appropriation of onsite props (luggage trolleys, escalators, elevators, tables) reveals character—this is a man constrained by his environment, who parlays what little it provides into great profit.
     There’s a cool blog, I Am Not a Stalker, edited by Lindsay Black, which has a long post on the hotel. It shows the interior, with images of its many appearances on TV and film. She said, “Though the property looks vastly different today, fans… can take comfort in the fact that its set-up is still the same and that the escalators Walken danced on remain intact.”

One “Weapon of Choice” scene, the hallway of mirrors, was custom-fabricated. In his interview with Chris Roberts, Jonze said, “We built that. We got hardware store mirrors for the closet doors. We built that in a conference room upstairs, like a 100-foot section of mirrors.”

Clean, Well-Lit Spaces

A lot of the tone and atmosphere of this dance film is established through lighting. Shadows and intense contrasts of light and dark help develop the businessman. Nothing is overused. I’ve had students comment that the vaguely dim lighting gives things a sinister edge. They pick up on how, when he is suspended before high-placed wall lights, or a painting of fresh, open air, the man seems extraordinarily happy.
Ambient sounds are discernible in the soundtrack: a call bell (nobody answers), the elevator ding, and tap shoes all nick at the bass and drum loops. And, ahem, yes:
Weapon of Choice has got cowbell. Let us never forget that Christopher Walken has gotta have more cowbell.

Maestro, Please

For this production, the music came first, so the video is a sartorial artifact. Cook was 36, same as me, when this song was produced in November 2000. While I had remade myself from Corporate MBA to mom of three, from freelance journalist to high school teacher, he’d evolved from The Housemartins bassist to popular DJ, from Acid House to Big Beat. He was in full swing under the stage name Fatboy Slim; my students affectionately nicknamed me Miss Dubya-geezy.
Theeez keeeedz.
Back in 2002, students called this sort of music hip hop, funk, dance crossover. Pretty much anything that uses body movements to emphasize rhythm. I remember them doing The Superman dance.
What Cook was doing in the “Weapon of Choice” era was new, an exploitation of new technology to make music in new ways. In a CNN Interactive SHOWBIZ article on 8 July 1999, Donna Freydkin distinguishes the difference between the terms electronic music and electronica. She defined the type of work Fatboy Slim, Lo Fidelity Allstars, and Chemical Brothers were pioneering as electronica, or “DJs' electronic samplings and manipulations of previously recorded work by others.” She contrasted that with musical composers of electronic music, e.g., Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, John Adams—and said that term “usually means original, not remixes. (Electronic music is) work created synthetically without traditional acoustic instrumentation.”
Karl Boltzmann’s soundboard deconstruction of the video is marvelous. The 1970s cushion the track, which samples The Electric Indian, The Chambers Brothers, and Sly & the Family Stone.
There exists a short documentary by Dutch Public TV’s Top 2000 a-Gogo, where Cook is interviewed by Magnus Broni in front of his original Atari sampler setup, what he calls the “octopus.” Cook says, of the joy of creating the music from audio extracts, “you could get the funk by using drum loops and samples rather than having to sit there, you know, pretending to be Bootsy Collins on the bass.”

He could also pixilate the vocals to be replayed at the syllable level (Funk. Soul. Bro-ther.) Cook says, from “’70 to ’75 are the best years for finding samples.”
Of record hunting—crate digging—Cook shops the cover art: “if you look at it and if it’s a multiracial band with long hair and it looks like they take a lot of drugs, then there’s probably going to be something interesting on it.” Cook has an affinity for bands from the 1970s.
Coincidentally, that’s a blithe connection between him and Walken. In Walken’s 7 August 2001 appearance on the Conan O’Brien Show, he admitted his “music knowledge stops somewhere in the 1970s.” The 1970s… the apple of Cook’s thrifting eye.
As far as working with Collins, and being a successful bass player himself, Cook said, “For us bass players, Bootsy is The Don…. He’s lovely. He’s beautiful.”
In terms of the Collins and Cook collaboration working as a film score, the anachronism of a boomer businessman grooving to a funk dance track reveals a Jonze aesthetic. His first skateboarding film, Video Days, soundtracks the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” for pro-boarder Guy Mariano’s segment; John Coltrane’s “Traneing In,” which the end credits describe only as “some damn good jazz,” underscores Mark Gonzales’s six minutes (and it pairs so well with the 3:45AM parking garage footage).

It's also interesting to consider the legality of clearing use for high-profile samples that are the building blocks of electronica. In Cook’s High Frequency interview with Nick Lawrence, Cook said licensing requires, “Lawyers. Two lots of lawyers, our lawyers and the person's you sampled’s lawyers, and nowadays there're lawyers who simply deal with samples. So, you just have to come with an arrangement with the person you're going to sample—sometimes it's expensive, sometimes it's not. It's a necessary thing for what I do.”
The most royalties Fatboy Slim ever doled out? One hundred percent, for “The Rockafeller Skank.” Cook said, “If there was more than a 100 percent, I probably would have paid that…. There were four different samples on it we had to clear, and they all wanted 40 percent, or 50 percent, and we were like ‘Hold On, there's only like 100 percent that's available.’ So, we were like, ‘you can all have 25 percent,’ and there was none left for me.”
For a side-by-side play of the samples used in “Weapon of Choice,” check out the Who Sampled site.

Psychic Friends

In terms of cinematography, Jonze showcases the individual. The gaze of his lens doesn’t judge. The distance is respectful, and the camera is encouraging, moving slowly toward the solitary figure. Whenever I alerted students to visual composition basics (rules of thirds, or painterly notions of background, middle ground, foreground), they found much to admire. Things they’ve jotted down include how “the guy comes very close to the camera, then moves away, and does a lot of spinning;” “it begins with long shot and high angle, as we ‘move in’ to study the businessman;” “even when the actor is passive, the camera is energetic;” “there is a lot of perspective change.”
Walken, in his audio commentary of the video, said, “Yeah, it has a very nice look to it, doesn’t it.”

Hotdoggin’

Short as the film is, it does include special effects. The flight moves get the most attention. The student who presented me the video at the start of my teaching gig did some research, and discovered Walken's flight moves necessitated the use of numerous wires, and support harness. The CAD designers, Sea Level, re-created the lobby in 3D in inferno. Walken was then extracted from the original footage in combustion, and composited into the 3D lobby in inferno. The result? Seamless flight. You can tell by his hair a stunt double does the cartwheel flip, and also the dive over the balcony. Other than that, it’s well done, and the 2021 remaster did a nice job of cleaning up any residual signs of the wires.

Walken says some funny things, and in his audio commentary of the video, he describes the feeling of flight in this way: “Yeah, you know you hang up there in the air like a frankfurter.”
That hanging in the air pays dividends in service to the theme. The young ones pick up on the pacing. I had one student comment on the visual rhythm, with long shots and longer cuts echoing the character being “stuck” in his thoughts, and faster-paced edits and close-ups used to convey the character’s feeling of happiness. The long pause before the return to ground makes that moment important, as if Joseph Campbell phoned in the shot.
Editing is also the foundation of electronica. The Boltzmann deconstruction gets into the tin tacks of how Cook was able to arrange music with early hardware samplers (circa 2000, Cook was arranging on an Atari with the C-Lab suite). Cook said the time intensity wasn’t a consideration, “We were thankful that we could do it, not so much worried about the long process.” Fatboy Slim songs are the product of Cook’s catalog of samples: “a cappella vocals, drum beats of a certain tempo, bass lines, piano lines, and I used to sit there for hours…. looking for a collage that works.”
What ties this whole short film together is Jonze’s overall direction. It’s a multilevel blend of visual and acoustic elements, the light dropping like pixie dust. Even without dialogue, the actor and creative camera work and lighting and setting and FX all serve the theme of journeyman Zen. Nothing is wasted, and everything brings out the nature of the modern anti-hero. When the camera extreme-closeups at the literal height of the journey, it reveals bliss. Walken delivers an iconic performance.

His Name Means Mirror

Director Spike Jonze, born Adam Spiegel, is the youngest of the main talent, having turned 30 at the millennium. His Epicly Latered biopic at Vice tells a thoroughgoing story of how Jonze skated into lifelong, professional friendships by hanging around Rockville BMX. He'd chauffeur visiting BMXers, then photograph and film their events. It was after Sonic Youth saw his Video Days short film that Jonze careered into filming bands.  His humble beginnings as cameraman for Freestylin and Dirt magazines put him in the saddle toward winning an Oscar. The very year "Weapon of Choice" debuted was the year Jackass, another Jonze creation, was first broadcast on MTV.
To choose Walken as the main character, who epitomizes the look (that pasty face!!) of a washed-out businessman while having the dance talent to pull off a virtuoso performance, was brilliant. The use of archetypical imagery, especially the character "dipping" into water at the peak of his journey, is a skilled visual metaphor that plumbs the unconscious. The juxtaposition of the dim, corporate lobby with the empathetic storytelling (accomplished in camera angles and editing!) earns the high praise.
Jonze had already garnered critical success with Being John Malkovich (1999), a story he described as one where he was "trying to make it a fluid emotional path through all these different ideas." The timing was perfect for him to unify the gigantic acting, musical, and artistic genius of Walken, Collins, and Cook into one funked-up juggernaut. The readiness was all. 
Jonze and Cook have a lot in common when it comes to artistic temperament. In the Boltzmann interview, Cook says he'd "just had four top ten records in a row, and I was kinda hot." When asked how he knew "Weapon of Choice" was coming together at his workstation, he said, "you know when something's working." Along the same lines, Jonze said of his creative process in a 2010 Vice interview, “I judge the success of what I do by the feeling." 
Further, in an October 2009 interview by Peter Sciretta for Slash Film, Jonze articulated what differentiates making music videos from making films: "With a video, you're still representing the artist. You're trying to make something that's both, you and the artist."
The aesthetic for "Weapon of Choice" has its motifs and style rooted in Jonze's earlier work. His music for video for the Chemical Brothers' 1997 "Elektrobank" features an individual, a gymnast named Janet, who enters the video solo before a curtained backdrop, dimly-lit and seated, underscored by an ambient tune—until she pivots unexpectedly to a tour-de-force tumbling routine of agility and athleticism—tumbles, twists, ribbon-dances—blissfully syncopated to the beat. She's the harbinger of a very Walkenesque persona.
More recently, there's the "Welcome Home" video he directed, of FKA Twigs, where again a solitary figure emerges, comes home, and starts dancing—summoning superpowers to transform the muted colors of her home into a candy confection. The use of the mirror image and looking glass fantasy also hearkens to "Weapon of Choice” and other Jonze-directed scenes (as in Her), whereas protagonist spins in front of a glass.
Jonze's eye for dance reports lovingly. Even in Her (2013), the Large Language Model, Samantha, has fantasies of inhabiting a body. Lines of dialogue reveal this, when she says to her human partner how she fantasized... "that I had a body;" "that I could feel the weight of my body," and when the LLM arranges for a human surrogate to be a go-between for body contact with Theodore? The first thing her human stand-in asks him is if he'd like for her to dance.
Shower thought: I don’t care what Boston Dynamics can do with its Ping-Pong-looking soldier dogs: to create, to dance, to be human, is divine.
I know I've talked a bit about using "Weapon of Choice" in class as a great short film that does big cinematic things, but there’s another short by Jonze I also love using for an alternate assessment: “I’m Here.” You know, sometimes a kid gets a concussion, and they missed turning in a high-value assignment or something like that. When they are back on their pins (and often overwhelmed with making up work for all their classes), I’ll ask them to select any three of the twelve critical lenses this essay mentions (subject, theme, dialogue, acting, yadda yadda, directing), and I’ll ask them to set aside three separate times in the upcoming week to watch “I’m Here,” and study the film’s use of those three things and jot down their ideas about them. It’s amazing how much one can learn with deep observation, attentive consideration. Jonze is a short-form master.

Best Foot Forward

Cook, now 59, commented in a Billboard Music interview on the future of dance music. He predicted "the dance music scene will gradually rid itself of DJ acts in it for the money, and return to its state of artists genuinely in it for the music." He tips his hat to Hot Since 82, Carl Cox, and Skream, whom he says are in it for the same reason as him. "They love the music, they love the craft of DJing, but they also love to party and they get involved with the crowd."
Collins, 72, is active in music and philanthropy. He was awarded the December 2023 Best Philanthropist of Cincinnati by CityBeat. That same year, he was inducted into the Cincinnati Black Music Walk of Fame. The Bootsy Collins Philanthropic Fund has given a new endowment to the Greater Cincinnati Hospital to help patients afford care and medicine.
Jonze, 54, is currently executive director of Vice Media. He’s, Malickly, directed no features since Her, but the rumor mill squeaks that he’s got two big projects in the works: A) an animated series based on an Arcade Fire album, and B) that he’s in pre-production for a big-budget sci-fi series for Netflix, and Joaquin Phoenix might be on board.
Walken, now 80, has a showboat role in Dune Two this year. He has said, of doing more dance on screen, "Well, if someone wants me to, they had better ask soon." He quoted James Cagney, saying there will come a time when he’d "hang up his tap shoes." Also, I couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the essay, but I have another nonchalant Jonze/Walken connection: Walken wrote and starred in a Broadway show called Him, about Elvis being alive and well and living his best life as a waitress
(It was reviewed by Vincent Canby in the New York Times on 6 January 1995.)
As for me, 59 and maintaining, the day I filed this essay, a student said she couldn't wait for her sister to have me as a teacher. I asked what grade her sister was in. Sixth. I did the math and got a chill. I won't be teaching in six years! If life is kind and I've time enough, I'll be retired before little sis gets to me. This was a late-life career change; been up and at it since “Weapon of Choice” picked up that Grammy.
There’s an old saying, “Anne plans and God laughs,” but I feel Bootsy Collins’s blessing is out there for all of us. Find your team, your talent, be ready for your luck; figure out what your One is, and keep coming back to it. I won’t teach forever, but I will keep writing, friends.

Anne Weisgerber (1964 - ) was born in Orange, New Jersey to middle-class parents. The author, center, was not immune to the 2000 trend of family portraits in coordinating jeans and white shirts. Photographer is Oscar Stokes, a local acting legend who played Mr. Smee in Peter Pan on Broadway, and had that sweet voice and way about him. Anne is an award-winning journalist, teacher, and storyteller. Her short fiction has won multiple nominations for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best Micro-fiction, and the Pushcart Prize. Anne lives in semi-rural Somerset County, New Jersey with her husband, and occasional cameos from her now grown sons: a Marine Corps officer, an artist, and a land surveyor. When she isn’t writing or teaching, Anne enjoys walking to the local to catch up with neighbors and get the news. She is passionate about supporting charities working to preserve open space, clean water, and the wood turtle. Anne’s last xness essay was a write-in on Motley Crue’s “Too Young to Fall in Love” in the March Shredness tournament. Follow @aeweisgerber or visit anneweisgerber.com

THE MIDDLE OF EVERYWHERRE: KATIE MOULTON ON HOW NELLY’S “HOT IN HERRE” DEFINES MILLENNIAL DANCE POP

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed, intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

—T.S. Eliot

I was like—
Good gracious!

—Nelly

Start with the hook, in pieces. A kick-boom, a couple of frisky organ notes, a heraldic hi-hat. A half-phrase shouted from somewhere in the back: HOT in! For a breath, it’s the sound of a band assembling on stage, but the shambolic stance is a facade—this outfit tightens up so fast it’ll snap your neck. The guy on the mic clarifies—So hot in HURR!—but what is that? A complaint, maybe, but not a thesis. This is the loudmouth in the bleachers, establishing the call that requires a response. This is Sam Cooke, if Cooke had a tenor like sandpaper, warming the crowd at the Harlem Square Club—somebody already sweating and ready to touch the ceiling. The sharp snare and funky top-line kick in, and the guy on the mic wants you to taste that. From the first perk of ah, ah—your shoulders: shrugging, your hips: twitching, upper lip: curling—just a little bit —because oh! that is tasty, and it’s just beginning to boil.
Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is a bridge. It’s a bridge from the humble middle to points in all directions. It’s a bridge in hip-hop, between late-90s throwback tunefulness and the suburban hip-pop that would define mainstream music for the rest of the 2000s. It’s a bridge in youth-pop itself, spanning the retrograde Britney-boy-band era of 1998-2001 and launching us beyond it. It’s a bounce from the belly, shooting into every tip of nerve. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what’s on the other side of the bridge, just that we get there.
“Hot in Herre” is the double-platinum first single from St. Louis rapper Nelly’s second album, Nellyville, and arguably his most enduring and influential hit. Released in early May 2002, the track quickly dominated across platforms—radio (remember radio?), sales charts, and nascent downloading and streaming services. The record garnered Nelly the inaugural Grammy for Best Male Rap Solo Performance, its general unassailability proven by the Recording Academy’s simultaneous ghettoization of the song and inability to ignore it. Nelly was not the first melodious or singing rapper (not even from the first from the Midwest, shout out Bone Thugs-N-Harmony), but we can draw a line connecting Nelly’s popularity to the rise of iconic, non-coastal emcees who incorporated singing (hello, Kanye, Chance, Drake), as well as the pop interpolations (howdy, Jack Harlow) that dominate across genres today. He even preempted hip-hop-inflected “bro country,” Lil Nas X, and Beyonce’s current conquest of country.
The song may have been aiming for pop dominance, but its creation was the product of risk, timing, and a willingness to be offbeat. As on Nelly’s 2000 breakout debut, Country Grammar, most of Nellyville was produced by fellow St. Louisans. But just before release, the team felt something was still missing; they didn’t “have the fuse for the bomb,” Nelly said. He had just featured on NSYNC’s final single, “Girlfriend,” which was produced by the hottest rising duo, The Neptunes. Nelly sought to harness his momentum to that of the man who would be crowned the most influential producer of 2000s dance pop: Pharrell Williams.
Pharrell offered that tasty, space-funk groove—a track built around a re-working of 1979’s “Bustin’ Loose” by Chuck Brown. Brown was a DMV-based musician known as the “Godfather of Go-Go.” Go-go is a profoundly regional subgenre of funk, characterized by its syncopated bass, snare and hi-hat, and audience call and response. In an interview with The FADER, Nelly said that once they were in the studio, he caught the vibe off the beat and riffed the hook first—It’s getting hot in herre— Pharrell offered two pieces of advice: First, “You gotta have the girls answer, ‘I am, getting so hot—‘,” and second, “Whatever the verses, that first line’s gotta be something everybody’s gonna wanna say.”
And what did Nelly say, for that all-important first line?
“Good gracious—ass is bodacious!”
Somehow, in 2002, one of the biggest rappers in the world combined the least-cool exclamations of my Midwestern grandma and Bill and Ted. Nobody, I mean nobody, who takes themselves too seriously can write a line like that. And nobody can take themselves too seriously once they’ve shouted it aloud on a crowded dancefloor. It’s a cure for pretension, for self-consciousness. It’s the enactment of that Midwestern commandment: Thou shalt get off thy high horse.
“Me and Pharrell...we both think there’s no such thing as a ‘dumb’ record,” Nelly told Maxim in 2017. “We created a moment for people.”
That moment arises from a half-baked pickup line that sounds like it was cooked up by adolescents: “It’s getting hot in herre...so take off all your clothes!” He’s talking to a potential paramour, but he’s also talking to the whole room, his crew, himself. What unfurls from that brilliantly silly opening is a swift pile-up of rhymes and jokes, which Nelly delivers with color and a singsong sideline holler:

I’m waitin’ for the right time to shoot my steez
Waitin’ for the right time to flash them keys
Then, uh, I’m leavin’, please believin’,
Me and the rest of my heathens
Check it, got it locked at the top of the Four Seasons
Penthouse, rooftop, birds I’m feedin’
No deceivin’, nothin’ up my sleeve and
No teasin’, I need ya...

He can’t help himself! But he’s also trying. He’s your clever uncle, the class clown, the courtside cut-up; he wants you laughing with him. He may have a twang, and the stakes may not be dire, but there’s nothing slow here. And despite the sexual innuendo, the language is naughty but technically clean, toeing the line.
“It’s more the story of a party record,” Nelly said. “People can relate to the process of the club...as opposed to the typical ‘everybody throw your hands up,’ and that’s why it lasts longer.” I buy this conception of the song because of the fleeting but careful frame Nelly gives at the top of the song. The first line is not, in fact, “Good gracious!” but rather, “I was like—” Hearing this for the first time, as a suburban St. Louis fifteen-year-old, I’m struck and reassured that Nelly told stories with the same language that me and my friends did. In this “story-song,” we start mid-conversation, mid-party, and our pal Nelly is about to regale us. The narration then is separated ever so slightly from the action. Incident becomes practice, becomes ritual and community—and awareness of a memory even as it’s being made.
“Hot in Herre” became the quintessential “song of summer” for a summer that has stretched on now for two decades. The song aimed straight for an inclusive middle and landed a bullseye, proven by its ubiquity across demos, genres, and time. Fans have spun “Hot in Herre” everywherre, from actual hip-hop clubs to middle-school dances to warehouse noise shows. For a kind of mainstream culture, the song’s absurd refrain defined its moment and its era. (In 2019, our ruler Taylor Swift told Jimmy Fallon it was her “favorite song.”) Like any canonical text, it lives on—loudly—in our multi-generational ritual spaces: sports arenas and wedding-reception dancefloors. Today, the foremost nationally touring DJ club night celebrating the “hits of the first decade of the millennium” is called—that’s right—“Hot In Herre.”
What is danceness, after all, but a song that people actually dance to? Why does pop ubiquity matter? Because, despite all the super-worthy subcultural entries in this tourney, what’s critical about 2000s dance-pop is that it represents the last gasp of whatever we called “monoculture.” “Hot in Herre” is one of the last mass-shared hits before our irreconcilable fragmentation: pre-algorithm, pre-streaming, back when the feds still busted college kids for using Limewire and the industry relied on focus groups, radio deejays and random A&R reps—you know, good old-fashioned market manipulation!
Nelly’s success is exceptional not only because of its universality but because of his regionality. In 2000, he broke massively with “Country Grammar (Hot Shit),” a record that repped his own beloved backwater so hard and so specifically. The album Country Grammar could have been a novelty (and would have been, based on his major label’s level of attention/funding), but it blew up and just. kept. selling. Universal strove to capitalize on that organic rise, releasing hit singles from the debut for more than a year—“E.I.,” “Ride Wit Me,” “Batter Up”—then rushing the next album. In theory, that sophomore effort, Nellyville, targeted (rapid and relatively cheap) mainstream dominance—which is typically a recipe for banal disaster.  

On May 7, 2002, I’m red-faced in the blaze of 4 p.m. sun, peeling myself off my high school’s flaking rubber track after practice. The Mississippi is two miles dead east. In St. Louis, you always know where the river is, even if you can't see it or feel a breeze off the bluffs. The night before, I’d seen my heroes Green Day and Jimmy Eat World at Riverport Amphitheatre, where security made me leave my CDs on the gravel outside the fence. I’m fifteen for a few more weeks. The bridge into true teenagehood is rushing fast under my feet. I’ve been waiting for more Nelly. And I’m bracing myself for the kind of disappointment that can only be delivered by your hometown.
In 1999 and 2000, we’d passed around middle-school hallways a burned copy of the “Country Grammar” single as it hit local, then regional, then national radio. We lived in a redlined metro defined by City and County, North and South, and here was somebody named Nelly saying we were all Country. We spent the summer before high school memorizing every lyric from Nelly and the St. Lunatics, catching every reference. So many references were already our own: STL, 314, M-I-crooked-letter-crooked-letter-O-U-R-I. We, too, loved the Cardinals, the Blues, the Rams. Some kids we knew, the only clothes they owned, that were never out of style, were bootleg-sports-branded jerseys. We passed all the same exits Nelly called out: Jennings, Hanley, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge. The malls that Nelly name-checks in his upward mobility—“Face and body Frontenac, don’t know how to act, without no vouchers on her boots, she bringin’ nothing back”—as in Plaza Frontenac, the shopping center in the wealthy suburb named for a colonial French governor of Canada—those were the same faraway fancy places where we could afford to walk around but never buy anything.
Me and my friends were white from South County. Nelly and the ‘Tics were Black from University City (U. City), which was actually Mid-County. Their suburb was more urban than ours, older, first accessible by streetcar in the last century. The old streetcar line is Delmar Boulevard, running east-west through an entertainment district called the Loop, anchored by Blueberry Hill, the landmark restaurant where, up until he died in 2017, Chuck Berry—Father of Rock and Roll—still played the basement club once a month. Delmar Boulevard is also a long-standing racial dividing line of the city between the white south and the Black north. On the other hand, my suburb sprung up around the old telegraph line running north-south along the river, and by our time, there was no way to get there but by car. And nothing to draw anybody who wasn’t just heading home.
Still, Nelly was technically a suburban kid, too, and we could hear it—not like us, but also, like us. More specifically than anything else we’d seen or heard. We felt immediate affinity. In a hollowed-out city like St. Louis, there’s a tendency to claim both your particular pocket and the whole metro area. We know kids at every Catholic high school in town. We gather in large crowds in the same places, and we have to travel a ways to get there. I ran track against the U. City team, often lost to them in the 400. Even his name—Nelly, short for Cornell—wasn’t tough but diminutive, familiar, belying deep-seated confidence. When Nelly landed a record deal, his friends and collaborators were working at the airport, the barbershop, McDonald’s, and Office Max. Nelly had been a serious high-school athlete and low-grade dealer, who’d considered three paths to adulthood: ball, streets, or music. Soon enough, I would sit on gym bleachers as a guidance counselor told us to divide ourselves into our post-grad plans: state school, community college, military, or job.
In the music video for “Country Grammar,” the setting is a block party, the street between humble red-brick houses near Natural Bridge and Kingshighway jam-packed with tricked-out Cutlasses and revelers in booty shorts and Cardinals jerseys. The lighting is a little gray, made to look “real,” and there’s no question this street and the people in it, if not the level of festivity, are real. The video opens and ends with the camera on the ground, aimed up at a lone Nelly against a clear blue sky, standing framed by the Gateway Arch monument above his head.
In St. Louis, we talk a lot about the Arch. We talk about the river below and measure floods by how many steps the brown water rose to lap at its great steel feet. We talk a lot about 1904. Our public park is bigger than Central Park; our museums are world-class and they’re free—all built for the World’s Fair in 1904. Constructed as a temporary pageant for outside visitors, to welcome the world to the river city. Once the Fair was over, it was all meant to be torn down. Instead, we kept it. Kept the limestone buffed, certain avenues shaded with trees. We mention that we were once bigger than Chicago, but they bet on the railroads, and we bet on the river. We always bet on the river.
I was a kid who loved St. Louis and hated my suburb, who dreamed of leaving because I believed there was more for me someplace else. We were a gateway, after all. St. Louis may be a place to return to, but first it was a place to leave. To stay meant to be concentrated in your smallness, to be doomed to asking, “Where’d you go to high school?” for the rest of your life. The artists left as soon as they could or when they couldn’t take it anymore: T.S. Eliot, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker (“Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear, humiliation, misery, and terror”), Tennessee Williams, who called the city “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid, and provincial.”
But Nelly didn’t just represent St. Louis; Nelly claimed St. Louis. As Nelly burst onto the national stage, it was precisely this uncategorizable “Midwest Swing” that was being celebrated. Uncategorizable and idiosyncratic, perhaps not because it was outside dominant culture but because in the middle, we have to take a little bit from everything flowing through. We have to study the maps. We have to know about you, elsewhere. But we figured that elsewhere, people must not have a damn clue what Nelly was talking about.
Yet in the early years of the Millennium, the mainstream did seem to care. Cameras and airwaves seemed interested in spotlighting Nelly, thereby spotlighting our spot. Coming of age at precisely that moment likely gave me and my friends a miscalculation of our centrality to the larger world. We considered ourselves to be the truest of Millennials—those who came into adolescent consciousness right at the flip of the year 2000. And suddenly, everybody had heard of our city. When we met kids in other places (leadership camp, newspaper conferences—yes, hometown escape velocity takes many forms), they always said, “St. Louis? Oh, do you know Nelly?” Our answer was always: Of course. Later, when I get to college on the East Coast, my roommates from Queens say, “Missouri? That’s one of those square states that votes for Bush, right?”—and then, “Do you know Nelly?” Studying abroad in England, I flirted with a bartender who called me “Nelly” rather than my name, and asked if I owned a gun back home.
Because even though Nelly rarely rapped about violence or even carrying weapons (with the notable exception of “Country Grammar” where “street sweeper, baby, cocked” was edited to “boom, boom, baby, uh, uh” for radio), this was another thing people heard about St. Louis: It was dangerous. People got shot there. According to U.S. News & World Report, St. Louis was the “Most Dangerous City in America,” based on the FBI analysis of violent- and property-crime rates from 2003 to 2009—another dominant statistic of the decade. And that’s where the lie—I know Nelly—breaks down. The median income isn’t that different between U. City and my suburb, but the crime rate is unfathomably higher. Same county, different planets.
It seemed possible in those years that our STL culture could be respected and influential on culture at large. That in so doing, our local culture could be shared among us at home too. That the city’s longstanding inferiority complex, “glorious potential,” racial injustice, and provincial terror could be brought into the light because it mattered. That all the industry, civilizations and people who had been lost and who remained mattered. Mattered and spoke. And when they spoke, sometimes they lilted and purred not quite like anyplace else.
So in 2002, when I listen to “Hot in Herre” for the first time, I’m anxious whether the hometown hero will deliver or melt in the glare. Or worse—abandon us. But there are reasons to be optimistic: The album is titled Nellyville, which we assume is another elevation of this city, sharing his crown. And the first single insists on its peculiar accent.
He stuck the accent right in the title: “Herre,” meaning “here,” is pronounced HURR, a kind of drawl punctuated by a hard R. For Black St. Louisans, other words that may rhyme closely with here include her, there (as in the Chingy hit “Right Thurr”), hair, year, and even mayor. “Everything collides linguistically in St. Louis,” says Dr. John Baugh, a Washington University (WUSTL) professor specializing in social stratification of linguistic behavior, and linguistic variation among African Americans. “It’s where the South meets the North. It’s where the East meets the West.” The ”urr” sound likely traveled north along the more rural Mississippi, where it collided with the Inland North Vowel Shift of people moving south from Chicago. Within this national crossroads, St. Louis’s history of extreme racial segregation likely isolated the dialect. That’s what happens in our “once-great,” long-overlooked American cities, cities like Nelly’s St. Louis, like Chuck Brown’s Baltimore. If you don’t leave, you become more and more yourself.
In 2002, the sound feels new—or rather, old, more organic, warmer. But sure enough, there’s Nelly’s voice—a stringent, friendly, party-starting rasp, linking go-go and Midwest swing, bridging the underestimated in-betweens. Nelly still shouts out “the Lou” once and his own Vokal-brand tank top. The language is a translation, another kind of bridge between Nelly, his roots, and the rest.
“Hot in Herre” both echoes and subverts Nelly’s first hit, “Country Grammar,” from the emphasis on local linguistics to the opening shout of Hot--! and edgy hooks cloaked in playground chants. Both songs are eternal turn-up anthems, and the music videos depict fantastical parties for the ages. Instead of a derrty-summer block party, “Hot in Herre” is a club scene, highly stylized, shot in glossy oranges and blues, featuring immaculately sweaty women who are distinctly no longer the same girls from the neighborhood. Still, everybody is elbow-to-elbow, getting down, and all the women just happen to be wearing bikinis under their halter tops. At one point, the ceiling billows with actual flames, but the clubgoers mistake the DJ’s warnings as a party-starting tactic, chanting back, “We don’t need no water—let the motherf*cker burn!”
In the video, Nelly is wearing what became his trademark—a white Band-Aid on his cheek, which people loved to poke fun at as an absurd fashion affectation. The story goes that Nelly used the bandage to cover a basketball injury, but kept wearing it in tribute to City Spud, his friend, producer, and fellow St. Lunatic who has a show-stealing verse on “Ride Wit Me” and who was incarcerated just as their careers were about to blow up. (City, or Lavell Webb, would not be released from prison until 2008, just in time for the wane of Nelly’s imperial period and the decade.)
Listening to “Hot in Herre,” I can tell right away that Nelly is now talking to more than just “us”—whoever he imagines as his home-team crowd—that he’s spreading his arms, goading everyone to peel off their defenses. We can dance to it; we can repeat the jokes. The jokes are so corny we’ll still be telling them in twenty years. And I think, briefly, that maybe he’s figured out a way to make it out and make it home.
It turns out, we were wrong about “Nellyville.” The title track does not proclaim a lush homecoming. Instead, it’s a conception of utopia—“where all newborns get a half-a-mill’” and “nobody livin’ savage, errybody got change” and “ain’t nobody shot, so ain’t no news that day.” The bridge, in true country songwriting fashion, punctures the dream, as Nelly keens, “I just want to go and look/Won’t you please take me on in.” “Nellyville” is definitively not St. Louis. It’s not where Nelly is, or where he can even get to.
The official “Hot in Herre” video was not the first.

The original, rarely seen video, is another club scene. But this party is happening inside the Arch. The link is literal: The world’s first image of Nelly is him tapping on the camera from the ground below the Arch, and now he’s at the very top of the symbol of his city. That room, of course, doesn’t exist as such. As St. Louis schoolchildren, who get bussed there on a field trip every single year, know: Once you ride the glowing-egg elevator up a click at a time up one grand leg of the Arch, the “top” is a narrow hallway covered in industrial carpet. There’s nothing to do but peer down from cloudy windows to see just how puny our city looks from up there. (As one KMOX reporter put it, “Something great happened here, but it’s over now.”) But that scene, of a club full of real bodies draped in recognizable glamor, at the top of our small world, is a powerful fantasy of belonging.
I was like—“Hot in Herre,” then, is both a bridge and a compromise. We from the middle know about these things. We can’t make you know us, how it feels to grow up with a river above your head, watchful of how it rises and falls. We can’t stick you in the wild heat of the downtown fair on the Landing, sweat stains on the concrete, fire rocketing from the barges in the dark. You can’t be with me all those summers, driving the highways from South County to my job in Ferguson off Natural Bridge, windows down because the AC busted again in my inherited 2002 PT Cruiser, hot wind buffeting you in the face as we speed under the Arch’s gleaming shadow, under and around without stopping the neighborhoods where kids still get shot, meaninglessly, all the time, the river on our right in the morning, and on the left headed back again.
But Nelly proved he could create a moment for folks to step into, shake their ass inside, return to. He proved that if you mix a little bit of (ah, ah) unabashed particularity with a little bit of (ah, ah) joyful dexterity, you can pack the dancefloor with goofy, indiscriminate sweat, across geographies and generations. That a song, somehow, can be for all and for us, and maybe that the flow between can expand our definitions of both.

Katie Moulton is the author of Dead Dad Club: On Grief & Tom Petty (Audible 2022). You can find links to more of her work at katiemoulton.com. She teaches at Johns Hopkins University and the Newport MFA. She makes her home in Baltimore, but she remains, forever, so St. Louis (ask my tattooist).