(4) Ke$ha, “Tik tok”
overheated
(2) Nelly, “Hot in Herre”
245-212
and will play in the final four

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 3/26/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

J. Nicholas Geist on ke$ha’s “tik tok”

“Wo-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh,
There’s a party at a rich dude’s house;
Dananana nuh nuh nuh nuh DA NA NA NUH NUH
…
I threw up in the closet.” —Ke$ha, 2009

“If you asked me then where I wanted to be,
It’d look somethin’ like this, livin’ out of my wildest dreams|
…
But if you ask me now, all I’ve wanted to be is happy.” —Kesha, 2023

It is 2010, and Kesha does not exist.
Ke$ha does, of course. In fact, it feels a bit like Ke$ha is all there is. She dropped “TiK ToK” at the end of 2009, and by the end of 2010, it will become the best selling single worldwide. And it is a song about Ke$ha. In her first single, she tells us exactly who she is: a woman who wakes up in a place she has no plans to return to, who brushes her teeth with Jack Daniels, who drifts from party to party and boy to boy with a clearly defined–but also seemingly quite generous–boundary as to exactly how gropey a guy is allowed to get before she takes offense. 
That this is who Ke$ha is seems unquestioned, here in 2010. She sits down for an interview with Billboard, and the interview is called “Ke$ha: The Billboard Cover Story.” Describing the woman he sees on the red carpet at the 2010 Grammys, Bill Werde explains,

Everything in her body language, expression, and posture perfectly conveys one thought: ‘I’m not sure, but I may still be drunk.’ It’s not so different from the look on her face when she climbs out of the bathtub in the video for her breakthrough song ‘TiK ToK.’

The woman on the red carpet, the woman in the bathtub: they are the same; they are Ke$ha. 

*

It is 2024, and I am researching for this essay, and so for the moment, Ke$ha is all there is.
My wife, Megan, and I are getting ready for work. Somewhere in the house our two children are wreaking unknowable havoc, but we allow that to remain undiscovered until we both have pants on. 
“There’s a track on Animal,” I say, “where she rhymes the words ‘pimps,’ ‘Trans Am,’ and ‘handbag.’”
“Those words don’t rhyme,” Megan says. 
“I didn’t think so either, but I’m not from Nashville.”
Megan leans toward the mirror, checking her lipstick. She doesn’t seem as interested in this as I feel she should be.
Because in a way, this is Ke$ha: an entity who would see a need to rhyme “pimps,” “Trans Am,” and “handbag,” and who would even arguably succeed. Animal is fascinating to listen to because it simply cannot be separated from Ke$ha.
On paper, it seems like it should be possible to separate this particular art from this particular artist. Dr. Luke, Ke$ha’s producer, was perhaps the bona fide hitmaker of the late aughts and early teens, and he cultivated a fairly deep roster of female pop stars. One might imagine, with a producer like that, which track goes to which artist might be at least a little bit arbitrary. And when I listen to “Your Love Is My Drug,” the first track on Animal, it is for a moment very easy to swap out Ke$ha for, say, Kelly Clarkson. I can imagine Katy Perry singing “what you’ve got boy / is hard to find / I think about it / all the time.” The same goes for “Kiss N Tell”—I can very easily imagine a circa 2009 Miley Cyrus singing “do I make your heart beat / like an 808 drum.”
But I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “my steeze is gonna be affected / if I keep it up like a lovesick crackhead.” I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “before I leave, brush my teeth / with a bottle of Jack.” I cannot imagine anyone but Ke$ha singing “I’m down to get faded / I’m not the designated / driver.” In order to explain Ke$ha as an entity, one must be able to define both “faded” and “enjambment.” 
To listen to Animal in 2024, knowing the story of the last ten years, is to ask: what was Ke$ha? Was the entity Ke$ha a role that the woman Kesha was playing? A performance of an exaggerated self? Was Ke$ha a prison from which Kesha had to escape? Or an Animal into which she transformed? If Ke$ha is a construct, who constructed her?
I try again to explain all this to Megan. “Later she rhymes ‘smashed,’ ‘cans,’ and ‘mess,’ but it doesn’t work as well.”
“Hm,” she says, as if the ways in which our performance of our identity can come to consume us from within hold no terrors for her whatsoever.
“The hook for that track is ‘there’s a place in France where the naked ladies dance,’” I tell her.
“There are times,” Megan says, “when the distance between two people—who share a life, and a house, and a bed, and a bathroom, and two children, and most of a career—seems so great as to be almost insurmountable.”
“It’s Henry’s favorite song now, so heads up. I told him not to sing it at school.”

*

It is 2010, and Kesha does not exist–at least, in the eyes of the media. Ke$ha is trying to tell Bill Werde about Kesha, but Werde doesn’t seem particularly interested. Everyone asks if she’s a party girl, Ke$ha says. Her answer, and Werde’s response, are so disconnected that it is worth reproducing them in full:
“If you mean ‘party girl’ like, at a club with a short skirt on with no underwear,” Ke$ha says,  “then no. I’ve gotten drunk before but never gotten a DUI. I don’t go to clubs. I try not to let my vagina hang out. I don’t do drugs, but I think I’m a walking good time and I talk kind of funny, so people think I’m messed up all the time. I’m not.”
But Werde does not hear this. “You can see where those people might get their ideas,” he says, and barrels into a conclusion he had clearly reached before starting: “the Ke$ha you hear on her songs is the Ke$ha you get in person.”
Except.
Except that two paragraphs previously, Werde told a story about the red carpet at the Grammys, where Ke$ha was worried that her complex designer dress was leaving her a little too exposed, and had to have a handler make sure she was covered to her liking. 
Except that Ke$ha seems to keep trying to bring the conversation back to her intelligence. She tells Werde that she was in an International Baccalaureate program. He puts it in quotation marks as if she made it up. (Twice.) She tells him that she got a 1500 on her SATs. He tells us that she was on The Simple Life. “The point being,” she tells him, “I’m not just a little pop moron.” He tells us what her burps are like. 
Except that despite Werde’s foregone conclusion, this is the interview where I first learned that Ke$ha and Kesha were two different people. It is where I first heard Ke$ha trying to introduce the world to Kesha, where I first heard a media voice actively suggest that there was no line between Kesha the woman and Ke$ha the construct, and most powerfully, where I first heard the story of the unsettling alchemy by which Ke$ha was constructed.
I am coming down hard on Bill Werde here, but as I said, in 2010, Ke$ha seems to be all there is. Scan the references list of her Wikipedia page and look at the titles from that time:

“Ke$ha tells us all kinds of awesome, crazy stuff: ‘Have I made out with chicks? Hell yeah.’” 

“Party Animal: Behind Ke$ha’s Big Debut.”

“Kesha – from Band Geek to Life of the Party.”

“Pop sensation Ke$ha gutsy, fearless.”

“Kesha and the Not-Quite-72 Virgins in Her Own Personal Heaven.”

“Kesha: Crazy, Sexy, & Too Fuckin’ Cool.”

“She’s a walking, talking, living dollar.”

“Make it $top.”

They don’t all include the $, but it’s there even when it’s not. That Kesha is Ke$ha, that the person and the per$ona are coterminous—in 2010, everyone agrees. 
Only Ke$ha seems unsure.

*

It is 2020, and—at least in my car—Ke$ha does not exist. 
My daughter, Violet, is an incredible force of will. When she wants something, she will not be impeded. If, in her toddlerhood, she decides a pair of pants are itchy—which she does on nearly a daily basis—the pants are gone. There will be no compromises about her outfit and no quarter granted to any parent so foolish as to try to reason with her. If she must crack the Earth to its very core and cast us all into the roiling mantle, so be it. 

ITCHY.

But that is later. For now, it is 2020, Violet is six months old, and for her, Ke$ha does not exist. We are in the car, and she does not want to be in the car, and so, in a polyphonic train-whistle scream jazz singers sometimes spend a lifetime learning, she wordlessly bellows her infant misery.
Megan reaches into the backseat and grabs Violet’s hand. Her brother, Henry, has headphones on, but absently pats her on her screaming head. 
“You’re okay, Violey,” I say. It’s strange: we’ve never really called Henry anything but Henry, but Violet became Violey—which looks a lot weirder written out than it sounds when I say it—almost at birth. 
“It’s okay,” I say, but it is not okay. There is only one path to calm for my cacophonic daughter.
We must play “Flik Flok.”
“Flik Flok” is not a toddler’s mispronunciation of “TiK ToK,” but rather a mashup of the beat from “TiK ToK” and the vocals from Dizzee Rascal’s 2007 track “Flex” which, unless you are an aficionado of the mid aughties UK garage scene, you have not heard. 

I have heard it, though. Thousands of times, I would imagine. On the drives across the desperately boring country between my house and my in-laws, Violet wails endlessly and unignorably until the last fiber of our resolve snaps and we put on “Flik Flok,” and she finally settles—only and exactly as long as “Flik Flok” plays, over and over, for hours and miles and an endless eternity of identical highway.
For whatever reason, “TiK ToK” on its own does not work for Violet. We try playing the original, but the instant she hears Ke$ha wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy, Violet makes her disappointment known to us at impossible volumes. Nevertheless, the backbeat of her infancy is the boxy synths and relentless bass of “TiK ToK,” looped and pounding and always. Ke$ha simply does not exist.

*

“Flik Flok” was created by the Kleptones, also known as DJ Erik Kleptone, the mad scientist (and singular plural) of the illegal music scene. Their special genius is their ability to put things in conversation with one another, and “Flik Flok” is, to my mind, among the greatest of their dialectics. We know, I hope, what “TiK ToK” is, but Dizzee Rascal’s “Flex” is its own fascinating contradiction.
“Flex” is a sort of horny ekphrasis: Rascal spends three and a half minutes celebrating the details of a woman dancing. He praises her timing, the way she controls her body. “Pure skill,” he says. He pauses to appreciate the movement of a drop of sweat. He catalogs her moves: the bogle, the butterfly. Drop it like it’s hot. Dip. Rock. Grind. Flex. “Your figure,” he says, “is so pleasing to the eye.”
And yet, woven in among the aesthete’s paean, Rascal makes sure to tell us he has a boner. “Got my tings rising,” he says, with only minor abashment. “What do you expect, that ain’t surprising.” Rascal’s appreciation is artistic, but it is also clearly visceral. It is about bodies. The wiggling. The jiggling. My heartbeat. My temperature. My blood pressure. “You could kill like that,” he tells her.
“Gosh,” he says, “you make a rude boy so shy.” 
It is this dualism that makes “Flex” such a good fit for “TiK ToK.” Rascal and Kesha are both attempting to live out the same superposition of states. They both are club kids and are not club kids. They are both animalistic and academic. They both are and are not themselves. Even the names—Dizzee Rascal, as you might imagine, is not the name on his library card, and in “Flex” he briefly refers to himself as “Dills,” a portmanteau of his “real” name, Dylan Mills. They create a space in the sweaty melee of the dance floor where they unquestionably belong, and yet keep themselves distant. It is easy, listening to “Flik Flok,” to imagine a sort of astral Dylan Mills and Kesha Sebert standing in the steamy haze above the crowd, watching Dizzee and Ke$ha dance.
This is why “Flik Flok” is so good: the braiding of these two artists, each of whom are already twinning with themselves, creates a helix of connection that is as meaningful thematically as it is musically.
Also, it fucking slaps.

*

It is 2005, and Ke$ha does not exist.
There is a 17 year old girl in Nashville with a single mom who knows some folks in the music industry. Her name is Kesha, but be careful: most of what we know about her—about how she snuck into Prince’s house to give him a demo, for instance—comes from stories Ke$ha will tell later. She thinks she might go to Barnard. She is studying the Cold War. Sometimes, her mom brings her along to the studio, and she records something, not really expecting anything to come of it.
One of those demos winds its way into the hands of Łukasz Gottwald, better known as Dr. Luke, who is well on his way to becoming a god of pop music production. (The power of Dr. Luke: when the time comes, and she writes the line “Wake up in the mornin feelin like P. Diddy,” Dr. Luke will get on the phone, and Diddy himself will that same day come to the studio to record a couple of voice lines for the debut single of an absolute unknown.)
On that demo, Dr. Luke hears two different people. Years later, he will play these two tracks for Bill Werde, who will write about it for Billboard, and I will learn about the utter fragility of identity. Werde: 

At Conway Studio where Luke works in Hollywood, he plays me two songs from the Ke$ha demo, each striking for different reasons. The first is a gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad that hints at what could’ve been had Ke$ha pursued a different path. The other is a gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track. But at one point toward the end, Ke$ha runs out of lyrics and starts rapping, for a full minute or so: “I’m a white girl/From the ‘Ville/Nashville, bitch. Uhh. Uhhhhh.”

Luke and his producer friends were smitten by this bit of screwball-gangsta improv. His face lights up even now as he remembers. “That’s when I was like, ‘OK, I like this girl’s personality. When you’re listening to 100 CDs, that kind of bravado and chutzpah stand out.”

This is how I remember the story—how I think about Kesha, and about Ke$ha: a girl gave a man two versions of herself and asked him, “who do you want me to be?”

*

It is 2023, and Violet is 3 years old. 
She has started giving us concerts at bedtime. Once she has her pajamas on, she will go into the playroom and fish out an old toy guitar that I have had for 25 years, and she will bring it to the living room. She will ask us to put on Train’s “Drops of Jupiter” and she will stand in the center of the room, strumming the guitar, and singing the lyrics, which she almost knows. It is always “Drops of Jupiter.” There are other songs that she loves—“Flik Flok” still among them, and now that she has the more developed palate of a toddler, “TiK ToK” as well—but for the concerts, it is always “Drops of Jupiter.”
I watch her dance, graceful and proud, and I think about “Drops of Jupiter,” and Violet, and Kesha. “Drops of Jupiter” is a song about a woman who leaves, drifting unmoored from earthbound stability, to try to find herself. (The song is best if you imagine it is about Elizabeth Gilbert circa Eat, Pray, Love.) The speaker asks this woman about her travels: whether she found what she sought, whether she escaped being scarred, whether she flew, Icarine, too close to the sun, and what it cost her to do so. And because it is a song that is written and sung by a man, the speaker of the song feels that the woman owes him answers to all these questions, and that the most important question among them is did you miss me, despite the fact that he estimates his own value as a human being as approximately equivalent to that of a really good soy latte.
Her little voice sings out an approximation of this story, this man who feels he has a right to tell a woman who to be, and then we say prayers, brush teeth, and settle in the rocker in her bedroom. 
This week, she has been playing with nicknames–among other peculiar experiments, she is trying to get Megan to call me “Mump,” for reasons nobody really understands–and so today, she has had an argument with her brother, who insists always and only on being called Henry. She wants to call him Hens. Personally, I think that is the cutest thing in the whole damn world, but Henry is insistent: his name is Henry. 
I sing to her as I rock her. Her favorite lullaby since time out of mind is an old hymn, “Down in the River to Pray,” only with the names of our family swapped in for the fathers and sisters and brothers of the original. 
Before I can complete the first verse, though, she interrupts me. “Oh, Violey, let’s go down—”
“I don’t want to be called Violey any more,” she says.
“You don’t? I’ve called you that your whole life,” I say.
“No. Just Violet.”
This makes me instantly sad. It feels as if I am losing something, a connection with her I have had since she was born. But, like, what am I, the guy from Train? Should it be up to me to decide who she is? Of course not. 
I don’t want to let go of “Violey,” because Violey is my daughter. But she will spend the rest of her life deciding who she wants to be, and I never want that to be contingent on what anyone else thinks—least of all a man worth little more than a cup of coffee. 
So sitting here, holding this tiny blonde dynamo who is already so many women when she is still only barely a big girl, I say, “Okay, Violet,” and I let her take one of the million tiny steps she will take in her life away from the image of her I hold in my mind, and toward the person that she wants to be. It is a baptism song, after all. Let her christen herself.
“Oh, Violet, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.”

*

I do not think we can know each other.
I don’t just mean that I cannot know Kesha, or Ke$ha, that two people as distant as a pop star and a listener a decade and a half later cannot know each other. I don’t just mean that I cannot know Violet, or that the churning storm of mystery at the heart of a three year old is beyond the comprehension of my meager dad brain. I do mean those things, but that is not all I mean. I mean you and me: I do not think that any two people can know each other.
Here: can you tell me who you are?
Not “can you tell me things about you.” Can you communicate your completeness? Put your entire self into words that I can understand? Can you put your entire self into words that you can understand?
A friend has read this essay, and she keeps saying: Violet will tell you who she is, you just have to listen. Kesha, after all, tried so hard to tell us who she was, but we could not—or at very least did not—listen to her. But if Bill Werde had listened, had struck the $ from the title of “Kesha: The Billboard Cover Story” and told us without ambiguity that this woman was not the character she was playing, would we have known her? 
I am afraid that Ke$ha was born because a man named Łukasz heard a woman sing two songs on a demo, and thought “I can understand this person.” And “I can understand her” led to “I understand her,” which led to “I know her better than she knows herself,” which led to “I know what’s best for you,” and this is how Ke$ha was made. 
I do not know this with certainty. But I do know that Ke$ha was born because Kesha trusted that Dr. Luke knew what was best for her, and Dr. Luke did not deserve that trust.
Listen.

*

It is 2008, and Ke$ha does not exist, but be patient: she is about to be born.
Kesha has signed with Dr. Luke, and he has already told her which of the girls from the demo he wants to sign. He wants the party girl. Flo Rida is in the studio recording “Right Round” with Dr. Luke. Luke tells Flo that he thinks a female vocalist would round out the mix, and he has just the person.
Kesha comes into the studio, lays down a vocal track, and Flo likes it. Likes it enough, in fact, that he’ll use Kesha again on “Touch Me” in 2009. 
Here’s Dr. Luke, moving his artists like chess pieces. Here’s Flo Rida, who’s already been in the Top 40 several times. And here’s Kesha, young and broke and nameless.
“Right Round” spends six weeks at #1. 
Kesha doesn’t get a credit. Kesha doesn’t get a dime.
“I was so broke and on the No. 1 song and it was being played everywhere all the time,” she tells Vibe. I imagine her working a register somewhere, hearing her own voice over the store sound system, and watching someone use her tip jar to break a $5.  Kesha changes her name to Ke$ha. “Just kinda making fun of myself,” she says.

*

Here is my question, the question of the father of a daughter who is so strong, so sure of herself, so unstoppable, but who is nevertheless only three, and who will someday be 17, and 21, and 27 and will enter a world where women do not always get to decide who they are, or who they will be, the question of a father who has never been a woman, and who somehow has to help this small fireball decide who she is going to be when she is 17, and 21, and 27, and being pushed against by men who have their own ideas about who she should be, the question of a father who will, inescapably, be one of those men, here is my question:

how do I help her decide who she is?

*

Not long after “Right Round” topped the charts, Ke$ha would release “TiK ToK,” which would spend nine weeks at number one, under her own name. Ke$ha would become what Ke$ha became, and Kesha would fade, and Dr. Luke would help her launch not one but three #1 singles—which, incidentally, is the same number Flo Rida has. The version of Kesha Rose Sebert that Dr. Luke chose was incredibly successful, even if he kinda ripped her off with “Right Round.”
Except.
Except the thing I have not yet said: ripping her off is not the worst thing Dr. Luke ever did to Kesha. 
In 2014, she filed a series of lawsuits against Dr. Luke, accusing him of “sexual assault and battery, sexual harassment, gender violence, civil harassment, violation of California's unfair business laws, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and negligent retention and supervision.” She said he drugged her, raped her, and caused her eating disorder, among other things. 
The lawsuits were not settled until 2023, but they were settled—nine years after they were filed, but only a month after Kesha released Gag Order, her last contractually mandated album on Dr. Luke’s label, Kemosabe.  Somehow, despite two English degrees and having spent much of my life being extremely pretentious, I only recently encountered Camus’s famous observation that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” When I did, it was Kesha that I thought of, releasing album after album after album knowing who would be sharing in the profits of her labor. I want to imagine Kesha happy.
I do not and cannot know what happened—about Kesha’s allegations, about the settlement, or about any of this. I am just another man trying to say who Kesha is, and was, and speculating about the shape of her authentic self, and how well it fit the container that was Ke$ha, and who built that container, and if she chose to get into it or if she was put into it by Dr. Luke, and I do not and cannot know any of that.
But I have listened to “Praying,” and it seems obvious to me that it was written by a woman who was deeply, profoundly hurt, who is healing, and who is trying to forgive someone who has done her incredible harm. And, while this is perhaps an unusual standard of evidence, I know that the Wikipedia page for “Praying” features a picture of Dr. Luke next to the words “fuck you.”

I do not know Kesha, and I do not know Ke$ha. I do not know Łukasz Gottwald, and I do not know Dr. Luke. I do not know Dylan Mills, and I do not know Dizzee Rascal. I do not know Eric Kleptone, and I do not know the person who bears the name on Eric Kleptone’s birth certificate (although I do have a pretty high degree of confidence that that name is not “Eric Kleptone”).
What I know are the stories that are told about them, the stories that they tell about themselves, and the story I piece together from those stories.

*

It is 2024, and Kesha/Ke$ha superposition fills my car. She hasn’t used the $ for nearly a decade now, and Apple Music knows this. They have dutifully removed it from the artist name in her metadata. But the album art cannot be so easily changed, and so it is that Kesha and Ke$ha both ride with us as I take the kids to school.

We pull into Henry’s school, listening to “Take It Off” for the third time. We both get out, and I sign him in, give him a kiss and send him on his way. When I turn back to the car, Violet is gesturing frantically at me from the backseat.
“Henry,” I holler, “did you forget to kiss your sister?” One of Violet’s many insistences: if she does not get the affection she believes she is due, there will be problems. He runs back to the car, climbs into the backseat, and is instantly rebuffed. 
“She doesn’t want a kiss,” Henry says. “She wants you to pick her a flower.”
So, of course, I do. The school garden butts up to the parking lot, and some of the marigolds they have planted to keep bugs away have grown through the fence. I pluck the prettiest bloom from among those scraggly stems, and I hand it to Violet as I get back in the car.
“You got me an orange one?!” she says, and it is unclear to me if this is surprise, delight, or disapproval. By now, “Take It Off” has given way to “Kiss N Tell,” which is not Violet’s favorite.
“Not this,” she says. “Something else.” I push the previous track button twice.
“Wake up in the mornin,” Ke$ha says, “feelin’ like P. Diddy.”
In the backseat, Violet slowly, deliberately, raises her hands in triumph. “TiK ToK,” she says quietly.
She has grown and changed in the last three years, and has come to love “TiK ToK” as much as, if not more than, “Flik Flok.” Because she is a person, she is new and different every day; tomorrow, she will respond to the same song with “NOT TIK TOK, I DON’T WANT TIK TOK.” Today, though, “TiK ToK” merits this small celebration.
We arrive at her school, and I unbuckle her seatbelt, and she takes her flower and tucks it into the cupholder in the backseat. “I don’t want to tell anyone about my flower,” she says. “I’m going to leave it in the car.”

*

It is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She is in college in Montana, and she texts me during her boring night classes to make fun of her professors, but I do not know her. 
Or it is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She calls me on her commute from San Francisco to Manteca, to tell me about how Galinda is leaving the production of Wicked she’s been understudying, and how she’s pretty sure she’s going to get to move up, and she’s so excited and I am so excited for her, but I do not know her. 
Or it is 2041, and Violet is 21 years old. She collapses onto my bed in tears because of a fight she had with her partner about something her partner’s cousin said about her brother, and I have no idea what she is talking about, but she is so upset, and so with one hand I rub her back while she cries, and with the other I text Megan to see if she can make sense out of any of this, and she says she cannot, so we agree to sit down later and make a flowchart or something, and I ask Violet if she wants to get some air, and we sit on the front porch in the dark and the fog and the cold and she leans against my chest and I remember when she was three and she would sit on my lap and play with my earlobe until she fell asleep, and she says “Dad can we go inside? It’s fucking freezing,” and I start to say something but don’t because I know that she’s old enough to use grown-up words now, and we go in and she goes to bed, and when I come to check on her later she is asleep with a book in her hand, and I remember all the nights before she could even read when she couldn’t fall asleep unless there were at least a dozen books in her bed, and I love her every bit as much as I did then, but I do not know her.
It is 2024, and Violet is 3 years old, and I know Violet as well as it is possible to know a three year old, but I suspect that is not very well. She is miserably sick, and she is hungry, and she is so, so mad, because her mother and I have made her peanut butter sandwich, but she wants us to cut it like a clock, and I have tried to cut it like a clock but it is wrong, no, that is not like a clock, NOT A CLOCK, I want it like a clock, so Megan tries, no, Josh, it’s not a circle, a clock is a circle, and she cuts a circle, and Violet becomes incensed, NO NO NO NOT LIKE A CIRCLE LIKE A CLOCK CUT IT LIKE A CLOCK, and she shoves the sandwich across the table, and Megan asks ok, honey, i’m sorry, we’re trying, would you like daddy to make you a new sandwich and cut it like a clock? and Violet sniffles, pitiful, exhausted, feverish, and says uh huh, and so I make a second sandwich, and I take it to the table with the knife, and I let her direct me cut by cut, do you want me to cut it like this? and then here? like this? okay? and step by step I cut the sandwich, first vertical, then horizontal, across the diagonals, until it is divided into eighths like pie slices, and she sniffs and says see, daddy, like a clock, and I say I see, honey, because this is exactly how I cut the first sandwich twenty minutes ago, but she is 3 years old, and I do not know her.
 All of these Violets exist in my imagination. Even the one I dropped off at school this morning, who made me sit in the parking lot until we got to the end of “TiK ToK.” I have been with her since the instant she entered this world, and I will share with her every moment she will let me (although for transparency I must disclose that at this particular moment she has been sent to bed early because she threw a book at me for unclear reasons). But still, I cannot hold her completeness in my mind–even now, when her completeness is not quite tall enough to ride Jumping Jellyfish at Disneyland.
I can hold her in my heart, though. Not perfectly, but completely. There’s room in there for all the people she might ever decide to be.

*

“Bring it back,” Dizzee Rascal says at the end of “Flik Flok.” “Bring it back.”

*

It is 2014, and Ke$ha does not exist. Kesha is 27 years old. She has just left rehab for her eating disorder, and she decides that is done with the front. “I let go of my facade about being a girl who didn’t care,” she’ll explain at SXSW next week. “My facade was to be strong,” she’ll say, “and I realized it was total bullshit. I took out the $ because I realized that was part of the facade.”
But that is next week. Today, she is getting off a plane at LAX.

She is wearing a sweatshirt that says “IMA SURVIVOR,” and she looks so unfathomably young. If you told me she was 17 and not 27 in this picture I would believe it without question. There is something about this young woman, who is deciding so intentionally who she wants to be, who is deciding to leave Ke$ha behind and to become again the person she was ten years ago, someone I do not know and someone she might not know that well any more either, that I cannot help but love a little tiny distant bit.
I do not know her, and I have no right to feel any kind of way about her, and she is not 17 or 27 but almost my own age, but none of that matters to my dad heart. I cannot help it. I am so, so proud of her.

*

It is 2024 and Kesha is waiting for you. (Link is mildly NSFW; leave it to Kesha to tease new music with her bare ass.)
She has been waiting for some time, in fact. Gag Order dropped in May of 2023. That release meant that she had produced the number of albums required by her contract with Kemosabe, but it seems that was not the end of her contract’s exclusivity clause. From an interview with V Magazine this February:

I’ll say…to all my fans, all my animals, this has been a ride. I’ll say that there is a day—although I won’t say the day—but there is a day marked on my calendar when I am free to release music. So just know that she is out here in the woods writing and singing till four in the morning, ferociously. I am being a feral wild woman out here. So just know that.

To say it another way: she has been there the whole time. Kesha is waiting for us. 
And while she waits, she has retreated into the wilderness like the Animal she has always been. She has taken an Artist in Residence position at the Esalen Institute, where she is teaching a class called “The Alchemy of Pop Music,” and it seems somehow very on brand that she is doing this work somewhere the FAQ page includes entries for “How do I tip my massage therapist?” and “Must I get naked?” The interview calls her Professor Kesha, without even a hint of Bill Werde’s scare quotes. 
And I was wrong. We need not imagine Kesha happy. She is happy. Listen:

I’ll say this: I’ve never felt happier, more excited, more at peace and had such a purpose in my entire life. And I feel like I have earned the right to be this happy for sure. So letting that be…I am loving every minute of what feels like a brand-new and very exciting chapter.

This month, in the middle of the first round of this tournament, the unnamed date arrived. “First day I’ve owned my voice in 19 years,” she tweeted. “Welcome.”
That same day, on Instagram Live, she shared new music, and it is hard to imagine a purer joy. We need not imagine Kesha happy. Just look at her. 

Kesha is free. And she is waiting for us.

*

It is 2023, and Ke$ha does not exist. Kesha still performs “TiK ToK,” though, because why wouldn’t she? It is today what it has always been: an absolute banger. Two days ago, though, singer Cassie Ventura filed suit against Diddy alleging that their musical partnership was fraught with years of abuse, emotional manipulation, controlling behavior, and even rape. It is not hard to understand why Kesha would take this very seriously.
The Ke$ha of “TiK ToK” is eternally 21, one boot on the floor of a stranger’s bathroom, emerging half drunk from the tub like a scrungly Venus, cheap jewelry on her wrists and a cockeyed trucker hat on her soul. The first thing the Ke$ha of “TiK ToK” tells us about herself is that she wakes up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy. And why not? The Ke$ha of “TiK ToK,” after all, doesn’t mind a little light groping. But it is 2023, and Ke$ha does not exist. She has been gone for a long time now.
Kesha must have decided the instant she heard: tonight, she will not say his name. 
The synths haven’t changed, boxy and wobbly at the same time. The bass is no different, round and rough and boneshaking. But this is not the same woman.
“Wake up in the morning,” she sings, “feeling just like me.”

*

It is 2024, and Kesha is a professor now, and so I am asking myself: has she made a palindrome of herself?
Her time with Kemosabe began, in a sense, with the video for “TiK ToK.” If one has enough English degrees, or has spent enough time being pretentious, one might say that Ke$ha was born in that tub. She arises from it, Botticellian, and gathers her effects. She puts on her boots. She finds her bag. She walks out the door. Who it was that climbed into the bathtub, we cannot say, but it was Ke$ha who climbed out of that porcelain font and blinked hungover onto the Hot 100.
Her time at Kemosabe is over, well and truly. She owns her own voice again, for the first time in nineteen years. And the first thing she did was return to the water.

Garment by garment, she divests herself of all affectations. She walks barefoot on the gravel shore toward the water. (Sing with me: oh, Kesha, let’s go down, down in the river to pray.) She does not submerge herself—at least, not yet. For now, she stands, ankle deep, in the water of rebirth. She awaits a new baptism. 
It is coming. Whatever is next, it is coming. And she is there.
Kesha is waiting for us.

J. Nicholas Geist is an essayist. Josh’s print essays have appeared in Ninth Letter, Creative Nonfiction, and the much-mourned videogame journal Kill Screen. His extracurricular essay for March Fadness 2023, “The Essential Whiteness of One-Hit Wonders,” was included in Sight and Sound Magazine’s list of the Best Video Essays of 2023. If you are reading this on Day 1 of the tournament, he hopes that you will wish Kesha a happy birthday on Twitter, where she has recently begun cataloging her experiences playing Fortnite.

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).