the sweet 16

(2) nelly, “hot in herre”
outhustled
(3) 50 Cent, “In Da Club”
173-108
and plays on in the elite 8

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 3/22/24. (Note that Arizona does not do Daylight Saving time, so AZ time now = Pacific.)

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DAVE SINGLETON ON 50 CENT’S “IN DA CLUB”

In his 2004 HBO special Never Scared, Chris Rock gave us the quote, “If the beat’s all right, she’ll dance all night.” It was a central part of a routine about extremely filthy and misogynistic lyrics in rap music, and how tired Chris was of defending the merits of rap music from its detractors.
A song, though, that should not need defending in this manner is 2003’s “In da Club” by 50 Cent. Thumping bass, hand claps, funky horns and a chugging understated guitar riff propel this song about 50 being on the come up, and his plans for future fame and fortune.
It was the lead single from Get Rich or Die Tryin’. Dr. Dre’s production shone through, and the track helped propel the album to being certified as platinum nine times in the United States. “In da Club” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks. Objectively, it is one of the biggest, hottest tracks of all time.
When 50 Cent performed the song at the Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show in 2022, hanging upside down for his entrance, the pop from the crowd was ridiculous (even if 50 admitted later that he thought it was a mistake).
Funnily, the song about poppin’ bottles full of bub and sippin’ Bacardi is now old enough to drink itself, having celebrated its release birthday in January of this year. I was not that much older when this song came out.
I was living in Southeast Michigan at the time. Working my first full-time job at Eastern Michigan University. In a long-distance relationship with my now wife, but essentially living a quasi-single life. Which involved (on weekends when I was not on duty as a hall director) going out from time to time. And I remember the first time I heard this song, and my mind was blown by what I was hearing. “OH! This is different.”
Around the time that this song came out, I had just bought a new car. A red 1999 Pontiac Sunfire that had a sunroof. It was sporty and zippy, and I felt kind of cool driving around town with it. The best part was it had a decent little built-in sound system, for the size of the car, that had a built-in CD player.
I felt like a baller.
We were still in peak Napster/Limewire era, so you know I was, ahem, “acquiring” music and burning songs onto CDs. However, I “acquired” a copy of Get Rich or Die Tryin’ in the traditional manner and took great pleasure in driving around Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor with the sunroof open and the windows down (when the weather permitted) bumping “In da Club” alone. Or throwing it onto a mix CD and popping that mix in when I was tooling around town running errands in my car or with my friend Heather.
Whether out at the club, at a wedding, or sitting at a stoplight, this song makes you want to groove. Makes you want to move. And while the lyrics to reference bisexual women and Ecstasy pills, it’s not talking about, as Chris Rock was joking about in his bit, “Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick.”
It’s not THAT dirty.
But the beat is all right.
And when “In da Club” comes on, you can best believe folks will dance all night.

In his younger days, you could find Dave Singleton "In da Club". Nowadays, you're likely to find him "on his couch" sipping on some tea. Like 50 Cent himself, Dave is also from New York City, but now resides in Las Vegas. He has won and lost on Jeopardy! and on the Game Show Network. You can follow him on Twitter/X at @dfsingleton.

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).