Songoftheday 5/25/23 - I was like good gracious ass is bodacious, uh flirtatious tryin' to show faces...

 

 

"Hot In Herre" - Nelly

from the album Nellyville (2002)

Billboard Hot 100 peak: #1 (seven weeks)

Weeks in the Top-40: 25

 

Today's song comes from St. Louis-born rapper Nelly, who ambitiously followed the big success of his debut album Country Grammar with the song "#1" from the soundtrack to the movie Training Day starring Denzel Washington. However that single stopped well short of the top of the pop chart, making the top-40 but making the next album's promotion so important. "#1" was on the sophomore disc Nellyville a year later, but the "true" first single from the record was the party track "Hot In Herre". The song was written by Nelly (under his given name Cornell Haynes) with the Neptunes production team (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo). It used a sample of R&B "go-go" legend Chuck Brown's song "Bustin' Loose", which topped Billboard magazine's R&B chart and was a top-40 pop hit at #34 in 1979, giving Brown a writing credit on the song...

 

 The Neptunes took the groove of the song and set a sparse guitar and keyboard chords over it, while Nelly rap-sings about macking up on a girl at the club, saying "B'cuz I feel like bustin' loose and I feel like touchin' you", that he's gonna strip naked, even before the anonymous woman backup singer agrees to do the same. It's an equal opportunity sinfest, and he's spitting out so many memorable lines that you end up transfixed. But in the end it's the "It's getting hot in here, I'm gonna take off all my clothes" that simply grabbed on to the universal zeitgeist. You'd have to be far far away from the mainstream to have been alive at that time and not recognize that line. With a cameo-packed video ripe for MTV, Nelly found himself even bigger the second time around...

 

"Hot In Herre" became Nelly's first #1 pop hit in June of 2002, while spending six weeks on top of both Billboard's R&B chart and Rap Songs list. On the radio, the song took two weeks at #1 on the Mainstream Top-40 chart, and seven weeks atop the dance-oriented Rhythmic format. Internationally, the single topped the Canadian singles chart, and made the top ten in Denmark (#2), Australia (#3), New Zealand (#3),the United Kingdom (#4), the Netherlands (#4), Norway (#5), Sweden (#6), Belgium (#7 Flanders/#13 Wallonia), Germany (#8), Switzerland (#10), Ireland (#10), and Croatia (#10). The Nellyville album, released in June as the single was cresting, took four weeks at #1 on the Billboard 200 sales tally, and five on top of the R&B Albums list, going on to sell over seven million copies. At the Grammy Awards in 2003, "Hot In Herre" won the trophy for Best Male Rap Solo Performance. The Nellyville album was also up for Album Of The Year, losing to Norah Jones' lite-jazz Come Away With Me, as well as earning his second nomination for Best Rap Album, which went home with Eminem for The Eminem Show. 

Both Nelly and the album will be back to the series.

(8/10)

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There was a second version of the video for the international market that had Nelly out of the club and inside the St. Louis Arch (thanks to a lot of CGI)...

 

Here's Nelly performing on Top of the Pops in 2002...

In 2010, the rapper performed the song at the bid for the Democratic National Convention ...

Lastly, Nelly performing the song with a live band for Boombox...

Up tomorrow: Rapper exclaims surprise.