It’s hard to believe it’s been two and a half decades since Country Grammar. Nelly’s smash debut album stands out even 25 years later; the perfect example of a regional record with universal appeal. The infectious hit introduced the world to the twangy rhymer from St. Louis with the singsongy flow, and Nelly became a superstar seemingly overnight.
It had actually been a climb for the man born Cornell Haynes. He moved to the St. Louis suburb of University City in middle school, where he met friends Ali, Murphy Lee, City Spud, and Kyjuan and eventually formed the group, St. Lunatics. The crew scored some attention in the city’s underground scene with the single, “Gimme What You Got” around 1996 but it was ultimately decided for Nelly to push through as a solo artist. He would subsequently land a deal with Universal in 1999.
“I had four demo songs that I would go around and play for people,” he recalled in 2021. “And I would send them to different record labels. All four of my demo songs were all four singles off of Country Grammar. So it’s kind of hard if somebody [who heard the demo] says, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember him, but he didn’t have those songs.’ No, those were the exact same songs I played.”
Nelly’s work on the album would yield blockbuster success for Country Grammar — which would go on to sell over 10 million copies in the United States. It announced Nelly as a superstar, alongside his compatriots the St. Lunatics — and soon fellow St. Louis natives like Chingy, J-Kwon, Jibbs and others were scoring hits. St. Louis — and Midwestern rap in general — were more than on the hip-hop map, they were rezoning its regional parameters.
“Club Casino [in East St. Louis] was the first place to ever play “Country Grammar,’” Nelly told SLM in 2001. “We blew up underground here, people took to us. It’s not like we were adopted by St. Louis — we were born here.”
“Country Grammar (Hot Sh*t)” dropped that winter and was inescapable by the early summer; an infectious smash carried by a kiddie rhyme chorus and singsongy lyrics that have always hidden darkness in plain sight. The song and its music video became fixtures on radio and music television that summer; so the album was positioned to capitalize.
Nelly followed “Hot Sh*t” with “E.I.” an impossibly catchy single that rose almost as high as its predecessor on the Billboard Hot 100. Its “Tip Drill” remix would become much more notorious, but the original is still one of Nelly’s signature tunes and the music video was another one that found itself in heavy MTV rotation. “Ride With Me” was the album’s biggest hit, another example of how Nelly’s melodic flow was perfectly suited for radio. Even as inescapable as the singles were, and remain, the album cuts have always been consistently strong: “For My” features a still-young-and-emerging Hot Boy-era Lil Wayne and tracks like “Steal the Show” and “Thicky Thick Girls” perfectly announce the St. Lunatics.
And the album would springboard Nelly to A-list stardom. Multiplatinum success would make him a 2000s fixture. He would drop top-sellers like Nellyville in 2002, 2004’s Sweat/Suit; he would go on to act in movies like The Longest Yard and on TV, appeared in Real Husbands of Hollywood and Dancing with the Stars. His love life became tabloid fodder — as the world renewed its obsession with his back-on relationship with Ashanti.
Through it all, the legacy of Country Grammar has endured. The title track was named one of Billboard’s 500 Greatest Pop Songs of All Time. He performed a medley of the album’s hits during the 2020 American Music Awards; he was expected to salute Grammar’s 25th anniversary with his performance at Bonnaroo before the 2025 festival was canceled.
And the impact Country Grammar had on St. Louis can’t be dismissed or diminished.
“There wasn’t much stock in the hip-hop scene for St. Louis talent [before]. Everyone primarily had their favorite artist from another city; we didn’t really have anyone to be fond of from our own city,” said art director Vango Jones, about Nelly’s impact in 2020.
“So once Nelly came, it really broke a barrier where other people in the city who were interested in rap, they felt there was actually a possibility of them making it on a national level or just achieving success than just the local scene… it just opened the floodgates for not only us to be seen on a national level — but for other talent to also come and achieve success.”
The success of Country Grammar further confirmed that at the dawn of the new millennium, hip-hop was no longer on the pop culture fringes nor was hip-hop’s voice defined by bicoastal bias. Like the Dirty South, the Midwest had made major inroads in the 1990s, but now Nelly was poised to take things to a new height commercially. St. Louis was staking its claim. And Nelly was the trailblazer.
