Okay, let’s get the gripes out of the way first. Nelly is undoubtedly a charismatic performer with oodles of attitude and a raft of hip-shakingly funky singles in his repertoire, but it has to be said that he and his band of merry muthafuckaz The St. Lunatics are exponents of mainstream hip-hop at its most aesthetically questionable.
At a couple of points during tonight’s show, Nelly compresses his none-too-complex manifesto into a few easy-to-swallow soundbites. First of all, he admiringly salutes those “niggaz swimmin’ in dollar bills”, before more pointedly engaging the crowd in a singalong comprised entirely of the refrain, “Make money-money/Make money-money-money”. Not that there’s anything wrong with putting bread on the table, understand, but when your extempore mid-gig compositions could feasibly soundtrack the next Republican Party convention, one can’t help but find it objectionable.
More troublesome is the amount of overt sexism on display. When not negotiating their way between the jungle of wiggling booty on stage (provided courtesy of the singer’s unabashed personal dance troupe), Nelly and his crew perform in front of a giant video screen purveying more soft porn vignettes than one could expect to encounter in the Sunday Independent of a Sabbath.
But damn it, this guy has got choons. The likes of ‘Ride Wit Me’ and ‘Hot In Herre’ (which fairly sizzles under the influence of that magical Neptunes sound-dust), transform this giant dockside cattle mart into something approximating a heaving downtown Manhattan discotheque – no easy achievement. Likewise, his astute interpolations of ‘Let Me Blow Ya Mind’ and – even more impressively – James Brown’s ‘Get Up Off That Thing’ hint at a performer who knows his George Clinton from his Bill Clinton.
So, to sum up, the head said no but the feet said yes. Looks like that old Cartesian mind/body dualism is alive and kicking in 2003.