Nelly’s “Country Grammar (Hot Shit),” the lead single from his 2000 album Country Grammar, is comfortably at home in 2025. He mentions AI, Donald Trump, and lighting up and taking a puff of chronic, all of which arguably have a stronger hold on America today than they did back then. But at the time, what made it such an interesting breakout single for the St. Louis rapper was how he threaded together East and West Coast with the South, all while being from the Midwest. His laid-back flow, which bounced behind the beat, was set to a song based on a game of patty-cake. This unique blend of styles and themes propelled him into the spotlight.
At the age of 26, Nelly was introduced to the world and went to No. 7 on the U.S. charts. The album went on to sell over 10 million copies and became only the ninth hip-hop album to be certified diamond by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). What wasn’t clear at the time was that Nelly would become a bridge between rap and country music. And no one suspected that, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Country Grammar, Nelly would be invited to perform the album in full at a country music festival (Stagecoach – where he has performed previously). He wasn’t that kind of country — was he?
When Country Grammar dropped, Nelly was propped up on TRL next to Britney Spears and ‘NSYNC. Country crossovers were so rare that Shania Twain, pulling one off a few years prior by landing some videos in rotation on VH1 and adult contemporary radio, got lambasted for not being country enough. Country music remained siloed, and the idea of any rap or pop artist — and Nelly was both, thanks to the success of his first album — appearing on CMT was unthinkably uncool. Against this backdrop of genre separation, Nelly’s next move was surprisingly groundbreaking.
In 2004, he joined up with Tim McGraw on “Over and Over” (two years later, a little artist named Taylor Swift would drop her first single, “Tim McGraw,” for some context on exactly how popular he was during this era). As for Nelly’s popularity, he performed at the Super Bowl halftime show for the second time that year. The track was from the latter of Nelly’s double albums Sweat and Suit, and is a slow heartbreak ballad. The video shows a split-screen day in the life of Nelly and McGraw, highlighting how similar they are. Sure, they decorate their houses differently, but they both take the same shower, put on variations of an ostentatious belt buckle, and keep a photo of their sweethearts on the bedside table (Ciara for Nelly, and Faith Hill, who had already been married to McGraw for eight years). Later, the two get out their Nokia cell phones to call their partners while waiting for a private plane on two different air strips. While intended to convey heartbreak as a great equalizer, today it suggests wealth as their commonality. The overall effect of this unexpected hit single foreshadowed a larger trend that was beginning to take shape: the rise of hick-hop.
While Suit was an R&B album, and there are elements of R&B swing in the song, the only thing really stopping it from being identifiable as a country track is the click drum, which was still a no-no in the country world of live bands and Opry debuts. The song went to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, to the surprise of Nelly’s label, and signified to country music gatekeepers that the mainstream was ready for country, under the right conditions.
Prior to the Nelly and McGraw duet, artists weren’t really taken seriously when they blended genres. In Rolling Stone’s history of hick-hop, there are some novelty hits where established country artists like Toby Keith and Big and Rich playing with the syncopated rhythms of hip-hop, and outsiders to country music like Bubba Sparxxs and Kid Rock flirting with blue collar life years before they make a hard right turn into more completely appealing to country audiences.
Between Trace Atkins’ 2005 novelty hit ‘Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,’ which seemed to satirize rap vernacular, and Luke Bryan’s 2011 hit ‘Country Girl (Shake It for Me),’ which celebrated aspects of culture and incorporated Southern rock guitar influences, the hick-hop genre evolved. That same year, Jason Aldean’s “Dirt Road Anthem,” which got a remix with a verse from Atlanta’s own Ludacris, was the first hick-hop song to go to No. 1 on the charts.
What shifted to make country and hip-hop blending acceptable? By 2011, Xennials and the first Millennials were taking the cultural helm, responding to a blending of culture that had begun with the generation before them. Nelly’s own background connects to this theory.
In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, rap became a fixture on MTV, and Gen X, of which Nelly is a member, were in high school. At that time, no matter how big or small the city, one place where men got together across racial and economic lines was the locker room. (Both country and rap were dominated by male artists at this time, and they still are. It follows that people involved in creating and legitimizing a hick-hop sound were almost entirely men.)
Youth sports were where Nelly met the St. Lunatics, the group of friends he would bring up with him through the music industry. Locker rooms were one of the most influential places this cultural mash-up would meet, and it makes sense. Music is a huge part of sports (hype songs, walk-up songs, team anthems) and being on a team is one place where diverse groups of people get the chance to work together, trust each other, qnd spend a lot of time together.
Beyond his influence on hick-hop, Nelly also helped spur another sub-genre, teaming with Florida Georgia Line on the remix of “Cruise,” a bona fide No. 1 hick-hop hit on the Hot Country Songs (it stayed there for over a year) and Country Airplay charts. The song kicked off a sound that became known as “bro-country,” a grouping of male-gaze centric songs about girls, trucks, and beer that many future hick-hop songs would fall into. Nelly and Florida Georgia Line would try to recreate the magic two more times with collaborations, but “Cruise” was a right song at the right time phenomenon, and lightning didn’t strike twice for the collaborators.
For Nelly, the hit “Cruise” came at a time when his career in rap was declining. He would hop on remixes with Kane Brown and Brett Kissel, to some success, as country embraced adding verses from established hip-hop artists to songs to extend the life of a single. In 2021, Nelly released Heartland, an album of duets with country artists, including the two most successful Black men in the genre, Darius Rucker and Kane Brown, as well as one of those Florida Georgia Line tracks and a solo collaboration with one of its members, Tyler Hubbard. The album was not met with success on country radio, or anywhere else, for that matter.
Looking back at Country Grammar, it’s easy to see the early parallels with country songwriting. The album is about a small part of St. Louis that Nelly and the St. Lunatics called home. It tells listeners about their world, bringing them into the party, the hard times, the posturing, and the world as they saw it. It’s fun while offering a nuanced version of country music’s long tradition of documenting rural life in a way that others have not, setting the stage for all that has followed and this upcoming moment of celebration for Nelly’s work at Stagecoach.