Surprisingly, Nelly Is Broke-Ass

I don't like to spin too many personal stories, because any guy who's fucked a Playmate will quickly top you and the game never ends and you inevitably lose. I did work with Nelly at the time he was crazy hot for nothing to do with musical talent. Somebody had to fill that handsome black R&B rap artist slot on MTV in the early 2000's so why not Nelly? Itzhak Perlman can't fake playing the violin. It's a ton easier with Hot in Herre. At a time when intentionally misspelling words was proven to sell more records. Fucking kids.

Nelly turned down more fat money gigs than anyone could imagine. Partly because every single relative and best friend from high school in his posse and every single hand in the music food chain was stealing much of it. Also because he imagined himself an evergreen artist, as opposed to a 26-year old dude with a three to four year payola window to make as much cash as possible and cruise through the rest of life.

Nelly turned down shoes deals because he didn't want to be seen in various sneaker brands not his liking. He turned down Slim Jim deals because pork. He turned down soft drink money because he didn't want to promote soda drinking. These were millions of dollars. Then he sunk a vast amount of cash into a cousin's project called Pimp Juice. He bought into a jeans company for chicks with big asses called Apple Bottoms. And the inevitable money down the drain in an auto racing circuit team. It's weird having a head's up to a train wreck in progress. A glimpse into why people who could really see into the future would want to off themselves almost instantly.

Now Nelly's forty-one and the IRS is hounding him down for $2.4 million in unpaid taxes, the inevitable step in the rapper bankruptcy chain of events. Nelly fans, who number nearly in the double digits, created a hashtag to encourage people to stream Nelly on Spotify a cool 280,000,000 times which Spin Magazine calculated would net him the royalties needed to pay off his lien.

It's unclear why saving Nelly versus, say, starving Syrian refugee toddlers with shrapnel scars, but everybody has their pet cause. Also unclear why Spin Magazine would not understand how royalty splits with publishers work in music, or how the Spotify money would also once more be taxed as income by the IRS before he could use the proceeds to pay off his previously unpaid taxes. So let's just settle on a billion streams of Hot in Herre to get Nelly back to zero. That's not happening. Or even one percent of that.

Look for some sweetheart deals at the emergency Nelly garage sale. Should've snapped into a Slim Jim, motherfucker.

_{Photo credit: Splash News}