NELLY ft KELLY ROWLAND – “Dilemma”

This was massive, winding up the fourth biggest seller of 2002 behind Will, Gareth and Enrique. I’ve talked a few times about records I want to like more than I do but with Dilemma I have the opposite problem; namely I actually want to dislike it more than I do. In its second week two fantastic records entered the charts (5 and 11 respectively) Electrical Storm by U2 and The Zephyr Song by RHCP and both then and now I consider these songs to be worth twenty of R&B warbling.

Except Kelly Rowland’s hook which cut through playlists of the time remains an ear worm and it’s nobody’s fault this wasn’t and isn’t my thing.

In its second week Dilemma blocked Like I Love You by Justin Timberlake from the summit as he launched his solo career on his way to becoming one of the biggest stars of the 2000s. I think we meet him eventually but that record was everywhere so it might surprise some people that we don’t get to discuss it.

Nelly is one of a handful of chart-toppers I’ve seen live* when FT’s own Kat Stevens got free tickets for his Wembley Arena show. He closed the show with this (Kelly on tape, not in-person sadly) It was a pretty good gig as I recall, much more of a straight-up hip hop show than the showbiz extravaganza his pop star status led me to expect. My other abiding memories are of how long his (American) football top was (more of a smock than a shirt) and of the audience being mainly very tough looking pre-teen girls.

That was about a year after Dilemma came out though. I remember it playing all year though I’m not sure I knew the title before now. At the time it was the object definition of a 6 for me: perfectly agreeable but nothing I was ever that fussed about. Nowadays I’d probably run to a 7. Hot in Herre would have been an 8. Love the synths’ evocation of sweaty claustrophobic club heat.

I remember the beef with KRS1. At the time I think I nominally sided with KRS since he was in my view, a serious heavy dude andd Nelly was just a daft pop star with a plaster on his cheek but even back then I had no gripe with Nelly and danced to Hot In Herre in many student nightclubs.

October 2002, I was back in London for my final year at Imperial and about to unleash my own music. In fact I think The Shakes might have played our first gig the day this hit #1. Despite the none-more-2002 name, we were, dare I say, really rather good. A wiry collision of Dead Kennedys and, er, Wire. We got offered a deal after six or seven gigs but managed to blow it – more on that later.

I have fond but vague memories of this – when I summoned it up in my mind, I realised I only remembered Kelly’s parts and the shout-outs coda – ‘East Coast, I know you shakin’ right’ etc (there must be a term for those things, but what is it?). Listening to the whole thing again, though, it broadly matches up with what I thought it was – it’s also a 7 for me.

It’s probably my favourite Nelly moment – Hot In Herre I tend to group with the Thong Song as Carry On R&Bing, and I’m not big on that.

I don’t remember the KRS-One beef, but it seems entirely in keeping with his tedious self-appointment as the guardian of hip-hop values. Occasionally Spotify chucks a Boogie Down Productions track my way, and I’m always slightly surprised by how exciting and vital they are, because Mr Parker became such a massive bore later on.

#6: “Was he the first rapper to sort-of sing most of his lines?” Bone-Thugz ‘N Harmony maybe?

Loads to love about Nelly – his name, the brilliant Hot In Herre, the almost as good Ride Wit Me, his signature elastoplast.. This isn’t bad either. These days virtually every record in the Top 10 includes a feature, but to me this record is a masterclass in how to do it well: both artists compliment and make space for each other; a proper duet rather than a strategy to hit as many playlists as possible.

I did originally post this over on the Patreon not realising the comments sections on both were unrelated, so this is more for completeness. Duly noted for next time!

An interesting one to revisit this. Firstly because of Nelly, who’d been coming up on the rails for a while at this point. He’d had a handful of top 10 hits here, and his single before this was, as Tom pointed out, ‘Hot In Herre’, which had made the top 5 in June, even if its chorus line of ‘It’s getting hot in here/So take off all your clothes’ was to become the mating call of a thousand undesirable males in low grade nightclubs flashing their pasty pigeon chests for many a year after.

Secondly because this is our first solo Destiny’s Child encounter on Popular – of which Kelly makes up 28.5% of these. They’d announced a year’s break to focus on solo projects following the conclusion of touring for the ‘Survivor’ album. Michelle had gone first with her gospel album ‘Heart to Yours’ – which although not a commercial success here in the UK did win her a MOBO award for Best Gospel Act.

Kelly’s bunnied bandmate was then meant to release her album next, but then ‘Dilemma’ happened. Or rather, US radio got hold of it despite it not being slated for single release, and much like ‘It Wasn’t Me’ a year previously, it blew up in a big way, and that transferred to here in the UK as well. The 200,000 copies this shifted in week one – and the fact it was the year’s fourth biggest seller as #1 highlighted – undoubtedly marked the point that Nelly crossed over to the mainstream, and certainly the point Kelly marked herself out as a solo artist.

I think the combination of Nelly and Kelly – even without the satisfying synergy of saying their names together – was a winner. They offered a nice contrast, her sweet mewing versus his Southern drawling. ‘Dilemma’ was very laidback yet melodic, with a memorable chorus, perfect for as the nights drew in, and the video had a nice autumnal feel to it that fitted the story of the song too (and also gifted the internet for years to come with the meme of the shot from the video where Kelly appears to be pissed off at her boyfriend not responding to a text written on Microsoft Excel. 00s problems, etc).

We meet Nelly twice – maybe three times? I’m not sure – more but he never topped this in my eyes. Subsequently for Kelly, her first solo album ‘Simply Deep’ came out here the following February – along with her unbunnied solo debut proper in ‘Stole’, a touching pop rock number themed around the numerous high school shootings across the States that had made headline news – and the album went to number one here and for that very brief moment in time, she looked like she was going to be the one to have the lasting solo career away from Destiny’s Child. We do meet her once more, again as a guest vocalist, six Popular years from now. But for me she’s always been my favourite member/solo artist from DC. Reasons of which I’ll discuss further when we meet the first B****** bunny. A solid 8 from me overall.

A couple of interesting newcomers not already mentioned during the fortnight this was at the top: ‘Nu Flow’, the debut release from Big Brovaz, a kind of family friendly So Solid Crew, debuted at #3 in its first week, and like ‘Dilemma’ was still on the chart when the new year hit. It started a year long run of top 10 hits for them which came to a crashing halt when one of their members – Flawless – was arrested for trying to smuggle jazz salt through customs at Heathrow.

On its second week came another solo debut, this time for *NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake, with the Neptunes produced ‘Like I Love You’ at #2. We have to wait a while to discuss him properly on Popular but this was certainly a debut that was announcing the arrival of a superstar as opposed to ‘Yet another boyband member gone solo’. I think I might have mentioned this elsewhere but Trevor Nelson on his Radio 1 show was certainly instrumental in helping his ‘Justified’ album crossover to the level of success it eventually attained here because he was raving about it loads on his show as I recall. Blue were also new at #3 in its second week with ‘One Love’, the first single off their second album but we don’t have long to wait before we discuss it’s follow up so I’ll save further comment for then.

Duplicate comment – my apologies.

Re: 6 & 7 – I’ll second BTnH. Also, the Pharcyde went in for a fair bit of that (eg, Runnin – esp Slim Kid Tre on the middle verse), and to some extent Snoop (although listening again to Nuthin but a G Thang – video maybe best not watched in an office – I’m wondering if someone – Nate Dogg? – is helping out on the melodic ‘Death Row is the label that pays me’ bits?)

As the framing of this around the KRS-One critique illustrates nicely, this is a pop song that happens to be mostly rapped, representative of a pop-rap culture that someone like KRS-One considered sacrilegious to the idea of rap as the socially-conscious sound of disenchanted black America. Wonder what he made of the 2003 bunny where those two visions of rap collide head-on…

But yes, we’ve seen pop-rap on Popular more than a few times before, and an equivalent US project would have offered up more, but the idea of essentially a speech-sung romantic ballad tearing up pop radio everywhere, including pretty small-c conservative radio stations covering fairly rural areas of Britain like the one I lived in, and becoming the biggest hit single of late 2002? That was new. (Yes, LL Cool J had a slow-jam 90s #1, but that was a backdoor fluke with an utterly forgotten bad cover version. The only non-Cowell record that outsold “Dilemma” all year was “Hero,” and it might well have shared more of an audience with that than it did “Hot In Herre.”)

The biggest hit love song of the half-year – maybe the biggest hit song of the half-year period – being THIS? Must have felt like the final confirmation that hip-hop was the basic grammar of pop in the 21st century, as of course it still is. My first thought on relistening to “Dilemma” (and I’ve done it a lot, enough that Tom’s 7 is the least I can give it and it might be more) was how much it fits in to today’s pop soundscape.

Or does it? I can’t, offhand, think of any pop-rap slow jams like this in recent years. A look through the 2010s rapper/singer bunnies – and the fact there’s so many confirms how much hip-hop and rap had now become an utterly entrenched foundation of pop culture – reveals mostly party anthems, and very often the pop singer/rapper guest spot combo a lá “Never Be The Same Again.” The “Dilemma” combination of rapped verses and sung choruses was also a common formula, but again mostly for party tracks – one Miami man produced a ton of them, some of which are in our future, all of which I want to dislike 305% more than I do.

So “Dilemma” strikes me now as something that sounds like the 21st century’s arrival, and is, but actually differs in slightly strange ways from what most of the early 21st century would actually look like. Which makes it actually incredibly fitting that it’s perhaps best remembered for the video’s infamously botched product placement for the Nokia Communicator, because that too was the 21st century’s arrival differing in slightly strange ways from what most of the early 21st century would look like; we’d expected the mobile phone as office device via keyboard phones, for a while that did indeed look to be locked in, but the 2010s looked completely different. And more – they looked completely different in much the same ways we might have imagined in the 90s, with the iPhone in 2007 and the revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, a technology straight out of a Star Trek holodeck. Similarly, the domination of pop-rap in the 2010s was actually, more often, closer in style to Will Smith’s party-rap or 90s Eurodance than this.

#18 The previous Austin Powers song (Beautiful Stranger by Madonna – also a stand alone single) had been a pretty big hit and the fan base for Beyonce was there. The fact it was otherwise a quiet week for new releases suggested people expected it to do better than it did. Anyway, for whatever reason it may have been one step back commercially from Destiny’s Child but her next single (bunnied) was at least two steps forward.

James @ #20: with Snoop I always got the sense of a Jamaican influence on his rapping and music. With Bone Thugz I’m less sure (I’m less familiar with their music anyway TBF)

One of a few R&B-ish hits from around this time where I was sure I’d heard the hook before but couldn’t place where from… eventually looked it up & realised it’s a reworking of Patti Labelle’s “Love, Need & Want You” with glossier modern production.

I was going to mention the same duo as Mark M, they define the micro-genre for me even though their songs weren’t actually much cop.

At the time, I liked Hot In Herre a great deal, but couldn’t stand this syrupy plinky plonk. I think I went for a wee during it at the Wembley gig.

I got the tickets through work (the label that did Nelly’s UK distribution). My colleagues were weirdly unenthused about going, esp after a very frazzled PR woman rushed into our office that afternoon to ask where she might find an ounce of weed in time for soundcheck.

Just find it a little bit schmaltzy. 3/10