As far as early 00s bangers go, Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” is difficult to top. Not only did it get people to take their clothes off at house parties worldwide, but it also smashed new records at a time when streaming was still germinal and the Grammys hadn’t even yet offered up yet an award for such a category as Best Male Rap Solo Performance. Nelly managed to secure almost a million (760,000, to be exact) streams on AOL Music’s “First Listen,” which was launched the same year “Hot in Herre” came out: 2002. As far as concern for global warming went that year, in an annual global climate report, it was assessed that: “Global temperatures in 2002 were 0.56°C (1.01°F) above the long-term (1880-2001) average, which places 2002 as the second warmest year on record.” Oh how saddened one is to use the phrase, “Little did they know…” here, but yes, little did humanity know (despite ceaseless and ominous warnings), it was all going to get so much worse. That is to say, so much fucking hotter. And yes, Nelly seemed to want to make a hit out of that no-brainer prophecy in a song like “Hot in Herre.”
Taking elements of Chuck Brown’s 1979 single, “Bustin’ Loose,” (hence, “I feel like bustin’ loose/And I feel like touchin’ you”), Nelly created a club (and yes, climate change) anthem out of it by also appearing in a music video helmed by Director X, already a beloved protégé of Hype Williams at that time. The scene of Nelly pulling up to the club in his car would end up seeming to inspire Britney Spears the following year in her own video for “Me Against the Music,” in which she, too, opens her video with a pulling up to the club scene. And, on a side full-circle note, “Me Against the Music” would be the one hundredth track for AOL Music, First Listen to offer up as an exclusive streaming preview. Because, back when such internet technology was still new, music releases could still be positioned as an “event.” As much as going to the club to dance in a sweat-drenched fever could be. And that’s precisely what happens for the majority of “Hot in Herre,” as female dancers (after all, it’s a rap video) with visible beads of sweat dripping down their faces and bodies do their best to ignore the unbearable temperature in the name of having a good time and also trying to get laid. Because there’s a reason wanting to bone goes back to a phrase like “being in heat.”
As Nelly moistens his lips, jumps the divider of his VIP area and approaches the woman who’s attracted his attention, played by Pasha Bleasdell (who tragically died of a brain tumor in 2022), bodies continue to converge on one another as Nelly gets his moment to shine on the dance floor with Bleasdell in front of him. While that goes on, many of the (mostly female) dancers in the club proceed to take Nelly’s advice about taking off their clothes—or at least pieces of them. The “sexily glistening” (as opposed to grossly sweaty) bodies that are paraded by Director X are of a uniquely 00s aesthetic that has only recently been revived with similar effect in Euphoria. Soon enough, Nelly is starting to take some of his own more frivolous articles of clothing off as other clubgoers fan each other with their hands and generally start to appear as though they’re attending a taping of MTV’s Spring Break as opposed to a Nelly video filmed in his adopted hometown of St. Louis. And, talking of St. Louis, the lesser-known version of the video (reserved for showing to the European set) took place in front of and inside of the famed St. Louis Arch (or at least a CGI’d version of it). Starting with Cedric the Entertainer as the bouncer (in the original, he’s the DJ) for the club that the Arch has become, various revelers enter the elevator leading up through the Arch as one man blows his hand back and forth to indicate the hotness inside the elevator, though it actually looks like he’s just trying to wave away the scent of someone else’s fart.
Soon, Nelly pulls up to the arch and gets in the elevator with just one other woman as we’re asked to ignore the architectural impossibility of a nightclub being able to “fit” inside the so-called top of the Arch. And while, yes, one can technically ride to the “top,” the elevators to do so are nothing like the posh one presented in Nelly’s rendering of it. But, clearly, 2002 was a much easier time for enlisting viewers’ suspension of disbelief.
As a randomly-placed thermometer shows the temperature going up while more people enter the imaginary “Arch Club” (complete with a staircase in the background), Nelly pretty much recreates the same scenes from the U.S. version of the video, except with a far more “European” slant…in that when people start to peel one another’s clothes off, director Bille Woodruff is sure to capture the sweat whipping off people’s bodies as this happens. We’re talking it looks practically like the Flashdance bucket scene. Woodruff, unfortunately, would also direct a number of R. Kelly videos over the years, whose crimes against women would make Nelly’s various rape allegations (one of which broke just before the #MeToo movement of 2017 did) look positively tame…not to trivialize what happened to the women who were assaulted by Nelly. But, back in 2002, both men were still safe and protected in their fame bubble, chock-full of enablers and sycophants as it was. The pressure, for Nelly, didn’t get truly “hot in herre” until #MeToo finally did. The roof was on fire, in other words, much as it is in the club in the U.S. version of the video, at which point the ceiling sprinklers finally burst. The way a storm has to erupt whenever it gets too sweltering. As for the second version of the video, the thermometer ends up breaking, spewing red mercury as it does.
At the end of the decade that Nelly reigned over (though really just the first half of it), the 00s were reported as being the hottest on record. “Hot in Herre” (“herre” being this cesspool of a globe) indeed. But that was soon to be topped by the report on the burning temperatures of the 2010s. Undeniably, the 2020s will keep upping the previously-held records, with Nelly’s formerly “sexy” single becoming, increasingly, an eerie and macabre prophecy. Complete with him also telling people to “let it just fall out” and “let it hang all out.” Elsewhere among his rapey lyricism, he includes, “I got a friend with a pole in the basement/(What?)/I’m just kiddin’ like Jason/Unless you gon’ do it…”
Cringeworthy moments of the song aside (including “What good is all the fame if you ain’t fuckin’ the models?”), Nelly does bring up a valid question when he keeps urging people to take their clothes off in the heat. And that is: will clothes really still be required when the heat gets more insufferable? Like, Hades-level insufferable. Or can we all go back to Garden of Eden’ing it despite being a very long way from paradise? Which the weather of 2002 looks more and more like from this perspective.
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