

Born in the fall of 1974 in Austin as the son of an Air Force man and a mother who worked mostly in fast-food restaurants, Nelly bounced from city to city. But Country Grammar was different: Country Grammar was a statement of purpose that gave order to the corner of the world Nelly and his friends inhabited, a syntactical maze of local culture that doubled as a flier for the greatest party you could ever imagine. Two friends diverged because the criminal justice system, and life itself, can be cruel and arbitrary. Kids across the country learned to wrap their tongues around “It’s all good-Range Rover, all wood” all while the man who rapped that sat in a jail cell because he didn’t actually have a car. Louis for years to come and net them millions upon millions of dollars. Lunatics-a tight-knit group of friends they met in high school and on youth sports teams-would define rap in St. Just after City was locked up, Nelly would become a global superstar in commercial tugs-of-war with N’SYNC and Britney Spears. (Missouri’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws required that he serve 85 percent of his time before the possibility of parole.) Without his confession, the only evidence police had was circumstantial. He eventually plead guilty to first-degree robbery and one count of armed criminal action, and was sentenced to ten years on the former, three years on latter, to be served concurrently. Despite turning himself in, aiding with the investigation, and even helping to search for the gunman, Webb was arrested and charged.

But his royalties would only be topping off commissary accounts. The husband told the Riverfront Times in 2001 that he feared what would happen if Webb laid low: “These trigger-happy cops-a young black man fleeing-were going to kill him.”īarely more than a year after the robbery gone wrong, Webb would have four production credits and a show-stealing guest verse on Country Grammar, one of the best-selling rap albums of all time. Webb’s grandmother and her husband, who had been visited by detectives, urged him to have someone take him down to talk to the police. Word trickled out that the cops were looking for him. He told the cops that his assailant knew about the $1,500 in his pocket, information that could have come from only one source: Lavell Webb. Police found the victim wounded but alive. Webb turned his head and saw his accomplice running back to the car when he slumped into the driver’s seat, he was holding only $30. Webb reluctantly agreed and waited in a parking lot near the mark’s home while the driver, masked and armed, headed out on foot.
#COUNTRY GRAMMAR VIDEO DRIVER#
The only person he found to drive him had proposed a new plan: instead of the arranged handoff, they’d rob the buyer, netting a grand for the driver and $500 for Webb, who could simply stay in the car. Customer gets off work, calls the pager, money and product change hands. On April 15, he was supposed to meet a potential customer for a $1,500 transaction. He’d just quit his job at a North County McDonald’s and was relying on small-to medium-time weed deals to keep the lights on. In December 2009, Billboard named Nelly the third best artist of the decade (2000s).Days earlier, City, born Lavell Webb, was party to a botched robbery. He has been called “one of the biggest stars of the new millennium” by Peter Shapiro, and as of 2014 Nelly was the fourth best-selling rap artist in American music history with 210,000 albums, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

He has two clothing lines, Vokal and Apple Bottoms. In 2005, he starred in the remake of The Longest Yard with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock. Nelly has won several honors during his career, including three Grammys and nine Billboard Music Awards. The lead single “Just a Dream” was certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) it also spawned the singles “Move That Body” (featuring T-Pain and Akon) and “Gone” (featuring Kelly Rowland) featured). It produced the singles “Party People” (starring Fergie), “Stepped on My J’z” (starring Jermaine Dupri and Ciara) and “Body on Me” (starring Akon and Ashanti). Nelly’s fifth studio album, Brass Knuckles, was released in 2008 after several delays. The Set debuted at number one in the same week of its release, selling about 396,000 copies on the same chart in its first week. Sweat debuted on the US Billboard 200, selling 342,000 copies in its first week. With the double release of Sweat and Suit (2004) and compilation Sweatsuit (2006) on the same day, Nelly went on to produce numerous chart-toppers.
