NELLY — “Hot in Here”
This is how softcore porn works, right? Woman complains about the heat, woman takes off her clothes, woman wants to have…THE SEX! Or maybe Nelly just do some nasty dancing out on the dance floor. Or maybe both. Probably both. You’ll also want to stick in the totally dubious sexual fetish of body inflation (“Girl, I think my butt gettin’ big!”) in there as well. And once again the Neptunes completely stomp all over Nelly’s juvenility, reformulating their basic beat yet again so it resembles the kind of slick, jazzy funk churned out by Brick or the Commodores at their hottest.
(I just have been informed that the title of the song is in fact “Hot in Herre,” which, uh…why? Is the record label insisting on Chaucerian pronunciation, making the word “here” two syllables, like “here-uh” or “her-uh,” like the way Mark E. Smith would say it. Huh. And to think I rejected parallelling the Neptunes’ continual variations-on-a-beat with the Fall’s yearly fuckaround with their basic avant-skiffle groove.)