Nelly turns 52: the R&B crossover that still runs it, “Dilemma”
Happy birthday to the St. Louis star. His biggest R&B moment with Kelly Rowland held No. 1 for ten weeks, and a Patti LaBelle sample sits at the heart of it.
Nelly, born Cornell Haynes Jr., turned 52 on November 2. He's from St. Louis by way of Austin, Texas. On an R&B site there's one record to celebrate him with.
"Dilemma" with Kelly Rowland came out on June 25, 2002, as the second single from Nellyville. It's a mid-tempo R&B ballad built on Patti LaBelle's 1983 "Love, Need and Want You", written by Kenny Gamble and Bunny Sigler. It wasn't meant to be a single. Radio started playing it off the album, it jumped to No. 8 on the Hot 100, and Universal had to follow.
- Released
- Jun 25, 2002
- Hot 100
- No. 1 for 10 non-consecutive weeks
- Grammy
- Best Rap/Sung Collaboration, 2003
- Sample
- Patti LaBelle — Love, Need and Want You
It replaced Nelly's own "Hot in Herre" at No. 1 and topped the charts in the UK, Australia, Ireland and Germany too. It won a Grammy and was nominated for Record of the Year. Nelly thought of Kelly straight away. They'd met on the TRL tour in 2001, and she re-recorded her part again and again to get it "just right". The hit moved her solo debut, Simply Deep, up to October 2002. Benny Boom's video, with Patti herself playing Kelly's mum and Kelly texting Nelly from a spreadsheet on a Nokia 9210 Communicator, passed one billion YouTube views in 2021.
They ran it back in 2011 with "Gone", an R&B ballad written as the sequel to the story. Nelly dropped the "Dilemma Part 2" tag so it could stand on its own.
Next up: he and Ashanti have confirmed their first joint headline tour for 2027 (see our News story). Happy birthday, Nelly. Be honest: have you ever texted someone on a spreadsheet?
