iHipHop Admin One of the biggest selling Hip-Hop artists in the history of the musical genre, Nelly is a very busy man these days. From his Derrty Entertainment imprint to his successful Apple Bottoms clothing line, the Mayor of St. Louis has brought having the Midas touch back into style.
In the next 5 minutes, Nelly shells out the facts on what his fans can look out for over the next year.
Since we don’t have much time to chat, what do you currently have going on?
Nelly: I’ve been busy working on a lot of projects including Ali & Gipp’s album, Kinfolk. I also have an artist that I’m working with named Avery Storm, that you may be familiar with from the Nasty Girl remix with me, Puff & Jagged Edge. He was only white guy with cornrows in the video, so you can’t miss him. We got Murphy Lee dropping soon, and I have another album coming out. So there’s a lot going on with my label.
So when will your new album be released?
Nelly: Not until next year. We haven’t titled it or scheduled a date, but it might drop somewhere between the third and fourth quarter of next year. I definitely want to make sure that it’s right.
Early this year at the Magic show, you’ve introduced your Children’s line as well as the new wave of the Women’s line of clothing. So now that the fashion world is starting to look towards the Spring line of clothing, what do you have in store for your consumers?
Nelly: Let me first start off by giving a lot of congratulations to our designers. I don’t want to act like I’m sitting in the room with boards and shit, drawing up designs and putting things out. It did start off like that, but as a CEO, it’s about hiring the people that you can respect and know that they will do outstanding work. Our Children’s line has taken off faster than our Junior line has. We’re doing a lot of ads as far as showing fathers with their daughters. I’ve done an ad like that myself. Jermaine and his daughter will be doing an ad as well; Ali and his daughter, Gipp and his daughter. We want to show that there are fathers out there that do give a damn about their children.
Talk about your foundations and charities that you’re currently working on.
Nelly: Indeed, 4sho4kids and Jes Us 4 Jackie. We’re getting people signed up on the Bone Marrow/Stem Cell registry to help fight Leukemia. Leukemia has taken so many lives including my sister who has been gone for over a year now. We’re still pushing; we’ve been able to find 8 different matches which allowed for us to save 8 different lives. You can say what you want about Nelly, but Nelly has helped to save 8 different lives and I don’t know too many people who can say that. Even though we didn’t find a match for my sister, we want to let people know that this is bigger than one person and that we will continue to get the word out there to try to help save as many lives as we can.
