Nelly’s ‘Country Grammar’ Gets New Vinyl Pressing For 25th Anniversary
The rapper’s 2000 debut album made him an instant superstar.
Country Grammar is coming back to vinyl. Nelly’s blockbuster 2000 debut album sold out the last time it came into print. Now the album is getting a fresh 2xLP pressing just in time for its 25th anniversary.
This latest round of Nelly vinyl will once again feature the deluxe edition of Country Grammar on two translucent blue vinyl discs. The expanded tracklist includes the bonus tracks “Icey,” “Come Over,” “Country Grammar (Instrumental),” and “Ride Wit Me (Instrumental),” as well as gatefold packaging.
Upon its arrival in 2000, Country Grammar instantly launched Nelly to superstardom. The St. Louis emcee’s pioneering and influential melodic rapping made him and his St. Lunatics crew fixtures at MTV and BET and sent singles climbing up the rap and pop charts alike. Country Grammar spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and is now one of an exclusive class of rap albums to be certified Diamond by the RIAA with more than 10 million units sold.
Country Grammar’s campaign of domination began with the title track, which was released as the lead single as winter was beginning to thaw into spring. He dizzily weaves through the track, veering shamelessly from one itchy and relentless cadence into the next. He shouts out localities that weren’t on the mainstream-rap map — St. Louis to Memphis, Texas back up to Indiana. He namechecks Beenie Man and Onyx and Hannibal Lecter and Billy The Kid. He jumps right out of the speakers.
After the album dropped in June, it spun off another Top 20 hit in “E.I.” By 2001, Country Grammar yielded a Song of the Summer candidate for the second year running, as “Ride Wit Me” became a No. 3 pop smash. “Batter Up,” a collaboration with the St. Lunatics, rounded out the album’s singles.
In a retrospective review in 2017, Pitchfork’s Paul A. Thompson praised Country Grammar as “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.” Three years later, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan declared of the title track, “Practically everything the 25-year-old Cornell Hayes Jr. says on ‘Country Grammar’ works as a hook.”
