The Rapper Who Likes Bowling

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After he left the grill, his life followed the ur-rap narrative--sell tapes from the trunk of a car, sign a record deal, buy a De Beers mine--but Nelly remained committed to the ideal of serving billions and billions. "I was never interested in just playing to one market or genre," he says. "I want everybody to get my music." So far, everyone has. His first two albums sold 15 million copies, and in many ways he has become the hip-hop Shania Twain (another ex-- McDonald's employee who grew up poor and writes songs designed to ring registers in every genre). But whereas Twain takes pop songs and countrifies them or vice versa, Nelly is an integrationist. His exuberant rolling delivery--he has never met a hard consonant--naturally places him between the commercial lodes of hard-core rap and sugary pop, while his lyrics invite everybody into the hot tub in the middle. His current single, My Place, sounds like a collaboration between Hall and Oates and Tupac.

Nelly has genuinely broad tastes. Between frames at the bowling alley, he sings along full throated with everyone from Hoobastank to Michelle Branch, never missing a lyric. And, as befits the mayor of all good times, he also enjoys all kinds of people. Although other hip-hip artists might view collaborations with OTown or Justin Timberlake as potentially fatal assaults on their credibility, Nelly embraces them as marketing and friendship opportunities.

Of course, there are those who view that eagerness to cross over, particularly when it involves collaborations with white pop stars, as a negative. Nelly has been hit with charges of Hammerism, most notably from aging rap legend KRS-One, who issued a commercial fatwa against Nelly and his label, Universal Records, and then backed it up as "the will of God." What KRS was presumably trying to do was inspire a battle in which he and Nelly would go back and forth on record, gaining publicity while insulting each other, before ultimately calling on someone else seeking publicity to broker a peace. Nelly, though, doesn't battle. "In Midwest hip-hop, we just don't do it," he says. "It's not our forte like the East Coast. We aren't trying to mess with anybody. It makes no sense, and it makes no dollars, either. With [KRS], I was just like, 'Yo, B, I don't even know you. What is your beef with me? Call me up, tell me what's wrong. Let's talk it out.' Maybe we could have done a record together."

As aw-shucks as that sounds, Nelly really does put collaboration over competition and only in part because he wants everyone's ears (and everyone's money). "Everybody that I work with, I like to call them friends," he says. "These aren't people that I just send a CD to and they do it. From Justin to Mobb Deep and Fat Joe, I'm tight with these people." There are so many friends on Sweat and Suit that the albums deserve their own Electoral College votes. Christina Aguilera, Tim McGraw, Ron Isley, Stephen Marley, Pharrell and Mase all drop by, and there's even a John Tesh sample on the hysterically over-the-top Heart of a Champion. Like all double releases, Sweat and Suit are a little bloated, but the good stuff, like the giddy Getcha Getcha and soulful Over & Over, sounds like a cohesive compilation of pop music at this very moment.