Nelly has fired back at the accusations lobbed by St. Lunatic member Ali that he abandoned his crew and “hustled” them to get to the top. As previously reported, Ali went to Instagram to publicly air his gripes and claimed he actually started the group. Well, Nelly has chosen not to respond with his Twitter fingers but addressed the issues head-on this week when he visited local St. Louis podcast “Wat Up Doe Radio.”
Nelly didn’t hold any punches when he explained his version of the origins of the St. Lunatics, and addressed some of the alleged bad business decisions Ali made as the leader of the group prior to them achieving success.
“There’s three people in this group that’s been a Lunatic since day one: Nelly, Kyjuan, and City [Spud]. We all went to school together. Alright? Cool. When we first started the Lunatics, Ali was not in this group. Stop me when I’m lying … When they said the Lunatics was doing all the legwork and talent shows and all of that, that was us. He didn’t do that,” the St. Louis MC explained.
“When we was going around town making a name for ourselves, doing the car wash[es], performing at the talent shows at [colleges], that was us, that wasn’t Ali. Ali did not perform with us. Either he thought he was too good or he didn’t perform with us. Either way, he did not perform with us. Just factuals. Actual factuals.”
Nelly also details that Ali pressured the group to sign a contract in the early stages of their career where they signed over 100 percent of their publishing to a local production company. Nelly ended up paying he and his brother City Spud’s way out of the deal but the rest of the group remains bound by the jacked-up contract until this day.
The “Ride Wit Me” rapper then added, “Come to find out when we signed the D2 contracts, we signed [away] over 100 percent of our publishing. We basically got a worse deal than what TLC signed. We signed over everything because our leader told us to sign these contracts. Now, this is a person who had a production deal before. Who was signed to somebody before and who read the book All You Need To Know About The Music Business. There’s no way you read that book and sign over 100 percent of your publishing. It’s impossible.”
In the interview, Nelly also reveals that Ali has tensions with Ludacris which may have caused some issues when the two hit makers battled it out in Verzuz and put some kinks in a possible Live Nation tour between the platinum-selling artists.
Check out the informative conversation on the next page uploaded by Creative Trends as the “Hot In Here” rapper breaks down his side of the story.
