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After all these years, Nelly is still trying to explain that damn “Tip Drill” video. In an interview with ESPN 2’s “Highly Questionable” (the same interview where he joked about Floyd Mayweather’s education when speaking on their alleged beef), he was asked about what that day of filming “Tip Drill” was like and the controversy behind it. He still didn’t see the problem with the video, which made its debut in 2003 on the infamous “BET Uncut” show. In fact, Nelly thought it was actually artistic.

Nelly: “That was a very, very very interesting day. I’ll say that. Very, very fun day. It was a video. I never regret it as far as being an artist. Being an artist, your responsibility is to create. It’s to be artistic. I didn’t do anything illegal. I put it on a show that was for adults at an adult time. Maybe some people mistook it the wrong way.

Bomani Jones: “What was artistic about sliding that credit card down a woman’s body?”

Nelly: “That had never been done before. I thought that was very, very, very artistic [laughs]. The first time you saw a naked statue did you think, ‘Oh man I’m looking at something or…you know?'”

Nope, I don’t know, sir.

While he might have thought it was harmless and artistic, we all know that the video caused quite a stir, as many thought the women in the video were objectified and treated as just parts (the focus was mostly on their backsides, which went along with the song’s lyrics). Women at Spelman University even protested Nelly’s visit to the school to throw a bone marrow drive to help find his sister, who was suffering from leukemia and eventually passed from it, a donor. Nelly would say much later in a Huffington Post Live chat with Marc Lamont Hill that having to cancel the drive over the uproar over the video enraged him:

“The Spelman thing, the only thing I feel I woulda did different is kick somebody’s A$$. That’s just how it felt to me, Pimp. I don’t have my sister. You robbed me of an opportunity, unfairly my brother. That was unfairly because we could have still had your conversation after I got my opportunity. It could have been somebody that was coming to that bone marrow drive that day that was possibly a match for my sister that didn’t come because of that.”

After all these years, what were your thoughts on the video and the reaction to it back then?

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