Hip-hop star Nelly has revealed that Taylor Swift once paid him for a show appearance with $50,000 cash stashed in a McDonald’s bag.
The gig in question was the Houston leg of Swift’s 2011 Speak Now World Tour, which saw the then-21-year-old bring new hits like Mean, Back to December, and Mine to arenas across the globe.
Despite this, the pop star’s budget was pretty modest at the time, and in a recent appearance on The Breakfast Club podcast, Nelly revealed an unusual tactic for getting around that.
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“She called me one night, just out of the blue, and said, ‘Yo, Nelly, listen, me and my friends, we made a routine to Hot in Herre last night and I wanna ask you a really big favor… I got two shows in Houston tomorrow and the next day. Can you come down to Houston and just perform it?”
He continued: “Now, listen to her. She says she doesn’t really have a budget. But she said, ‘What I will do is send my plane. I’ll get your room and all of that. And we only have like $50,000.’ I said, ‘Can you put that in a McDonald’s bag?’”
According to Nelly, Swift’s G5 private jet landed in St. Louis, picked up Nelly and his family, and delivered them to Houston for the shows. After performing, the hip-hop artist received a handsome — but less than glamorous — piece of remuneration.
“We did it, and she was like, ‘Yo, three minutes, three minutes!’ Her [manager Robert Allen] comes out and tosses me a McDonald’s bag with $50,000 in cash. We never even saw the room. We went from the show right back to the airport.”
It’s a testament to the jaw-dropping power and status Swift commanded even in those early days — the kind of power that causes modern rap icons to up sticks at the drop of a hat.
“The money wasn’t really the issue,” he said. “I would’ve done it for free.'”
