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Nelly is a rapper, actor and entrepreneur, but when you get him out of the spotlight, Cornell Haynes Jr. is a straight-up sneakerhead. If you follow his music, you probably already know about his affinity for kicks from tracks like "Air Force Ones" and "Stepped on My J'z." In fact, his love of basketball shoes goes much deeper than his one-time love of Band-Aids, and that's saying something.

We recently caught up with Nelly while he was promoting his new album "Brass Knuckles" to talk about sneakers, because we too are sneakerheads, and honestly, what more do you need to know about his music than girls love to grind to it?

In the video, Nelly talks about the first few pairs of sneaks he had while coming up in St. Louis, memorable NBA players' shoes and the disgust he has for Kobe Bryant's early Adidas designs. As a bonus, he gave us commentary on some of his favorite (and not so favorite) Air Jordans in the gallery below. Basically, it's all you ever wanted to know about shoes that really should never be stepped on.


Nelly on Jordans

    JORDAN #1: "It's not too different from a Dunk. It's a little flatter at the toe. The original Jordans were cool, but they were flat as hell, but considering where they came from at the time ... "

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    JORDAN #3: "It's a hell of a transition. That's when they came with the air bubble. That sh*t was unheard of at the time. That bubble threw them over the top right there. They were already number one, but that sh*t was crazy."

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    JORDAN #4: "Incredible. It's all about the toe for me. That's what you see, and it's also about how the jeans sit on it. These were incredible. They came down a bit to 3/4."

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    JORDAN #6: "These are fly as hell. They were all black when they came out. They had to compete with the pump at that time, because Dee Brown had killed them when he pumped up before the dunk that won the dunk contest."

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    JORDAN #9: "This is a hot shoe, but you didn't know how hot this shoe was until later on. At that time, they were getting space agey. Some people loved it, some people hated it. I loved them."

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    JORDAN 15 Retro: "They lost me on these. I wasn't really feeling this. You're supposed to play basketball in these, but I don't know, it doesn't look like you can do anything in these."

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    JORDAN #17: "They lost me on this one, but I had 'em. They were Jordans and you had to have them, but these lost something in the transition."

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    JORDAN Spiz'ike: "This is a classic. They killed with this one. This is like, 'Whoa.' These just came out, but I'm into that. I need to find out if they have those in my size."

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