During the mid-2000s, her music was absolutely everywhere. From "Promiscuous" to "Maneater" to "Say It Right," you couldn't leave the house without hearing one of her songs.
Before she cemented her place in pop culture, she rose to fame with the iconic 2000 classic "I'm Like a Bird" — during a time of "a lot of airbrushing."
In a new interview with People, the 45-year-old looked back on the early days of her career. "I have olive skin," she said. "They'd kind of lighten my skin a lot in photos and kind of take my hips down all the time — they would always kind of cut off in editorials."
Tim Roney / Getty Images
Nelly — who was born in Canada to Portuguese parents — was so upset over this that she wrote about it in her 2003 song "Powerless (Say What You Want)." In the opening lines, she sings: "Paint my face in your magazines / Make it look whiter than it seems / Paint me over with your dreams / Shove away my ethnicity."
Jean-paul Aussenard / WireImage
"By my second album, I guess I was kind of angry about it," she recalled.
Nbc / NBCU Photo Bank / NBCUniversal via Getty Images
Fortunately, it wasn't all bad. She felt "lucky and blessed" to have her family around her throughout it all. "I think I was just raised right. My mom was really strong, and so is her mom, and her mom, and her mom — a very matriarchal family, in general, on both sides, all my grandmothers and great-grandmothers."
Cindy Ord / Getty Images
"So I was given a really solid kind of sense of assertiveness, I'm going to call it. So, that was a good tool for me to navigate the music industry. And I was given really solid advice from a young age, luckily, from very paternal sort of people around me. So I was lucky; I was one of the lucky ones," she concluded.