A 23-year-old pop culture mystery has finally been solved. Kelly Rowland has confirmed the bizarre method she used to text Nelly in the music video for their hit 2000s song, Dilemma.
In the promo for the 2002 song, the former Destiny’s Child singer uses a now iconic Nokia 9210 flip phone to type a message to the rapper, her onscreen romantic interest with whom she is having an affair.
Yet Nelly never receives the message — all because she attempts to type and send it from what appears to be a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
In the unforgettable moment, Rowland types to Nelly, sporting his famous face plaster: “Where you at? Holla when you get this” into a spreadsheet, then smacks the phone shut.
Yet, in the almost quarter of a century since, neither Nelly nor Rowland has confirmed the technological mishap their musical characters have to overcome.
“I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to text on Microsoft Excel,” Rowland finally revealed in a new interview with Elle magazine this week. “But it chases me everywhere that I go. And everybody is always asking me.”
Newsweek reached out to Kelly Rowland’s publicist for comment via email.
Indeed, this key detail has puzzled music fans for decades. The pop-culture-defining track, set in the fictional town of Nellyville, is one millennials look back on nostalgically: an R&B love song that perfectly soundtracked the 2000s zeitgeist, went on to win a Grammy at the 2003 awards — and became the first music video to hit 1 billion views on YouTube.
The track has resurfaced into cultural conversation in recent years, after eagle-eyed social media users unearthed the mistake before the Reddit community, TikTok users, and meme creators gleefully dissected the scene.
Charles Brockman (@theonlycb3) uploaded a skit that drew 316,600 likes on TikTok, in which he hilariously highlights that Rowland is angry at Nelly for not replying — despite never actually sending a message. He reenacts writing the line in the Google search bar, a notepad app, a calculator, even his microwave. “How was he supposed to get that message,” he captions the video.
A music fan account (@the_catalogu3) shared the clip on TikTok, with the text: “Kelly texting Nelly on excel and getting mad that he didn’t respond. This lives in my head rent free.”
“That phone was way ahead of its time to install Microsoft Office,” pointed out one viewer.
Others chimed in, in the comments:
“I dunno maybe it was a shared spreadsheet on Google Drive,” one user speculated.
“I never even noticed this before,” another confessed.
Rowland admitted she was unsure herself when handed the prop phone on set. “I was given the device, it had this on it, and here we are in the video. They were like, ‘Oh, we need a shot of it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I guess this is right.’” And here we are, 25 years later,” she said.
“I’m literally asked that [about texting via Excel] every week,” she added.
Rowland’s admission may have finally drawn a line under one of the most debated moments in music video history — though fans will forever wonder whether the lovers overcame the miscommunication to find their happy ever after in Nellyville.
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