How Shaboozey Scored the New Longest-Running No. 1 in History

The week ending July 13, 2024, was a long time ago. How long? Get this: Kamala Harris still wasn’t running for president. How’d that turn out? Um … pour yourself a double shot of whiskey.

I suggest whiskey because that week in July was also the first week that a hard-to-categorize performer who calls himself Shaboozey topped Billboard’s Hot 100 with his country–hip-hop hybrid “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” A lot’s happened in America in the past five months. And yet, we are all still flying the flag of Shaboozey: “A Bar Song,” which reboots the 2004 rap hit “Tipsy” by J-Kwon with keening fiddles and twangy guitars, has held the No. 1 spot for 19 weeks, and it may not be done. I couldn’t have predicted that in the year of Donald Trump’s comeback, a country song by a Black former rapper would hold the top of our chart for nearly half the year—but 2024 has taught us some weird lessons about racial identity and cultural affinities. Apparently, one of the few things we can still agree on, across both hip-hop and country music, is that drinking songs are awesome.

If you are a chart-watcher or a longtime reader of this Slate series, the number 19 should sound familiar—that’s how many weeks Lil Nas X spent at No. 1 with his country-trap hybrid, “Old Town Road,” in the spring and summer of 2019. That gave Lil Nas X the all-time Hot 100 record (himself, plus a guest: For 18 of the 19 weeks he commanded the chart in 2019, LNX was accompanied by featured artist Billy Ray Cyrus). That single-song record held until last week—now, Lil Nas X and Shaboozey are tied at 19 weeks each.

I’ll confess, I have mixed feelings about this, given that I wrote a whole book about “Old Town Road,” its amazing chart feats, and the race and genre questions the song raised. At some level, I knew the “Road” record couldn’t hold forever. Just in the past two years, a couple of other smash hits took a run at Lil Nas X’s crown and came awfully close—“As It Was” by Harry Styles (15 weeks at No. 1 in 2022) and “Last Night” by Morgan Wallen (16 weeks in 2023). But if any song was going to steal some of Lil Nas X’s spotlight, I am tickled that it’s by Shaboozey—another rising Black pop star merging country and hip-hop to generate an improbable multigenre hit. That is too perfect.

As of this week, Lil Nas X has Kendrick Lamar to thank for why he still holds part of the Hot 100 record. Shaboozey’s run was stopped by a new No. 1 song. The arrival of GNX, the surprise album–slash–victory lap from the man affectionately known as K-Dot, sends a slew of Kendrick tracks onto the Hot 100, including “Squabble Up,” which enters the flagship songs chart in the top spot, ejecting “A Bar Song.” For those who are just becoming acquainted with the new Lamar opus, “Squabble Up” is the song with the prominent sample of Debbie Deb’s ’80s electro-dance classic “When I Hear Music” and a clever music video filled with iconography from classic R&B and rap albums from decades past.

So, because of Kendrick Lamar, Shaboozey’s reign with “A Bar Song” has been … terminated? Paused? Your guess is as good as mine. Shaboozey’s hit falls all the way to No. 6 this week, but that’s only because tracks from Lamar’s new LP now occupy Nos. 1 through 5. Assuming the K-Dot tracks experience the typical second-week fade, I would not be surprised to see “A Bar Song” come right back to No. 1 and pile on that tiebreaking 20^th week—maybe as soon as next week. Or, assuming the perennial Christmas onslaught of Mariah Carey, Brenda Lee, and Wham overtakes the chart’s penthouse by mid-December but then fades by early January, Shaboozey could start his 2025 tacking on weeks 20, 21, 22, and beyond, deep into the winter doldrums, when his competition will be as light as the snow.

But none of this answers the question Why? Not just why this song is No. 1, but why it became a record-breaker. How did this modest ditty about drinking become a blockbuster?

For starters, sure—it’s the song, stupid. A roadhouse singalong that traffics in nostalgia for a prior hip-hop golden era, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” fuses the kid-friendly counting lyrics from J-Kwon’s original rap hit (“One, here comes the two to the three to the four”) with more adult concerns that reflect our current national malaise (“This 9-to-5 ain’t workin’—why the hell do I work so hard?”). While it is rooted in rap, “A Bar Song” is fundamentally country in presentation, instrumentation, and most especially its copious melodies, making it appealing to all ages and audiences. Plus, there are those clever turns of phrase: “Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey/ They know me and Jack Daniels got a history.” The better you know the song, the more witticisms it reveals to you—it had been out for months before I keyed into “I’ve been ’Boozey since I left/ I ain’t changin’ for a check/ Tell my ma I ain’t forget.” It’s a play on the Nigerian American’s birth name (Collins Obinna Chibueze) delivered in the form of a remember-your-roots hip-hop boast. In other words, Shaboozey is serving “Jenny From the Block” crossed with “Coat of Many Colors”—both twang and flow.

But, real talk: Commercially, the obvious answer to how “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is smashing records is that it smashes together the audiences of two major genres, country and hip-hop, much the same way “Old Town Road” did five years earlier. However, the chart patterns of the two songs reflect how the zeitgeist has shifted in the past half-decade.

In 2019, the success of “Old Town Road” was largely a story of how streaming services like Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music had overtaken the music business. Fueled in part by its popularity on the then-new social-video site TikTok, Lil Nas X’s out-of-nowhere hit set multiple records for the most streams racked up by a song in a week. To this day, “Road” is the only song to clear 100 million weekly streams in nine separate weeks (no other song comes close). And its high-water mark of 143 million streams—set during the week the Billy Ray Cyrus remix dropped in April 2019—not only remains the top streaming week ever, it beats all other contenders by more than 20 percent.

However, those gargantuan streaming numbers masked a relative weakness in Lil Nas X’s chart conquest: radio. On the airwaves, “Old Town Road” was a solid hit, but it was no blockbuster. “Road” peaked at No. 2 on Billboard’s Radio Songs chart, for just one week, and its airplay was mostly limited to Top 40 pop and some R&B/hip-hop stations. In 2019, radio programmers in general were still catching up to the idea that a song that broke via social-video platforms could be a legitimate drivetime airplay hit.

And then there’s the infamous fact that country radio largely ignored “Old Town Road.” (The exception was on morning shows, where country stations played the Lil Nas X banger as a novelty.) “Road” peaked at No. 50 on the Country Airplay chart. The larger point, which I discuss in depth in my book, was another iteration of an old story for country music and race, dating back to at least Ray Charles’ bestselling but country-radio-ignored album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music in 1962 and running right through what happened to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album this year: Country gatekeepers—from radio programmers to rank-and-file listeners—do not take kindly to Black artists crossing over from pop or R&B to country. Only a handful of Black acts nurtured within the system, from Charley Pride to Darius Rucker and Kane Brown, have become country chart-toppers—and even for these artists, crossover can be a struggle.

This is what makes the Shaboozey story such a stark contrast. You might call the mix of achievements that boosted “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” on the charts a more well-balanced cocktail. At various times this year, Shaboozey’s hit has been tops in all three components that make up the Hot 100: the top streaming song (nine weeks), the bestselling song on digital download sites (15 weeks), and, most especially, the most-played song on the radio. It’s that last metric where “A Bar Song” has been an unstoppable force. It’s had America’s largest radio audience for the past 18 weeks straight. And it’s the composition of that radio audience that makes “A Bar Song” truly exceptional. From the jump, the team promoting Shaboozey had an ambitious plan to get his hit on as many radio formats as possible. Simply put, it worked: Billboard reports that “A Bar Song” is the first single to crack the top 10 on the magazine’s Pop Airplay, Country Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, and Rhythmic Airplay charts. (Those last two formats are stations that play current pop for adult audiences and those that play a mix of R&B, rap, and dance, respectively.)

The song’s country-radio success is especially remarkable. When I first wrote about “A Bar Song” in July, I was already amazed it had reached No. 3 on the Country Airplay chart. I hadn’t seen anything yet—one week later, “A Bar Song” rose to No. 1 on Country Airplay, and it stayed there for seven weeks, scoring more rotations on country stations than current hits by Wallen, Luke Combs, Blake Shelton, and Jelly Roll. Billboard rolls all current-format airplay into the Hot 100. So this fusillade of radio rotations at multiple formats gives “A Bar Song” a steady stream of chart data not even “Old Town Road” enjoyed at its peak.

What all this data ultimately reveals is that our musical metaverse really has evolved, in both positive and negative ways, since Lil Nas X’s record 2019 run. Among the pluses: Shaboozey is basically an independent artist. He records for Empire, which is less a label than a distribution company. In other words, Shaboozey is not only “indie,” he’s setting an all-time chart record without a traditional label deal of any kind. Though Lil Nas X exploded as an unsigned artist in early 2019, to get “Old Town Road” the final mile to No. 1, he signed with old-school mega-label Columbia. Another evolution I regard as positive: “A Bar Song” was, by and large, not fueled by TikTok. Plays on the social-video site still don’t factor into the Hot 100, but Billboard does now track the most popular TikTok songs on their own chart. Shaboozey’s hit topped out at No. 3 on that chart last spring, in a fairly brief TikTok run. In short, no one can accuse “A Bar Song” of being a viral fad. With all that airplay across formats, it’s clearly an ambient hit experienced in the physical world by plenty of Americans who wouldn’t know Charli D’Amelio from Charli XCX.

On the negative side, the long command of “A Bar Song” on the nation’s airwaves is evidence of radio’s malaise. Since the pandemic broke many Americans’ commuting and other out-of-home habits, not only have radio ratings been down across the board, but playlists have become especially static—so, tested-and-proven songs like “A Bar Song” remain in rotation for months. That’s the main reason why Harry Styles nearly toppled Lil Nas X’s record back in 2022; “As It Was” sat a stone atop Billboard’s radio chart for a dozen weeks and in the Top Five for most of the year, fueling his 15-week No. 1 run on the Hot 100. As long as radio remains part of the big chart’s mix—and, for philosophical reasons, I think it should—we may see more numbingly long runs at No. 1 for hits that have passed the passive-listenership smell test.

But perhaps the biggest change between 2019 and 2024—and I’ll let you decide how positive this is—is the integration of country music into our regular pop diet. When “Old Town Road” ran roughshod over the pop charts in 2019, it was a one of one: the one country song played on pop stations, and streamed by listeners who might otherwise be exposed to no country music day to day. Hardcore country listeners, as of 2019, were still mostly listening to country radio and even buying CDs. Then, Morgan Wallen happened—the first country act to break as a true streaming star, with Drake-and-Taylor-level Spotify numbers—and the whole genre basically got woven into the fabric of pop. By 2023, more than 40 years after country’s last pop crossover boom, not only were improbable country songs hitting No. 1 on the big pop chart, they were jockeying for position with hip-hop hits and even crowding them out. I am all for diversity on the airwaves, and country’s sidebar status on the hit parade was a form of exclusion that shouldn’t have persisted as long as it did. On the other hand, I would like it if the new country generation would stream something besides Morgan Wallen.

In the epilogue to my book on “Old Town Road,” I speculated that Lil Nas X’s seminal hit would launch “a new wave of Black crossover in country music. … You might say Lil Nas X died at country radio so others might live.” Mind you, I wrote that before the country-pop explosion of 2023, which was almost entirely proffered by white artists (including, in one case, a white country star covering a legendary song by a Black folkie). But in 2024, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song” finally fulfilled my prediction, even if it took a form I couldn’t possibly have foreseen. Which, honestly, makes it a lot like its predecessor and (currently) shared Hot 100 record-holder, “Old Town Road”—irresistible, culturally ubiquitous, and sui generis in its final form. Where “Road” put a button on the 2010s, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the ultimate 2020s hit: Nostalgic for hip-hop heads, legible to the post-Wallen country crowd, and just catchy enough to lure in the moderate pop fan, Shaboozey’s smash is at once digitally savvy, culturally old-school, and as American as a trucker hat. Or even—I hate to say it—a MAGA cap. Let’s … not think too hard right now about how this song’s legion of fans, both active and passive, cast their ballots a month ago. Let’s marvel that a Black man mashing up all flavors of our culture is bringing us together at all.