Shaboozey Is Doing What Even Beyoncé and Lil Nas X Couldn’t

In popular music, the hype machine works in delightfully mysterious ways. You never know who will benefit from our fickle hit parade. A vice president turned presidential candidate gets a meme boost from a British pop star named Charli XCX. An album by a pair of rappers ignites a beef that takes down Drake and gives Kendrick Lamar a comeback. A white ex-“rapper” with face tattoos reboots his career by duetting with Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen. Or, atop the charts this week, a Black country singer benefits more from Beyoncé’s country album than Bey herself did.

Remember Cowboy Carter? Nearly six months ago, when Mrs. Knowles-Carter “broke the internet” by dropping new music during the Super Bowl—and not just new music, but straight-up country music—the biggest mystery was whether any actual country fans would care. Within two weeks, “Texas Hold ’Em,” the leadoff single from Bey’s Cowboy Carter LP, topped both the Hot 100 pop chart and Hot Country Songs. But as I explained at the time, this No. 1 Country status, while certainly a milestone for a Black woman, was also something of a mirage, a technicality driven by the way Billboard tallies its genre charts; it did not indicate widespread acceptance by the Nashville establishment or country radio listeners. By the spring, on the Country Airplay chart, which isolates airplay on country radio stations, “Texas Hold ’Em” peaked at a respectable but hardly world-beating No. 33. Beyoncé got Nashville’s attention and was cleared through the gates, but she was not destined to be a Grand Ole Opry headliner.

It turns out Cowboy Carter’s greatest contribution to the Black-country narrative was the boost it gave one of its least hyped guests. Buried amid the album’s cameos by Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Post Malone, and a quartet of Black women singing a Beatles cover were two deep cuts featuring vocals by a Virginia-born singer who goes by the name Shaboozey. Taking advantage of the Bey bump, Shaboozey accelerated the release of a new single, a twangy saloon jam that blends guitars and fiddles with lyrics borrowed from a 20-year-old rap hit. The result: Shaboozey has not only reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 and outlasted “Texas Hold ’Em,” but has been embraced at multiple radio formats—including country—to an extent Beyoncé could only dream of. He might even pull off an upset win for 2024’s Song of the Summer. Want to feel hopeful about something this July and August besides Kamala Harris’ electoral chances? Join me in rooting for “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”

I know—you’re probably rooting for Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” and it’s still a jam. But as I explained for this Slate series a few weeks ago, the red-hot Carpenter is splitting her Song of Summer votes between two smash singles, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” both still lodged in the Top 10. Whereas Shaboozey’s hit, now in its second week at No. 1, could actually win the whole thing. To outlast Malone and Wallen’s roadhouse barnburner “I Had Some Help,” the current Songs of the Summer title holder, “A Bar Song” needs a few more weeks at or near the top of the Hot 100. It’s funny that for the second summer in a row, two country songs are duking it out. But unlike 2023’s duel between white format stalwarts Morgan Wallen (with “Last Night”) and Luke Combs (with his cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”), Shaboozey’s 2024 hit sounds more like the future of country—and maybe also pop.

In a decade that has already seen so much promiscuous genre-crossing atop the charts—from hip-hop with alt-rock guitars to rock songs with trap beats—Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” may be the apotheosis. The hybridization of hip-hop and country, America’s two biggest musical cultures, feels like the final frontier. As I chronicle in my book Old Town Road, rap and country have been eyeing each other warily and smashing together for decades, long before Lil Nas X’s country-trap megasmash that gives my book its title. “Old Town Road” was a clear inspiration for Shaboozey: In interviews, he says that it validated his cross-genre tastes and his desire to blend them. But where Lil Nas X hit a ceiling with country listeners five years ago, Shaboozey seems to have unlocked a new strategy for making hip-hop palatable to them: a dose of nostalgia.

The reason “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has that parenthetical subtitle is that it interpolates “Tipsy,” a 2004 No. 2 hit by St. Louis rapper J-Kwon. At a mid-aughts moment when hip-hop was at an absolute zenith of pop crossover—“Tipsy” peaked in the Hot 100’s runner-up slot, sandwiched between hits by Usher, Diddy, and Chingy—J-Kwon’s hit offered rap as crunching, stadium-ready pop, shamelessly piling hooks upon hooks. Its catchiest bit may have been not even its dead-simple chorus (“Errebody in the club gettin’ tipsy!”) but rather the verses, in which J-Kwon, who was only 17 when he recorded the song, counted up like a sloshed Sesame Street Muppet: “One! Here comes the two, to the three, to the four/ Everybody drunk out on the dance floor.” It was crunk music for teenyboppers.

Or maybe younger: Shaboozey was 8 going on 9 when J-Kwon’s underage drinking anthem crashed the charts. On “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” the kid born Collins Obinna Chibueze (his music moniker is a playful misspelling of his last name), now a grown-ass man of 29, invokes J-Kwon’s best hooks—the chorus about errebody in the club, the count-up verses—but Shaboozey refashions them into a hoedown for folks of legal drinking age. “One! Here comes the two, to the three, to the four/ Tell ’em bring another out, we need plenty more,” he sings over strumming guitars, a keening fiddle, claps, and stomps. “Two! Steppin’ on the table, she don’t need a dance floor/ Oh my, good Lord.” Besides the beautiful, oddly poignant melody, which already seems to anticipate a morning-after hangover, the song’s genius lies in its connection of rap decadence with country hedonism, and the party-till-we-die fatalism underlying both. It’s like that classic Saturday Night Live “Black Jeopardy” sketch with Tom Hanks, in which his MAGA hat–wearing contestant commiserates with his Black compatriots, except turned into a honky-tonk sing-along.

Shaboozey may as well have been created in a lab to blend cultures. Raised in the northern Virginia town of Woodbridge by Nigerian-American parents, he consumed both contemporary hip-hop and his dad’s preferred Kenny Rogers albums and started recording his own hard-to-pigeonhole music as a teenager in the early ’10s. He nearly completed a country album but didn’t release it, convinced that the world wasn’t ready for a Black kid invoking twang and trap beats—which, half a decade before “Old Town Road,” was probably correct. So instead, he released a straight-up rap joint that, with a wink, was named after NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon. After he signed to major label Republic Records, ostensibly as a rapper, country tropes began gradually infecting his music—2018’s Lady Wrangler, mostly a trap-style rap LP beyond that cornpone title, led off with the high-lonesome guitar-based “Dream.” And Shaboozey’s 2022 LP Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die, though still rooted in hip-hop, featured tracks titled “Rodeo World Champion” and “The Ballad of Belt Buckle Bill” and closed with “Why Can’t Cowboys Cry?” with mournful slide guitar and some of the same emo energy Shaboozey would later bring to “A Bar Song.”

As intriguing as all this was, Shaboozey scored only industry buzz but no hits until Beyoncé called. On Cowboy Carter, Shaboozey was featured on “Spaghettii” alongside veteran Black country singer Linda Martell, who leads off the track with her much-quoted spoken-word plaint: “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well … some may feel confined.” Confoundingly, the song isn’t country at all but a thumping trap jam, with Shaboozey cropping up near the end to deliver some frontier-justice lyrics: “Outlaws with me, they gon’ shoot/ Keep the code, break the rules.” Then he pops up again, to duet with Bey on “Sweet Honey Buckiin’,” which is closer to the twangy hip-hop sound Shaboozey was exploring on his next album.

Fortuitously, that 2024 LP was all but complete and ready to deploy just weeks after Cowboy Carter dropped. The aptly titled Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going moves Shaboozey away from the rap-first production styles of his prior work—it’s his first to be tagged on streaming services as a straight-up country album and has been allowed onto Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, where it debuted at No. 2, right behind Morgan Wallen. It’s still in the Country Albums Top Five a couple of months later.

The album’s out-of-the-box explosion was due largely to “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which, thanks to Shaboozey’s higher profile post-Beyoncé, debuted within the Top 40 on the Hot 100, then hurtled into the Top 10 in just its third week. It has since remained locked in the Top 10 (mostly the Top Five, including two weeks at No. 1) for a dozen weeks and counting. That’s better than “Texas Hold ’Em,” which managed only about two months in the Top 10. Not since Kanye West’s 2016 album The Life of Pablo gave Ye no major hits but gave sampled rapper Desiigner a left-field No. 1 smash has a superstar album done so much more for a guest than it did for the headliner.

Shaboozey’s breakthrough track has performed well in all three metrics that make up the Hot 100: streaming, sales, and airplay. Like both “Old Town Road” and “Texas Hold ’Em,” “A Bar Song” was fueled at first largely by digital consumption. Since mid-May, it’s consistently been among the five most streamed songs at Spotify, YouTube, and other digital service providers. In fact, by early July, it was the most streamed song, period, briefly toppling Kendrick Lamar’s streaming smash “Not Like Us.” And on buck-a-song download services, “A Bar Song” has been something of a juggernaut. It’s been the top-selling song for nine of the past 14 weeks, only briefly ceding the download top spot to songs like Taylor Swift’s “Fortnight” or Eminem’s “Houdini.” Generally, when a song sells well, that means that it’s catching on with an older fan base who would rather own a track than stream it (like, say, country listeners, who bought piles of Jason Aldean and Oliver Anthony downloads last year). To date, “A Bar Song” has sold nearly 280,000 downloads, more than any single released in 2024.

But it’s the third Hot 100 metric, radio, in which “A Bar Song” has made the most improbable inroads. Among all broadcast formats, it currently ranks second in radio audience (behind only “I Had Some Help”). That’s already impressive, and at first glance, that makes “A Bar Song” a match for “Old Town Road,” which also peaked at No. 2 at radio in 2019. But back then, Lil Nas X scored the overwhelming bulk of his airplay from Top 40 pop stations and R&B/hip-hop stations. Country radio never regarded it as much more than a novelty: “Road” peaked at No. 50 on the Country Airplay chart. And again, this year, Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em,” for all its positive word-of-mouth from country radio programmers, couldn’t crack the Country Airplay Top 30.

So what about “A Bar Song”? It currently ranks an amazing No. 3 at country radio, behind only a pair of songs by (natch) Morgan Wallen. This is gobsmacking: Over the years, there have been Black artists who’ve done as well or better at country radio, from Darius Rucker to Kane Brown, but these are performers nurtured in the Nashville system, not ones who cross over from hip-hop. Back in May, when “A Bar Song” leaped into the pop Top 10, it automatically went to No. 1 on Hot Country Songs, replacing Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em”—the first time Black artists had the top country hit back-to-back. That was historic, sure—but again, as with Beyoncé back in February, it’s less than meets the eye. Billboard’s genre-charts methodology, which uses the Hot 100 pop chart as the basis for Hot Country Songs, meant Shaboozey’s ascension was not really an indication of his country acceptance. Two months later, “A Bar Song” ranking third in airplay exclusively at country stations is a much, much bigger deal. Shaboozey, a country arriviste who built his career in hip-hop first, has officially gone someplace Lil Nas X and Queen Bey never did.

Indeed, “A Bar Song” is setting a lot of crossover firsts this year. Billboard reports that it’s the first song to reach the Top 10 on the following four radio charts: Country Airplay, as noted above; Pop Airplay (the chart that tracks Top 40–style pop stations), Adult Pop Airplay (which tracks stations that play current hits for an older demo), and even Rhythmic Airplay (stations, largely in urban areas, that play a mix of rap and dance music). In the past five years, we’ve seen No. 1 hits that have combined pop, R&B/hip-hop, and rock airplay, like 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood” or Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit.” But pop, hip-hop, and country airplay, all in power rotation? “A Bar Song” is literally exceptional in that regard.

As I have said in this series before, I feel that genre as a musical concept—even with all the racial essentialism and segregation that has been baked into it for at least the past century or more—is still useful, a celebration of cultural difference and a reflection of humans’ natural tendency to categorize our art. That said, what I value even more is when new artists like Shaboozey take a blowtorch to genre walls. “Genre is always a blending of both formal structure and cultural context,” Oregon State University professor Ehren Pflugfelder told the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich, in a story about the rumored end of genre. “This may be the most frustrating thing about genre for those who want it to be stable over time.” In short, genres are valuable because they adapt—yes, even country, the category that polices its borders most zealously. If country fans are falling in love with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” as much as pop and hip-hop fans—and if Billboard’s data is any indication, they are—then that’s the kind of thing that makes me feel as if (not to be too grand about it) there might still be hope for the American experiment. When Shaboozey sings about “everybody in the bar” getting drunk on his summer banger, apparently he really means everybody.