If Billboard is to believed, the sound of the summer is Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” now in its seventh week atop the pop charts. Before it climbed to No. 1 there, the song had already summited on the country charts, thus making Shaboozey the first Black musician ever to have a Number 1 hit in both categories simultaneously.
Through metrics like these the spoils of conspiracy capitalism mold themselves into a silhouette of the zeitgeist. During the ongoing reign of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” at No. 1, Joe Biden’s swansong segued into the lightning ascent of Kamala Harris from muted back-up singer to full-throated star of the show.
New York Times polls are about as reliable as Billboard, but Harris’s entry into the race and immediate surge in the standings have found a fitting backing track in Shaboozey’s ubiquitous song. Supplanted at no. 1, tone-deaf Trump got very mad very fast. Lamenting the Gong Show treatment given his erstwhile opponent, Biden, Trump started heckling the newcomer to the stage, claiming that she had recently “happened to turn Black.”
Before this supposedly unexpected turn of events, many were the reports that Trump was rapidly expanding his share of the Black vote. His stunt of staging a campaign event in the Deep Blue Bronx was the most blatant attempt to self-proclaim his diverse appeal. In May, Trump appeared in Crotona Park with rappers Sleepy Hallow and Sheff G, both then under indictment for alleged gang crimes.
At last, The Donald had found a musical firepower that suited his violent urges and celebrity ambitions, even though he couldn’t tell you the difference between Sleepy Hallow and Ichabod Crane.
Trump began boasting that he might even win the electoral votes of the State of New York. This was nonsensical bluster that showed just how unhinged he had long been. In the birthplace of hip-hop, Trump was sure that he would ride a colorful landslide back into the White House.
But his campaign managers and everyone else knew that the election would be decided not in the Empire State, but in the Heartland.
At their recent convention, Democrats courted Middle America musically, enlisting singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, who hymned God, family, and honest work, and the Chicks (formerly of Dixie) harmonizing close and high on the National Anthem. Later, the likes of Patti LaBelle and Stevie Wonder delivered soulful, funky classics for the party faithful. Beyoncé graced the closing in absentia with “Freedom.”
But it was not by accident that the opening musical act at the DNC was a Black country singer, Mickey Guyton. Her performance was a clear indication that Democrats were sending their musical appeal for the Heartland vote across the color divide. Guyton’s “All American” was perfectly attuned to the Democratic strategy that trumpets unity over division, with plenty of church and football (branches of the same religion) holding the whole thing — song and nation — together:
With the lines on the interstate
The dust on a back road
We’re a Friday night football game
The lighters at a rock showWith the night shift, smoke break, high school heartache
Driving with the windows down
With the dance floors, church pews, suit and ties, tattoos
One big small townAin’t we all, ain’t we all American?
I don’t know what Shaboozey’s political inclinations are, but one could ask why the DNC fixers didn’t enlist him to try to boost their nominee further up the charts.
Black musicians, among them Kane Brown, Brittney Spencer, Jimmie Allen, and the just-mentioned Guyon have had great success in the Country ranks over the last two decades. Still more threatening to some, Beyoncé recently invaded the once-foreboding terrain. Her Country Carter album was released in early March of this year and immediately become the no. 1 album on Billboard. Shaboozey appeared twice on that record; his own album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going (curious that the title didn’t go for “Ain’t”) came out in May and went on to win the summer. Conspiracy theorists are surely fulminating against the Great Replacement in Country Music.
A “Bar Song (Tipsy)” and its creator/performer tell an ultra-American story. Children of Nigerian immigrants, Shaboozey grew up in northern Virginia and early on demonstrated an irrepressible love of music. He cites Dylan, Cash among many other — and more contemporary — influences, not least rap. The standard line on Shaboozey, one taken by the likes of Jon Pareles, chief pop critic at the New York Times, is that he brings “hip-hop grit to country.”
His moniker, Shaboozey, is a riffing transliteration of his family name, Chibueze. The boozy slides easily into his hit’s lyrics, a clever bit of branding. Not surprisingly, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is all about alcohol.
Shaboozey’s first single, “Jeff Gordon” (as in the NASCAR driver) came out a decade ago. It mashes up misogyny (“My bitch Ecuadoran / Her ass is enormous), stock cars (“Vroom!”), gun violence (“Put a 44 to ya mouth nigga”) and other Americana, all of it heard against a shattered piano ostinato and ratchet-head percussion ghosted intermittently by the complaint of high-performance engines. The song gives new meaning to the term “race track.”
Having arrived in the winner’s circle ten years later, Shaboozey still has lucrative fun conflating the color line with the finish line, the crossing of which is signaled by the checkered black-and-white flag.
The album trailer for Where I’ve Been, Is Not Where I’m Going traffics in the archetypes of racism. At a desert town, a crusty cowboy-hatted geezer rips down a poster for Shaboozey’s “Great American Road Tour.” The geezer (obviously a Trumpite) crumples up the playbill, his disgust apparently fueled by the identity of the singer, a Black man blown off course into the bleached landscape and its even more monochrome demographic. Seeking refuge on the porch of the nearby abandoned general store, the man discovers another playbill again in his newspaper.
Bent on escape from this menace, he hops into his Ford pick-up and turns on the radio (the guy is a music fan). But Shaboozey infects the airwaves too. Even the portable radio that keeps the geezer company at his fishing hole plays the blasted song. The old guy tosses the offending machine into the bass pond.
After his Ford pick-up breaks down on the way home, a bus pulls up and out steps Shaboozey, guitar case in hand. The geezer is irked and incredulous. Like gunslingers, the two enemies face each other on the sand-swept road. The old white man spits on the ground and crosses his arms in a posture of hate. A smile plays on Shaboozey’s face and he taunts his opposite with a tickling wave. Behind his sunglasses, the stranger’s eyes are presumed to twinkle with a mix of contempt and compassion. He doesn’t need those shades because it’s sundown; twilight too is for racist reactionaries. Shaboozey will win the duel, since his music will win over this sagebrush Bull Connor. Billboard soon delivered that very verdict.
The song that conquered the charts is an easy-going, unthreatening affair. As the title reveals, people don’t even get drunk in it, merely tipsy. It’s a word for pre-dinner cocktails in the burbs, not closing-time maneuvers and mayhem at rugged roadhouses.
A wistful tone is strummed to life with the opening minor chord. That melancholic air wafts through the tune, gently haunting the other more comforting major harmonies. In musical deception, indeed.
These chords traipse endlessly past like a disoriented horse and rider circling, lost in the desert. A High Plains whistle preludes and interludes on the melody from a climate-controlled studio made to echo over the great open, if virtual, spaces courtesy of electronic reverb. No buzzards circle overhead to spoil the nostalgic taste of whiskey — “Jack Daniels,” we are told.
The song’s title purports to be generic, but the song and video are saturated in name brands like this. In the video, Shaboozey dons a pristine Carhartt jacket and a Chevy t-shirt. In the soft-focus background good old boys and one good old girl drink long-neck Budweisers around and on top of the hood of an old Ford pick-up parked in front of a backlot “Saloon.”
This live-action catalog of Made-in-the-USA goodies (the working-class chic Carhartt brand is family-owned American, but much of the company’s production is outsourced to Mexico and China) cuts against Shaboozey’s opening line: “My baby wants a Birkin” — a $40,000 Hermès purse. His baby can certainly afford one thanks to him. “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is not a Miles City, Montana saddle-bag ballad.
We’ve arrived instead in Capitalism Country saturated with product placement. Beyonce’s “Levii’s Jeans” from Country Carter boosted Levi-Strauss’s stock price by 20% directly after the hyper-sexualized song came out. The reasons are not just economic, but ethical too. We connect across color lines through consumerism.
If the Democrats are wise, they’ll allow the lessons offered by Billboard to carry through to the ballot box in November. We are what we buy.
Strangely, it might at first seem, Shaboozey sings in the video and he seems to be so utterly bored by himself and those behind him that he doesn’t even see or hear them or himself. Clear and in focus in the foreground, his voice is as expressionless as his face. He’s autotuned to the hilt, yet utterly tuned out even from his own performance.
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” sounds and looks like it was generated by AI. Music by the numbers has, like our politics, led us to the middle of road, probably to the end of it too. At this lonely place, a white cowboy and Black singer-songwriter will, after their initial stare-down, whip out their phones, press “play,” click the embedded links and “order.” Then wait for the drones to deliver as the sun goes down.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at dgyearsley@gmail.com.)
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