SHABOOZEY'S EVOLUTION
Collins Obinna Chibueze is no stranger to the music game. But it took the Woodbridge, Virginia, native known to the world as Shaboozey a decade to ignite, as “Tipsy (A Bar Song)” became the song of the summer—and arguably the song of the year. The breakout artist, who’s signed to EMPIRE and co-managed by American Dogwood and Range, has four Grammy nominations of his own—for Song of the Year, Best Country Song, Best Country Solo Performance and Best New Artist—and two shared nods, for Best Melodic Rap Performance (alongside Beyoncé and Black country Linda Martell for “SPAGHETII”) and Best Remixed Recording for “A Bar Song (Tipsy) [Remix]” (with David Guetta).
Combining his shrewd sense of cultural intersectionality and an eye for unrecognized flashpoints, the spaghetti Western-steeped, trap-grounded songwriter-producer’s shift to a more organic country-Americana hybrid shattered country music’s resistance to change. Not only was “Tipsy” the first song to top the Country, Top 40, Rhythm and AC charts, but Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going could be heard blowing out of car windows on Music Row as well as lower Broadway’s honky-tonk strip, demonstrating country fans’ and industryites’ affinity for and curiosity about the whole of Shaboozey’s work.
Calling from Birmingham, Alabama, the afternoon after his galvanizing performance on the CMA Awards, where he got the star-packed audience on their feet howling along, the genre-buster was tired but living the dream. On tour with fellow hip-hop head-turned-country icon Jelly Roll, he was grateful, thoughtful and ready for the next adventure.
Tell me about your name.
People would never say it properly.
Sorry, the meaning of your surname.
Oh, “God is king” in Igbo.
Igbo is melodious and rhythmic. Just beautiful. You attended boarding school in Nigeria too. Does any of that contribute?
It is very different there. I didn’t know why my parents sent me. But maybe so. You see things through very different eyes when you’re in that culture.
Even when your songs were more trap than Americana, the outlaw, cowboy, high-plains badass was part of it.
Hip-hop has always recognized that outlaw-cowboy thing. The bad guy, the guns, the justice. And the stories, there were always stories.
People often miss that. Your first two albums were Lady Wrangler and Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die.
Right. It’s always been there. There’s a lot of similarities, but people are just starting to see it.
You also leaned into Jeff Gordon, Robert Plant and Joan Jett for song titles early on. Not songs about them, but…
Vibe, yes, and feel. Those were all people who weren’t really in my world, but it seemed like what they represented, they would fit, they could be part of it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of introducing people, showing them what it is. I always thought NASCAR or Led Zeppelin worked somehow.
You’ve also said you wanted to create a “Virginia” sound.
Yes, I wanted something that was all the things that are Virginia, where I come from. Country music was born there. There is hip-hop. bluegrass and folk music too. But I wanted it to be its own sound, not so much two separate things in the same song.
Johnny Cash is obviously an influence in terms of, well, everything. Who else is in this mix?
Fela Kuti, Kenny Rogers, The Rolling Stones, Missy Elliott, Bob Dylan…
That’s some cocktail. Who else?
The movie Taxi Driver: how Martin Scorsese did scenes and created feelings. Leadbelly, Pink Floyd, Waylon Jennings, Pharrell Williams, who’s also from Virginia.
And it cooked down to Where I’ve Been.
It was over time, listening and trying things. I have a lot of influences. My family listens to a lot of different kinds of music. It has all been coming together over all the different records and songs. It’s evolution, but also trying things that could work and listening for what does.
A lot has been made of your being a guest on Beyoncé’s album, “SWEET ↔ HONEY ↔ BUCKIN’,” and especially “SPAGHETTII” with Linda Martell, which is nominated for Best Melodic Rap Performance. Do you think there’s a point of inevitability for all these seemingly diverse—even opposing—genres to merge?
Music should be music first. More than labels or formats, it is melody, rhythms and words. Those things want to come together, not keep people apart. So if that’s where you start from, yes, it is all meant to be music.
Your CMA Awards performance of the moody “Highway” into “Tipsy” was cinematic; the Scorsese idea of evoking vibe was very gunslinger and present. When you looked out and saw Ashley McBryde, Karen Fairchild from Little Big Town, Dierks Bentley and Keith Urban, as well as fellow outlier Post Malone, on their feet, singing along, dancing and really in the joy, how did that feel? Because suddenly it wasn’t about anything except making people happy.
It didn’t matter where I came from, what label or anything else. Seeing those artists having fun was the whole point: Music should make people happy, or think, or feel something. It’s been like that everywhere we play. It took us a while to get here, but seeing the response, it’s everything I thought it could be.
