Collins Obinna Chibueze, better known as Shaboozey, has to fit in interviews as and when he can; his schedule is “crazy”. He is peering into his phone’s camera, his dreadlocks silhouetted against the stark white of the photo studio where he is ensconced. He is answering questions about his eclectic musical passions – he loves the War on Drugs, Lil Yachty and the gruff-voiced Canadian country singer Colter Wall – and how growing up in the small town in Virginia where his Nigerian parents settled influenced his cocktail of hip-hop and country.
On the one hand, Virginia has its hip-hop heroes – Missy Elliott, Pharrell Williams, Timbaland and Clipse among them – but on the other, “Virginia is a southern state, very rural, a lot of emphasis on being outdoors. A lot of stories were made there, from the colonial days to civil war to political stuff, so I just wanted to continue that tradition of telling stories.”
But Shaboozey has a question he wants to put to me: “So, is my single really big in the UK?”
It is. A Bar Song (Tipsy) deftly melds Shaboozey’s bruised croon and rap flow to a backing of lazily strummed acoustic guitar and fiddle, plus an infernally catchy chorus that interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 rap smash Tipsy; its lyrics hymn “a double shot of whisky” as an antidote to a 9-to-5 job that doesn’t cover “gasoline and groceries”. It took up residence in the upper reaches of the UK singles chart three weeks ago and shows no signs of vacating them soon.
A Bar Song (Tipsy) is part of a wave of huge country-infused pop singles this year: Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s I Had Some Help, Dasha’s Austin, Noah Kahan’s chart-topping Stick Season and another No 1 hit, Texas Hold ’Em by Beyoncé, who had her own role to play in Shaboozey’s rise. On the search for collaborators for her country-leaning album Cowboy Carter, she alighted on Shaboozey’s 2022 album Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die. He ended up guesting on two tracks, with almost inevitable results. “Beyoncé’s like the ultimate tastemaker; she has an invested, worldwide audience,” he says. “So for her to put me on that project, a very anticipated album, I think people were like: ‘There’s got to be something here, she doesn’t do this all the time.’”
Co-sign from Beyoncé or not, you can understand Shaboozey’s surprise at his British success. It’s hardly unprecedented for the UK singles chart to feature huge country hits – the 1970s saw a string of No 1 singles and albums, by Tammy Wynette, Kenny Rogers and Glen Campbell – but not at the level we are seeing now.
For the most part, country music in Britain has maintained a position as a niche pursuit: big enough to support the annual Country to Country festival, which fills arenas in London, Glasgow and Belfast, but not big enough to turn the artists who headline it – Kane Brown, Thomas Rhett, Old Dominion – into household names. What’s more, 2024’s hits are not by mainstream country artists. They are primarily by artists described by Alexandra Hannaby, of the Country Music Association’s UK taskforce, as “country-adjacent”: mainstream pop or R&B artists pivoting towards a different sound.
Again, this isn’t without precedent – take Pitbull and Kesha’s 2014 No 1 Timber, for example – although one big difference this time around is that the country-adjacent artists appear to have been embraced by a conventional country audience and Nashville’s music business establishment, the second of which is traditionally very sniffy indeed when it comes to gatekeeping the genre.
Three weeks ago, A Bar Song (Tipsy) went to No 1 on the US country chart, displacing Texas Hold ’Em – the first time in history there had been two consecutive country No 1s by Black artists. It’s all a far cry from even a few years ago, when Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road was removed from the country chart just as it was about to reach the top on the spurious grounds that it did not include “enough elements of today’s country music”. (Billboard denied that race had played any part in the decision.)
“There’s been a change,” says Hannaby. “They’ve been called out. There’s still a problem – I’ve seen a lot of negative comments online about the Beyoncé album and I’m sure that’s affected by racism – but the industry, I think, has changed. As a whole, everyone I know is loving the Dasha track, Beyoncé’s work, Post Malone and Morgan Wallen; radio play is actually happening for them.”
The country-adjacent pivot seems to be one of 2024’s big pop trends. In the wake of Cowboy Carter, Lana Del Rey announced her next album would focus on country music, while Post Malone’s collaboration with Wallen represents a distinct step away from the guitar-pop of his most recent album, Austin, let alone his trap-influenced beginnings.
Last week, Dua Lipa – not a vocalist noted for her passion for rhinestones or pedal-steel guitar – appeared unexpectedly at the Academy of Country Music awards with the hirsute, Stetson-sporting Nashville star Chris Stapleton. The duet they performed, Think I’m in Love With You, has just been released as a single. Stapleton’s producer, Dave Cobb, was also at the boards for the new album by Zayn Malik (formerly of One Direction), which is full of heartfelt country-adjacent guitar strumming.
“Country-adjacent” certainly fits Dasha, whose single Austin is enjoying its sixth week in the UK Top 10. Despite its preponderance of fingerpicked guitar, the line-dancing-inspired choreography in the video (which helped propel the track to TikTok ubiquity) and indeed the cowboy boot on its sleeve, you can tell she is not part of the Nashville establishment by her merch, which features the word “cuntry” in flowing script.
She tells me she started out writing country songs as a teenager in California, shifted to straight-ahead pop on her 2023 debut album, Dirty Blonde, then shifted back again after its release. “I played the first album release show for Dirty Blonde and I remember getting off stage and thinking: that was not me, that was a total act I just put on. And that’s when I fired my management, fired my label, took everything to ground zero. My brother’s ex-girlfriend and I were in the car and I was playing Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan and Thomas Rhett – that’s all I really listen to. She was like: ‘Girl, why are you not making country music again?’ It kind of hit me over the head with a frying pan. I wrote Austin and King of California and Drown Me and I was like: we’re back on.”
Dasha says the appeal of country to artists from other genres is straightforward: “Country keeps it so grounded and so down-home. It’s not talking about unrelatable, high-level things – country’s for normal people that work 9-to-5 and have hard lifestyles. I feel like that brings a level of authenticity and people are wanting to tap into that again. Honestly, by going into country with my music, I feel like my songwriting has gotten to bloom; it’s more authentically me. Before, I had to write pop lyrics; it was a tighter box I had to live in. Now that it’s country, I feel like the world is my oyster with lyrics.”
The question of why country has taken root in a previously agnostic British pop landscape is more complex. Hannaby and Sara Sesardic – who is responsible for Spotify’s editorial output in the UK and Ireland, curating playlists including its flagship Hot Hits UK – think the shift began before the latest rash of hits.
Hannaby noted a sudden rise in country artists’ streaming figures “three months before Beyoncé’s album came out, so it definitely wasn’t triggered by that”. It was driven by a handful of Nashville superstars who seemed to be crossing into the mainstream consciousness – what she calls “a super-spike for Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Luke Bryan. Both Combs and Wallen sold out multiple nights at the O2 last year.” Controversy embroiled Wallen in 2021 when he was filmed shouting the N-word at a friend, but he apologised and it didn’t harm his career. “Now, at Wallen’s gigs, there are loads of screaming 16-year-old girls, which you don’t normally get at country shows in the UK. It’s the same thing as the country-adjacent pop – it’s attracting a different audience.”
Sesardic, meanwhile, says Spotify noticed a change from an “aesthetic perspective” last summer: “At all of the big stadium shows last year, Harry Styles or Beyoncé, people were wearing these cowboy hats – pink or sparkly ones. There was a cowgirl aesthetic in the Barbie movie, which as we know kind of took over popular culture. We were trying to feed into that as well, so we launched a playlist around the world called Neon Cowgirl, which tapped into that aesthetic – big pop hits, old country hits, big crossover hits like Shania Twain.”
On the most basic level, the rise in country-pop could be another example of streaming and social media broadening the palate of mainstream pop, which in recent years has expanded beyond its usual boundaries to embrace music from South America, Africa and Asia. “It’s broken down these barriers that used to exist,” says the Radio 1 DJ Mollie King, who has tracked pop’s shifting horizons as the host of the station’s weekly Future Pop show. “It used to be that everything was stuck in a genre. People are just finding songs they like, whether it’s K-pop or country. If it’s a great song, whatever it is, then people will focus on it.”
Equally, though, you could view country-pop as part of a broader pop trend: 2024 has been marked by the vast success of Benson Boone’s Beautiful Things, Teddy Swims’ Lose Control, Mark Ambor’s Belong Together, Myles Smith’s Stargazing and the unexpected return of Hozier to the top of the charts with Too Sweet, all songs that match a powerful vocal to rootsy instrumentation of one kind or another. It’s as if pop has started reverting to its pre-Covid love of the kind of sound that propelled Lewis Capaldi and Rag’n’Bone Man to platinum success, albeit with a noticeably more American flavour and a more straightforwardly photogenic set of stars.
“Guitar-based stuff is really connecting and working at the moment,” says Sesardic. “We’re in a period where there’s more of a pull to things that feel authentic, that tell stories. We’re living in difficult times and there’s clearly a kind of escapism through that music that people are really associating with.” It might not be as obviously escapist as, say, dance music, but country is still rooted in a culture and style noticeably different from Britain’s.
And there is always the fact that the biggest pop star in the world in 2024 is at heart a country artist. As King points out, even if you are too young to remember the days before Taylor Swift outgrew her Nashville roots, she has spent years re-recording her old albums, while her current blockbuster tour is designed to showcase every area of her musical past.
“We’ve seen Taylor Swift go through so many different eras – I Knew You Were Trouble, the whole Max Martin super-pop thing – but we’ve also seen where she started from, which is also kind of where she went back to with [her 2020 albums] Folklore and Evermore. It can’t be a coincidence that this is what people are wanting at the moment, when she’s this unstoppable phenomenon.”
Whatever the reason for country-pop’s ascent – the all-pervading influence of Swift, a shift to a more “authentic” strain of pop, country’s relatable storytelling coupled with a hint of escapism, a general penchant for cowboy hats – no one I speak to thinks its success is a blip, more an expansion of the tastes of UK pop fans (“I can see the stats and I can see the change,” says Hannaby, firmly). You wouldn’t bet against the US’s latest country-adjacent star, Jelly Roll – a Tennessee rapper who moved into country last year – repeating his US success here. And Dua Lipa isn’t likely to be the last mainstream pop star to find its lure irresistible.
So, expectations are high for Shaboozey’s first post-Beyoncé album, the forthcoming Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going. “Open-mindedness, that’s what it’s like now,” he says, smiling, as he heads back to have his photograph taken again. “We just have access to so much music now – people have these different discovery points. I can’t speak as to why those people are finding a discovery point now, but, you know, the more the merrier.”
Source: theguardian.com
