Into The Music
Shaboozey did not ease his way into the mainstream. He arrived via one of the most played songs of the last two years, a number that spent more weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 than almost anything before it, and he did so while being difficult to categorize, difficult to explain, and impossible to dismiss.
Collins Obinna Chibueze, who performs as Shaboozey, grew up in Virginia and spent years building a catalog that drew from hip-hop, country, and the sounds of Southern outlaw music in ways that did not feel forced. His 2024 album Where I Come From is the record that broke through, and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the track that made him unavoidable. But describing it as “country rap” is both accurate and kind of useless, in the same way that describing Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” as country rap captured the genre markers without capturing why it worked.
What Shaboozey does is write songs about familiar territory: late nights, hard drinking, small towns, the specific gravity of a place you can never fully leave. He delivers them with a looseness that country radio has historically resisted and a directness that hip-hop has always rewarded. The combination clicks in a way that feels like less of a hybrid and more of a logical extension of where both genres were already heading.
His position in music in 2025 and into 2026 is an interesting one. He is not purely a country artist and he is not pursuing the mainstream hip-hop lane with any urgency. He is somewhere between those worlds, which is exactly where the most interesting music tends to live. His current extended number one run with “Amen,” his Jelly Roll collaboration, underscores that the moment he found was not an accident. It is a place he built toward deliberately.
The commercial success has not visibly changed his approach. He still performs with a looseness that suggests he is less interested in consolidating a crossover than in making records that sound like him. The Jelly Roll collaboration works because both artists share a certain refusal to be contained by the genre they are most associated with. The result is a number one that sounds like neither of them selling out.
Shaboozey is one of the more genuinely unpredictable artists to break through in country or hip-hop in years. Where he goes from here is genuinely hard to predict, which is the most interesting thing you can say about anyone right now.