BY: NICO BACIC

You hear it everywhere, at bars, on the radio, and on TikTok. Shaboozey is asking you once again to “pour him up another double shot of whiskey”, and you begin to wonder if it's time for him to put the bottle down. It's been six weeks since Shaboozey's “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” has charted number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and it has proved its staying power. What's even more impressive, is that it's the first song to rule #1 in streams, radio airplay and sales simultaneously since 2021, putting it in the same company as cultural hits like “Uptown Funk”, and “Despacito”. This crossover success is extremely impressive, but whenever I hear it I can't help but be reminded of a song that came almost five years prior, Lil Nas X's “Old Town Road”, and the long journey hip-hop has taken to reach crossover success in the country genre. 

I can remember it like it was yesterday. High school, summer of my junior year, everywhere I listened I heard it. The endless remixes, with artists across all genres, only compounding to the crossover hit that was “Old Town Road”. However, I remember a main talking point of the song was not about its success, but rather about its controversy. It placed first on the Billboard Hot 100 and Hip-Hop Hot 100, and it debuted at 19 on the Billboard Country Charts, before the company removed it claiming that it was “not [embracing] enough elements of today's country music”. This sparked some intense discourse about what makes a country song a country song, and why a non-white, LGBTQ, artist was removed from the charts. In reality, the song equally embraced elements of both country and trap, hence Lil Nas X's insistence of the song being placed on both charts, despite Billboard's claims. 

Today, five years after this controversy, it seems that the mood in the country genre has shifted, with many former hip-hop and R&B artists moving into the genre this year with great success. Beyoncé, Post Malone, and Shaboozey are three artists with major crossover success in each genre. However, all of these artists are placed into either the hip-hop or country charts, but never both. Despite all of these artists existing within each genre, and Shaboozey directly claiming his music as a merge between the two genres, Billboard sees it otherwise, as they placed all of these artists in the country charts, but not hip-hop. 

Is this a success for black artists, Billboard, and the music industry as a whole? Is the process of drawing these lines in the sand productive to artists' crossover success? I think to answer these questions we need to return to the story of Lil Nas X, who by no means invented the genre, lifted it up out of obscurity. Country and hip-hop are not mutually exclusive, and creating bins to place music in is counterproductive to the very idea of pushing the envelope in music creatively. These two genres share a lot of similarities, but merging the two takes finesse, and I think that it was Lil Nas X who cracked the code of how to do it effectively. Throughout music history, black artists creating crossover success has always sparked controversy, but I think Lil Nas X's 2019 hit will be noted as the straw that broke the camel's back for bringing hip-hop elements into the country music mainstream in the 2020's.