The penultimate track on Shaboozey’s 2024 LP Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going is “Drink Don’t Need No Mix.” He prefers his alcohol straight up, thank you very much. But his music is very much a mix, and a potent one at that—of country, hip hop and Americana.
Shaboozey isn’t a very happy drinker—this is one very down-in-the-mouth album, all heartbreak and regret and running from or to bad choices, and it makes perfect sense that its final track is called “Finally Over.” If it’s a kick you’re looking for, and drunken good times, you’d better hang on to smash hit “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”—most of the LP’s other songs are sobering experiences.
Shaboozey (given name Collins Obinna Chibueze) is a rapper, singer-songwriter, filmmaker, and record producer, and his musical influences go a long way to explaining his music. Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Pharrell, the Grateful Dead, Fela Kuti, and the Backstreet Boys are just the tip of the iceberg. His background in film is evident in his songs, which are cinematic indeed. He’s cited the films of Martin Scorsese as an influence, but the director that comes to mind when I listen to the LP is Sergio Leone. And when it comes to musical backdrops, Ennio Morricone is Shaboozey’s man. The territory Shaboozey roams in Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going is a mythologized American South and West, updated of course. The horse he rides is faster than a Dodge Viper SRT-10. And he rides the highway, not some dusty trail to Laramie.
There’s a sameness to these songs, a uniformity of musical tone and tempo and lyrical content that could lead to boredom but don’t, because the ultimate effect is cumulative—it’s like the songs (with the exception of “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”) are nails Shaboozey’s using to nail down the lid of the coffin of his happiness. These horses don’t gallop, and they exist in an emotional realm without place names—other than “East of the Massanutten,” the Tennessee of “Horses & Hellcats” and the sheerly metaphorical Vegas of the song of the same name, I don’t think he ever tells us where he is or where he’s going. Someplace else, usually, it doesn’t matter where. Shaboozey is a man on the run from heartbreak, from the busted past, from himself. Let it burn, move on, repeat.
Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going has a less pronounced hip hop feel than 2022’s Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die. He does very little rapping, per se, on the new one. The hip hop is there—the first time I heard “A Bar Song”—I was in a bar, appropriately enough—I didn’t know what the fuck I was hearing. It sounded, at first, like an urban party song. The second time I heard it—the same night—I thought it was some kind of avant garde country song. It lacks the hip hop signifiers obvious in, say, Lil Nas X’s “Old Country Road,” a rap song with a country overlay. With Shaboozey’s new album it’s the other way around. And Shaboozey eschews the Porsches, Mazeratis, and Gucci cowboy hats that make Lil Nas X’s song so funny. With Shaboozey, hip hop’s fixation on conspicuous consumption is conspicuous by its absence.
“Horses & Hellcats” opens with some blowing dust to let you know we’re not in the hood any more, and while there is some hip hop in Shaboozey’s vocal delivery and the echo in his vocals everything else is movie western. Shaboozey is living in past and present simultaneously—he’s got his foot on the gas and that car of his is a modern-day horse, but the next minute he’s on a palomino and it’s a four-legged SRT. He’s an outlaw “goin’ for broke, plottin’ on gold” and like every good outlaw he wants his momma to know he loves her. Lines jump out at you: “I love my rifle, cross my heart, that will not change/Took a little bit of peyote, why the hell am I still in space?” Shaboozey’s wild frontier comes with hallucinations. Mid-tempo at best, the song’s tone is anything but outlaw defiant—Shaboozey knows there’s no way out of the life he’s living, and while he isn’t about to give it up, he doesn’t sound particularly thrilled by his lifestyle choices. Except that’s not right—he never had any choice.
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” requires three, exactly three, listens to become your favorite new party song. Doesn’t exactly start out on a high note—the 9 to 5 grind has Shaboozey in a funk, and don’t even get him started on the price of groceries. But by the second go around the chorus will have you in its pocket:
Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey
They know me and Jack Daniel’s got a history
There’s a party downtown near 5th Street
Everybody at the bar gettin’ tipsy.
And the lead-up to the chorus is almost as good as the chorus. How this was the LP’s fourth single and not its first is beyond me—ain’t a blind horse or a blind pig in the whole wide world wouldn’t have said, “That one’s your hit, right there.” Sometimes you have to wonder.
On “Last of My Kind” Shaboozey is joined by outlaw country artist Paul Cauthen, and together they go anthemic. The vocals are epic, especially the big sing-along backdrop. And when Cauthen goes over the top and wails he sets the woods on fire. “Anabelle” is a mite perkier than much of what’s on offer, and less overtly country. Ain’t no hip hop extravaganza either. And there’s nothing mythopoeic about this one, no Big Sky Country backdrop or endless highways. Just a song about a woman who ate our boy’s heart and spit it out and not only is he not the forgiving sort, he’s petty, ruthless, and looking for revenge. Those words are all his.
The slow but relentless “East of the Massanutten” has Shaboozey striking out for the West from a Johnny Reb-haunted Virginia and he’s wondering why he’s running—isn’t the Civil War over? One thing’s for certain; there’s nothing for him in the East, and he doesn’t even mention the South and them Northern cities seem to be good for nothing but making bad investments. Go West young man, that’s this one in a nutshell, while in “Highway” he’s just driving, in no particular direction, hasn’t been himself since she stopped riding shotgun which is on him, it’s on him. Very catchy melody, haunted feel, and no wonder—as the song goes on it becomes apparent there’s only one end to the highway he’s on. And in the closing verse he shifts to third person and boy does it hit home. And that final line is sheer genius:
The guy who died on the highway
With all his regrets
He was driving for miles and miles and miles
Couldn’t see where it ends
He was tryna find ways
To tell her how he feels
But when he looked in her eyes
He could tell she was hurt so he let go of the wheel.
“Let It Burn” is, surprisingly, a song about renewal and new beginnings, not some ode to going out in a blaze of glory. Although it’s hardly inspirational—Shaboozey sounds as laid low and put out as ever. But the chorus has more jump than usual, and when this big hip hop beat comes in and Shaboozey gets to sing-rapping new horizons sound right around the horizon. “My Fault” is a duet with Noah Cyrus and real, real purty and real, real sad at the same time: “Is it my fault, you’re lost/It’s hard for me to see you when you’re drunk/In a bathroom stall/Taking pills, giving up.” Lines to ponder: “Where did everything go wrong? You say that it’s the universe, and blame it on the stars.” Maybe, but you’re still spread out drunk on the front lawn.
“Vegas” has a Ennio Morricone opening and is depressing as fuck although the rhythm, when things finally kick into gear, helps. Shaboozey’s Chevy’s in the pound, he says sorry ma again, and the lines “I pour my shame inside my cup and drink myself to sleep/If I make it through the night, then it’s a sweet dream” hit home. “Been so long, I need a long vacation/Lived my life like it was one big Vegas.” If carrying the city of Lost Wages around on your back, and needing a long vacation from your permanent vacation ain’t country, what is?
“Drink Don’t Need No Mix” is the hippity-hoppityest song on the LP, and Shaboozey gets some help from D is for Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug, whose “Texas” is so down home you won’t know whether to go for your six gun or your six-pack of Lone Star. Shaboozey is more of a PBR guy, if the song is to be believed, and he’s not the kind of guy who likes his liquor undiluted, unpolluted, and straight out of the bottle: “The drink don’t need no mix/What the fuck is this?/I’m tryna get faded baby this ain’t gon’ do shit.” No ambiguity there. Party song number two? A bit more belligerent than party song number one, more let’s get down to business like boozing is a job and Shaboozey is a fellow who takes pride in his work.
“Steal Her From Me” is a real peach of a good old-fashioned country stealing song, with a solid gold melody and a killer tagline: “I stole her from him/And someone’s gonna steal her from me.” Karma’s a bitch, “what goes around comes around,” and Shaboozey seems resigned to the rules of the game until song’s end, when he begins pleading “please don’t steal her from me.”
“Finally Over” has an elegaic end of the album feel to it. It’s a good old country shuffle, easy going with a friendly chorus until you listen to the words. Careerism is doing him in:
I’m looking for a reason
To hold it all together
Will I spend my final days
Tryna chase a dollar
I can’t sell my soul again
For another viral moment.
And by the end of the song he’s singing, “I’m glad it’s finally over.”
I have no reason to believe things are really finally all over for Shaboozey—not with a shot as potent as “A Bar Song” at the top of the pop charts, and high-proof chasers as undeniable as “Drink Don’t Need No Mix,” “Steal Her from Me,” and “My Fault” lined up on the bar. And speaking of juke joints, seems to me Shaboozey just might have a whole album of barroom anthems in him. Wouldn’t that be great? He could be the next George Jones.
That’s an idea I’m sending him free of charge, seeing as he and Jack Daniels have a history, and here’s another: cover “Rhinestone Cowboy.” That’s some real country bling right there, and I admit to having a selfish stake in his taking it on seeing as how he’d make my daddy the happiest shade in the hereafter. Hell, something tells me my old man and his cronies are singing along with “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” right this minute.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
