If you listened to the radio in 2024, you probably encountered the artist Shaboozey. His megahit A Bar Song (Tipsy) reigned for 19 weeks as America’s #1 single. When you did encounter him, you likely wondered about his name.

Shaboozey has the feel of a jokey hip hop stage name, like Pooh Shiesty or DaBaby. But a quick listen reveals that Bar Song is a country line dance number…isn’t it? Yes, and no, and yes. Both the song and the name resist our impulse to categorize. They’re cultural fractals that twist and divide as you try to zoom in on them.

The Enigma

The music video for Bar Song is a single take with a static camera. A black man with dramatic dreadlocks stands front and center, looking tired and pensive. He eventually begins to sing. In the blurry background, a group of white people in cowboy hats drink, laugh and dance next to an old pickup truck and a saloon sign.

Is the singer part of their party? Is he performing for their entertainment? Could this be a deliberate reversal of the common dynamic of a white star surrounded by black backup dancers? Or do the partiers not even know the singer’s there?

The singer himself won’t give you a clue. His voice and expression remain mostly impassive, his t-shirt and denim Carhartt jacket casual universals. Even his song refuses to commit to a mood. It’s a neutrality that contains multitudes.

The Music

A Bar Song (Tipsy) is a guitar and fiddle-driven line dance sensation. The subject matter is classic honkytonk: an ode to whiskey and good company as solace for the hard life of a working man. As of this writing, the song is riding a six-month streak atop Billboard’s Hot Country chart.

Bar Song is also a reimagining of a 2004 hip hop party anthem by rapper J-Kwon.  It features catchy samples of the original, rap-cadenced new verses, and lyrics that namecheck the luxury Birkin bag. What’s more, the theme of escaping the 9 to 5 with a boozy party is as much a staple of rap as country. The result is not merely a mashup of country and hip hop, but somehow entirely both at once. Toss in some gospel-worthy hand claps and a guitar line ready for indie folk-rock and you have a thorough annihilation of genre constraints.

Some celebrated this crossing of boundaries. In one review of Bar Song, Rap Critic argued “Genres being exclusive to certain crowds is an invention by those up top, who want to keep their audiences nice and divvied up so they can figure out who to market to.”

Yet a lot of the audience likes being divvied up. There’s an allure to drawing lines, to create structure and help us define ourselves. Inside the line is a feeling of community. In both country and hip hop, fans draw lines by demanding “authenticity,” in artists’ biographies and their music. Fan forums seethe with resentment over their genres being watered down by encroaching styles like pop.

Now here comes Shaboozey, dominating the country charts while citing Missy Elliot and Timbaland as inspirations, calling the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds “the greatest album to ever exist,” and claiming there’s no difference between Wild West cowboys and hip hop gangstas. Not to mention being named Shaboozey. Country fans often point to his name as a symbol that he doesn’t belong. In one fan’s dismissive words, “Why is this ‘shaboozy’ thing even considered country?”

Claiming the Culture

When male country musicians take stage names, they usually aim for a casually rugged splash of Americana. For instance, country singer Jason Brown restyled himself Colt Ford. William Covington III goes by the nickname Bucky.

The stage names fit the genre’s cultural positioning. Nashville presents itself as both the voice of white rural life and the standard-bearer for American patriotism. The constant pairing of those two messages feeds into a mythology of small-town white America being the real, traditional America. That adds another layer of meaning to a dreadlocked black singer with a name like Shaboozey taking country music by storm—and to the grumbles that he’s not really country.

It’s not only fans who have treated the singer like a country interloper. At this year’s Country Music Association Awards ceremony, Shaboozey walked in with the biggest hit song in years and left with nothing but a string of presenters taking digs at his name. Lines like “Holy Shaboozey!” and “this cowboy who has been kicking Shaboozey for a lot of years” made it clear he was seen as a gate-crasher at the insiders’ party.

The Wrong Name?

Would the man behind Bar Song have been treated differently if he had chosen a more country-styled name? It’s possible that a conventional name might have made Shaboozey more palatable to the country establishment, but consider that he wasn’t the only crossover artist with an odd stage name performing at the CMA’s that night. White musicians like Post Malone and Jelly Roll were welcomed more warmly. Aiming for the heart of country might also have turned away listeners who came to Shaboozey’s music from other genres.

When asked about his stage name, the singer is pragmatic. It’s a brand, one he credits with helping him stand out in the music business: “I’ve had moments where I think I want to change my name and people are like ‘no, it stands out and that’s good!” At the CMA’s, it certainly did the job. On country music’s big night of self-celebration, its luminaries kept talking about Shaboozey.

Does all of this add up to a public rejection or a publicity win? Would your answer be different if you were told that the name Shaboozey started out as a rendering of the artist’s real African name…or that it started out as a joke at his expense? Like so much about Shaboozey, all of the above is true at once.

The Origins

In 1995, a Nigerian-born couple living in Virginia had a son they named Collins Obinna Chibueze. Collins is an English surname that conveniently fit both sides of the boy’s cultural experience. It’s popular as a given name among two groups: black Africans, and white Americans from country music territory. The family surname Chibueze (chee-BWAY-zay) is an Igbo name meaning “God is King.”

After a childhood in Virginia, Collins Chibueze went to junior high in Nigeria before returning to Virginia for high school. As a freshman high school football player, he was subject to a fateful prank. His coach was writing players’ names on helmets to identify whose was whose. When it came to the newbie with the African surname, he scrawled “Shaboozey.”

The coach’s mangling of the name not only suggested that the original was weird or ridiculous, but pointedly turned it into something else. Unstressed prefixes are a hallmark of creative African-American naming. “Sha” in particular, as in Shaquille and Shamar, was common among black boys born in the ‘90s. “Boozey,” meanwhile, points explicitly to alcohol and its abuse, and implicitly away from normal names. (The letter string ooz is non-existent in the world of names.) So turning bueze into boozey gives the name a Bozo-style clownishness.

In short, an American teacher/coach turned a young black student’s African surname into a racially marked, liquor-drenched joke. That sounds like a not-so-micro aggression. Or perhaps it was par for the course in hassling new football team members, an affectionate rite of passage. Two paths lay open in the wake of “Shaboozey,” laughter or anger. Collins Chibueze took a third. He claimed it. He adopted Shaboozey as his nickname, and ultimately as his professional identity.

Pick a Lane

The CMA Awards presenters, then, were making fun of a joke name that was created to make fun of a real name but turned into a chosen name. It’s an insult house of mirrors, with every reflection angled to show Shaboozey on the outside—even as he ends up standing in the very center. He indisputably has the biggest country song in years, whether or not it’s a country song.

2024 America didn’t make flexibility or neutrality easy. Everything in our culture and politics screamed “pick a lane.” How remarkable, or perhaps fitting, that the biggest song of the year was the one that refused to pick. One that refused, even, to acknowledge the lanes’ existence. Bar Song is a radical act of crowd-pleasing, a performance that answers “yes” to almost any label you try to pin on it. All from an artist with a silly, serious, problematic, pragmatic name.

The name Shaboozey is a product of America and Africa, insiders and outsiders, art and commerce, pride and prejudice. And it blithely ignores all of those divisions, challenging the lines we’re so eager to draw around our identities and traditions. That makes Shaboozey the 2024 Name of the Year.

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With thanks to everyone who contributed to the Name of the Year discussion, and special acknowledgement to reader Quiara for an insightful nomination of Shaboozey.