The Song Remains the Same: Detuning the Democratic Defeat

Released only the day before the election, will.i.am’s sonic squib, “Yes She Can,” was the final political misfire of the musical campaign, the cannon’s weak report barely heard as evening fell on Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign and the routed troops fled her standard.

But there is another mournful melody that continues to waft across early November’s electoral battlefield soaked in blue blood. Carrying over the vanquished candidates’ carcasses is Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” his lament not for dead donkeys and their fallen riders but for decimated purchasing power, ransacked consumer confidence, and savaged aspirations to luxury. The song is now enjoying its eighteenth straight week atop the Billboard charts. If it holds its position for another few days, it will match the all-time record of nineteen weeks still tenuously held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”

“A Bar Song (Tipsy)” claimed the no. 1 ranking the week before doddering Joe Biden announced that he wouldn’t run for a second term after all, the sitting President kicked down the White House backstairs by an Entertainment Industry cabal led by Democratic loyalist turned putschmeister, George Clooney. Kamala Harris mounted the war donkey and curveted ahead in the polls.

Shaboozey’s hit spanned Harris’s heady weeks in command of Democratic forces and resounds still in the aftermath of her political demise. Like a colorizing gloss applied to a vintage Civil War daguerreotype, the guitar strumming and hollow whistling impart an elegiac finish to the singer’s reverb-boosted plaint, one that lulled Democrats into the complacent assurance that the song was cooly apolitical. Obama put it on his summer playlist, but he wasn’t really listening to it either. Like the buzzards above, the harmonies and auto-tuned incantation circle endlessly, even aimlessly. The song will be on perpetual replay until, and probably after, Disney buys up the entire site and sound of the Democratic Debacle.

It can be no coincidence that both contenders for the dubious honor of longest stretch at Billboard no. 1 are basically country songs by Black artists whose music is inflected by, even reliant on, Hip Hop sensibilities and diction.

Lil Nas X’s nineteen-week Billboard run traversed the summer of 2019. His “Old Town Road” begins with a ten-second tribute to Blind Lemon Jefferson, then clip-clops ahead into a sing-song, rattle-snake-ratchet-driven beat backing a navel-gazing catalog of the accessories of the urban cowboy lyricist riding his horse through the hood: “Hat is matte black / Got the boots that’s black to match.” The musician didn’t need to say that he was Black too.

Lil Nas X delivers the raps, while the country singing is done by diehard Trumper, Billy Ray Cyrus, who arrives in the video in his MAGA-red Maserati. Lil Nas X ditches the nag and hops in the convertible and the unlikely pair head to a barn dance in a strip mall in which Black and white (though mostly white) are united by music, movement, illusion, and love of luxury brands mashed-up with the everyday:

My life is a movie
Bull riding and boobies
Cowboy hat from Gucci
Wrangler on my booty

The track’s constricted melody was similarly spare of ideas. Its default misogyny matched the mores of Trump 1.0. Never mind that another Lil Nas X song, “Donald Trump,” imagines the president in the trunk of a car—maybe that Maserati—and its unclear whether he’s dead or alive, though it’s probably the former. Neither that image nor the song’s rampant gunfire and exploitation (“Got a bad bitch with a thick ass / She a stripper ho, yeah, she get cash”) got the “artist” called up on terrorism charges. But in “Old Town Road” there is no talk of “niggas” and “bitches” and “Glocks” but instead of “tractors” and “horses” and “babies.” Shaboozey wisely kept his no. 1 hit clean.

It wasn’t an upscale Italian sports car Lil Nas X drove through the border wall separating Country from Hip Hop. It was a bulldozer. Beyoncé then rode the white steed of Cowboy Carter through that gap and to the top of the Billboard in March of 2024: the first Black woman to have a no. 1 hit on both the Country and Pop charts. Shaboozey ascended to the top spot after her, and he now sits at the controls of the bulldozer. The dismantling of that border wall has been fabulously lucrative for all three.

With melody and chords unable to get out their own way, the “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” captures, if gently, the feeling of claustrophobic despair at closing time. That fear of having to leave and head out into the night and towards working reality can quickly tip towards panic if not for the balm alcohol.

“Someone pour me up a double shot of whiskey
They know me and Jack Daniels got a history
There’s a party downtown near Fifth Street”

The artist couldn’t help but write his own name into the bar ballad: “I’ve been Boozey since I’ve left,” he croons, the Shaboozey brand as sonic reflux.

In concentrating on the genre-busting strategies of these Black musicians who have so smoothly crossing over into Country and up the Pop charts too, commentators, including me, failed to note the predictive punch of Shaboozey’s seemingly unthreatening mega-hit.

At the Democratic National Convention in August the bosses thought that their political triangulations would be enhanced by the usual musical kill coordinates: soulful stalwarts Stevie Wonder and John Legend balanced against country contributions from Maren Morris and Jason Isbell with a few rounds of Springsteen thrown in to soften up the targets.

Shaboozey would have seemed a likely fieldpiece to add to these howitzers of hope. A child of Nigerian immigrants, he grew up in the Washington, DC suburbs. His stage handle is a transliteration of his family name, Chibueze. From early on he was a musical omnivore whose inclusive appetites allow him the ease with which he moves between and mixes together styles. At the time of the DNC he was well into his no. 1 run, his song offering sounding proof that the winner-take-all American Dream is real. Shaboozey’s dominance on Billboard was a potential harbinger of a Harris victory.

After Taylor Swift endorsed Harris in September, Shaboozey was asked at the MTV Music Video Awards what he thought of her declaration of support for the Democratic candidate. He extolled his celebrity colleague’s music, thus proudly displaying his own catholic tastes, but deflected the interviewer’s attempts to lay bare his own political affiliations: “I’m a huge Swfitie,” he beamed, “And she should walk in her truth.” His “truth” remained hidden. Could it be that Shaboozey didn’t want to make waves in Nashville, sink his standing on the charts and his future prospects? Could he have been one of the many young Black men who went red? One could easily think so after watching the video of “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”

Whatever the case, the opening stanza, delivered in no-fault auto-tune, was a declaration of disaffection, and though unnamed, Democrats were clearly the ones responsible for the people’s plight:

My baby want a Birkin, she’s been tellin’ me all night long
Gasoline and groceries, the list goes on and on
This 9 to 5 ain’t workin’, why the hell do I work so hard?
I can’t worry ’bout my problems, I can’t take ’em when I’m gone, uh

The rich, Shaboozey among them, buy $40,000 Hermès handbags while working folk—Black, brown or white—can’t even afford the basics. They don’t turn to the ballot box but to the bottle.

All through the summer and into the fall a Black man sang from the pinnacle of Pop of discontent, inflation, wage slavery, and consumer envy. Yet tone-deaf Democrats only wanted to hear their own in-house music. The Legends and Wonders of make-believe sang of joy instead of jobs.

If Kamala heard Shaboozey’s hit, she didn’t hear its message. Does she hear it now as she nurses her electoral wounds and her political hangover?

There are more lessons to be learned from the bitter medicine of this deceptive, easy-listening anthem than the most obvious one: that it’s easier for a Black singer to succeed in White Country than for a Black woman to win the White House.

 

 

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