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‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’: How Shaboozey Improvised the Year’s Biggest Hit, Which Even Caught Beyoncé’s Attention

With nearly 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Shaboozey’s genre-blurring “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is the biggest hit of 2024.

It’s a monumental achievement for any artist, let alone an independent one who simply had the audacity to wonder what a country flip of an aughts hip-hop hit — in this case, J-Kwon’s 2004 smash “Tipsy” — might sound like. During a songwriting session with producers Sean Cook and Nevin Sastry, Shaboozey raised the idea of interpolating a vintage rap hit, and soon enough, the seminal J-Kwon lyric “everybody at the bar getting tipsy” flew out of his mouth. Songwriters: Sean Cook, J-Kwon, Joe “Capo” Kent, Nevin Sastry, Shaboozey, Mark Williams

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