Country<\/a> Music awards, an event traditionally resistant to artists of colour. The accompanying album, Where I\u2019ve Been, Isn\u2019t Where I\u2019m Going, was by far the most successful sustained attempt to fuse hip-hop and country, two genres that have been warily circling each other for some time, spawning the occasional novelty hit such as Nelly and Tim McGraw\u2019s Over and Over Again, the Ludacris-featuring 2010 remix of Jason Aldean\u2019s Dirt Road, and Lil Nas X\u2019s Old Town Road; the baleful, rap-influenced spectre of bro country; and the deep underground sub-genre of hick-hop, a hidden world of Maga politics, confederate flags and festivals held at Georgia mud holes. The album is still on the US chart, 112 weeks after its release.<\/p>\nShaboozey: The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales. <\/p>\n
Understandably, its success has led Shaboozey to swing for the fences two years on. The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales is a 20-track concept album, accompanied by a three-issue comic of the same name. It features scene-setting interstitial tracks: cinematic and orchestral, ambient and Pink Floyd-y, with weeping pedal steel subbing for David Gilmour\u2019s trademark mournful string-bends. There\u2019s narration by actors Jamie Foxx, Teyana Taylor and Sam Elliott, the latter going some way to ameliorate the traditional problem with concept albums: that the listener quickly loses the thread of the narrative and spends most of the album listening without a clue what\u2019s supposed to be going on.<\/p>\n
Country got to concept albums long before rock did. Marty Robbins\u2019 thematically linked Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs were released in 1959, Johnny Cash\u2019s Bitter Tears in 1964 \u2013 and they loom large in the genre\u2019s history. Willie Nelson\u2019s Red Headed Stranger, the 1975 saga of a murderer on the run, is regularly voted the greatest country album of all time; many major artists, including Emmylou Harris, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, have at least one in their catalogue. You could thus view The Outlaw Cherie Lee as a concerted effort to pivot away from pop into country\u2019s heartlands, albeit while still featuring a heavily Auto-Tuned guest appearance by rapper Gunna on High Noon (\u201cspent a hundred thou on clothes \/ I got bad hoes,\u201d he offers, presumably not referencing farming equipment). Cowgirl and Born to Die are two obvious \u2013 and, it has to be said, remarkably charming \u2013 attempts to replicate the success of Shaboozey\u2019s biggest hit: \u201cGot another bar song for you,\u201d he notes by way of introduction to the former. Bullets and Blades, meanwhile, is a big and strikingly beautiful ballad with Shaboozey duetting with R&B star Kehlani.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Elsewhere, The Outlaw Cherie Lee is more purely country: If I Was an Outlaw has saloon-bar piano, Sweet Revenge goes country rock, while the closing track is a burst of the traditional cowboy ballad Streets of Laredo sung by Orville Peck. The album\u2019s predominant mode is stark and brooding, driven by fingerpicked acoustic guitar and decorated with fiddle. At their best, these tracks are darkly atmospheric and powerful \u2013 as on Drunk \u2013 although it\u2019s occasionally hard not to feel that part of Shaboozey\u2019s USP has gone with his decision to dial down the rap influence in his vocals. He can certainly croon with a glowering power, but there\u2019s a distinct leap in excitement when he reverts to a hip-hop-inspired delivery, the better to inhabit the character of a swaggering outlaw on Til Sunday.<\/p>\n
Still, as a demonstration of his eclecticism \u2013 or, if you prefer, a desire to be all things to all people \u2013 The Outlaw Cherie Lee works well. The pop-facing tracks hit, the strike rate when he diversifies is higher than his naysayers would suggest, and there\u2019s an impressive boldness about his evident desire to draw R&B, soul and hip-hop artists into his world \u2013 aside from Gunna and Kehlani, there\u2019s an impressive turn from Leon Bridges on Burn It Down. The overarching storyline is tight and well handled. Perhaps most importantly, the album never feels like the work of an artist whose career has been destabilised by a huge, unexpected and unrepeatable hit, but rather the work of an artist digging in for the long haul.<\/p>\n
What Alexis listened to this week<\/p>\n
Mr Wa7t \u2013 Secrets (Richard Norris Fitness Mix)<\/p>\n
The original is great soulful, deep pop, but Richard Norris\u2019s remix turns it into delightfully smooth, hot-afternoon Balearic: very much what is needed at the moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s fair to say that if Shaboozey never released another note of music, his place in history would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":719368,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-719367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719367\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/719368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}