Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing her song, Fast Car, at the Grammys last night is all over the internet this morning, but I watched it and I’m posting it here from The Tennessean instead of a national outlet because it’s a daily newspaper in the South and those are dying out, and because it’s in Nashville, Music City, and Tracy Chapman is the first Black woman to win a CMA award (though I can’t not mention that she should be, at least, the second, because Beyoncé should have won for Daddy Lessons).
I played Fast Car whenever I was in the car the year it came out, and often when I wasn’t mobile, but until this morning knew nothing about Luke Combs. My bad. Now all I know is that he has a great voice and chose to cover this song, which he used to listen to with his Dad. And that he has deep, abiding respect for Tracy Chapman. So, I guess I actually know a fair bit about him.
I’m not naive and I don’t want to be a Pollyanna. But.
The most important thing about this song, and this duet, is not — spoiler alert! — that Taylor Swift sang along. The most important thing about this song, besides its incredible beauty, is that it’s about being poor, desperate, and screwed over by our society. And trying to escape, and trying to have hope. Unsuccessfully. Unlike Born to Run’s sound, (though not its bleak underlying core), Fast Car’s sound is the opposite of triumphant. It’s elegiac. The music doesn’t work at cross-purposes with the meaning; it burrows into the words, accompanying the narrator, who “ain’t going nowhere.”
And that this intense, loving, clear-eyed, performance by a queer, 59-year-old Black woman who wrote it as a folk song and a White, straight (I googled that, just to be sure), 33-year-old man who covered it as a country song, gives us a damn good road map of the multi-racial, anti-racist, anti-ageist, LGBTQ+ inclusive coalition focused on economic struggle that we need to be building.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. We needed it, urgently. Our country needs a way out of the hate-filled, heat-filled place we are stuck in as much as the narrator of Fast Car needs a way out of the shelter. Politics people take note! Follow the artists!
Isn’t that obvious??? But even without checking, I’m pretty sure the mainstream media isn’t saying so.
Totally agree about the Fast Car duet. They were singing the song of America.
Go, Robin!