Luke Combs revives Tracy Chapman’s native aspirations.
Against relentless aggression by politicians and media who use race to control public sentiment, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” from 1988, is a reminder of our native shared aspirations. Luke Combs’s country-music cover version of the song recently went Platinum in record-industry sales parlance, but it also triggered a regime media attack by the Washington Post that seemed intent on Millennial social division.
The Post raised issues of racial and sexual identity that Chapman herself already quashed 35 years ago when it questioned the prerogative of white male Combs to record a hit by a black lesbian — implying he’d appropriated and erased her. This real example of Fake News was also ignorant of pop music history. Distrusting Combs’s remake denies the art of Chapman’s songwriting and of her original deep-voiced, dulcet rendition that Combs evokes through masculine Southern intonations — it’s only slightly different, yet fresh enough to give the song new life.
Not recognizing the transfer of ideas and feelings that has occurred with these two versions, the Post insults the meaning of “Fast Car.” It’s precisely set in American circumstances: A young woman remembers riding alongside her father, a social casualty who is disillusioned after the family has broken up, yet she ponders their trouble and envisions an eventual resolution. “Buy a house and live in the suburbs,” she dreams. That simple, common objective, currently being undermined by urban political activists, may partly explain the Post’s attack. This insidious journalism overlooks the fascinating reality behind Chapman’s breakthrough with “Fast Car.”
Chapman’s eponymous debut album launched her career in folk-rock, outside the rhythm-and-blues and disco genres expected of black musical artists. The album was produced by folk-rock legend Neil Young, even though that genre was notoriously segregated (what the Post might call “white supremacist”). Chapman was marketed against type — her dark skin and short, spiky Afro were blurred on the album cover as if distancing her from folk-music predecessors Joan Armatrading and Odetta. Still, the iconography was striking. She appears almost androgynous, but look closely: The image raises a sepia-toned memory of civil-rights pioneer Marcus Garvey.
In 1988, Chapman didn’t have to proclaim politics (the hip-hop act Public Enemy was already doing that), but her subtle, elliptical songwriting certainly contained political undertones. Producer Young performed a consciously liberal, politically aware gateway function, and the album’s first single, “Fast Car,” proved the appropriate vehicle to imply progress. Its story was unspecific enough to be a crossover hit because its narrative was universal.
That artsy, Garveyite album image evoked the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association whose Black Star Line shipping corporation was devised to facilitate the black diaspora. (Chapman’s yearning verse “move out of the shelter” applies here.) But the song’s key metaphor — not “new car,” “old car,” or “our car” but “fast car” — also alludes to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to “end segregation with all deliberate speed.”
You can hear that moral urgency even when Combs sings “Fast Car.” He keeps the line “I work in a market as a checkout girl” to pay homage to Chapman. The crossover creates empathy and achieves working-class unity that evidently includes Americans in the country-music audience — the sort that elitist media disdain.
“Fast Car” repeats the chorus sentiment “Had a feeling that I belong / I had a feeling I could be someone.” It drives home an American promise — a nostalgia — rather like Morrissey’s “Nobody Loves Us,” a sharper, much deeper expression of British social mobility and spiritual aspiration.
Chapman told Billboard: “I never expected to find myself on the country charts, but I’m honored to be there. I’m happy for Luke and his success and grateful that new fans have found and embraced ‘Fast Car.’” This song speeds past the worst aspect of authoritarian media that chews up and spits out so much popular culture. Combs and Chapman communicate across the gulf of social division.
