Some People Have Listened To Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ But Never Actually Heard It
They probably also think ‘The One I Love’ is a great wedding song.
Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” hit number one on the iTunes Top Songs chart Sunday, just moments after she’d performed her iconic 1988 song at the Grammy Awards with country music singer Luke Combs. (You don’t need a speedy vehicle to take you the record store these days when you’re inspired to buy great music.) Her debut album, Tracy Chapman, is also number one. The sister’s doing well.
Chapman wrote all her songs and paid attention to every dotted line on the contract, so she received her fair share from Combs’ hit cover of “Fast Car.” Daily Beast culture reporter Helen Holmes crassly observed, “As of March of 2023, Chapman had already netted over $500,000 in residuals off the back of Combs’s success.”
This “culture reporter” doesn’t seem to understand how covers work. Combs’ version of “Fast Car” was number two on the Billboard Hot 100 for months, but there is no song without Tracy Chapman.
The headline for Holmes’ article is also weirdly uncultured: “Tracy Chapman Came Out of Hiding to Crush ‘Fast Car’ at the Grammys With Luke Combs.” That’s almost a compliment, I guess, but Chapman wasn’t banned from the Grammys because she’d slapped Billy Crystal at the 1989 ceremony nor did she pull a Garbo. She was just quietly living her life. I’m happy she didn’t collaborate with Kanye West.
Chapman never sought fame for its own sake. Brian Koppelman, who discovered her when they were both students at Tufts University, told Rolling Stone, “I was helping organize a boycott protest against apartheid at school, and someone told me there was this great protest singer I should get to play at the rally … Tracy walked onstage, and it was like an epiphany. Her presence, her voice, her songs, her sincerity — it all came across.” (Koppelman introduced Chapman to his father, Charles Koppelman, then co-owner of SBK Publishing.)
NPR describes “Fast Car” as a “folk anthem,” which doesn’t seem quite right to me. An anthem is defined as a “song or hymn of praise or gladness,” and while “Fast Car” shares many of the musical characteristics of a hymn, its tone is hardly joyful. I also wouldn’t describe “Fast Car” as “a rousing popular song that typifies or is identified with a particular subculture, movement, or point of view.”
“Fast Car” is both deeply personal and subtly political — perhaps too subtle considering how often it’s misunderstood.
Monday, author Daniel Tutt posted the following on social media. At first, I thought he was kidding.
“Fast Car” is one of the best working class songs ever. It’s extremely hopeful. But that hopeful spirit is so much more distant today. To ‘move out of the shelter’ and get a simple job to pay the bills. It’s not like that no more ... our love for this song is bound up w/ nostalgia.
But Chapman didn’t write a “working class song” in the same vein as Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” or John Mellencamp’s “Small Town.” She wrote a song specifically about a Black woman’s distress. She doesn’t indulge in a working class hero fantasy nor does she romanticize American small towns.
“Fast Car” has a pretty clear meaning if you actually listen: Chapman’s narrator is trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of generational poverty. Her father’s a beaten-down drunk, whose only legacy for her is the obligation to care for him in his remaining years. She’s quit school and has limited options. She wants a “ticket to anywhere” but her partner, with their fast car, is just another obstacle.
Cars are still considered a symbol of freedom, and “fast cars” in particular epitomize youth and sexuality in far too many popular songs to list. Chapman challenges that consumerist myth.
Martha Lincoln, an associate professor of non-music-related matters at San Francisco State University, shared the following:
“Fast Car” was always a sad song, but in 1988 when it released, you arguably *could* run away with your partner and make a life on the salary of a grocery-store checker. 35 years on it reads as much sadder
As Alex Trebek used to say on Jeopardy! after a second contestant answered a question incorrectly, “No, that too is wrong.” Let’s look at perhaps the song’s most tragic, yet brilliant, verse:
You got a fast car
We go cruisin', entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in a market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
And we'll move out of the shelter
Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs
“Fast Car” was released in the final year of the Reagan administration. Black Americans were collectively poorer and disproportionately incarcerated at shocking levels. Reagan gutted social programs and shredded the safety net that might’ve benefited people struggling with addiction and poverty. He killed dreams. Yet Chapman’s narrator still dreams of escaping homelessness and somehow enjoying suburban life. She’s in a prison where the bars aren’t always visible but are nonetheless impenetrable. This isn’t “hopeful,” nor is her “American dream” as easily achievable as Lincoln insists.
Lincoln and Tutt might have the luxury of viewing the 1980s through the haze of John Hughes nostalgia. Combs didn’t even exist in the ‘80s. (He was born in 1990.) Some have commented that his cover lacks resonance because he can’t truly identify with Chapman’s narrator. I wouldn’t go that far. I think it speaks to the power of Chapman’s song that Combs connected so strongly to “Fast Car” while driving around with his father as a child and listening to her album. However, anyone who enjoys “Fast Car” should at least try to empathize with its narrator and not whitewash her unique experience.
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I don't know what it's like to be Black, or a woman; but I do know what it's like to be poor. That song spoke to me, and it's continually surprised me that people could hear it and yet...not hear any of it.
I know I’m old, theoretically. But I have never been able to listen to “Fast Car” and not felt that teenage desire to escape from all the oppressions, small and large, by running away - that feeling of speeding so fast it feels like being drunk, escaping to some dream that I know is untrustworthy. The song feels the same way now as it did when it was on rotation on B96 in Chicago. It wasn’t hopeful, as a song, it was just…realistic, when so much of what was playing was not.
“I’d always hoped for better,” but we know not to expect much from partners with fast cars and from jobs, even if they pay all our bills. Your goal was tempering your expectations, because plans were bound to end in disappointment. We’d seen how much work our mothers had to do after the divorce, while fathers got to live the high life with their new families. We’d seen the factories close. We’d seen the evictions.
How young are these critics imagining a dream world 1980s? It…it was not like the movies, even for white girls in the upper middle class suburbs, no matter how many of my FB acquaintances seem to recall their childhoods as idyllic and think we should beatify Reagan. Chapman’s song got press at the time about the plight of the poor, but it was also the plight of all of us laboring under expectations that didn’t acknowledge our circumstances. We sang along because we wanted that brief freedom of a Fast Car too.