Media Driving 'Fast Car' Off Cliff

Tracy Chapman, Luke Combs and Another Reason To Hate Cultural Elites

Country superstar Luke Combs is PROBLEMATIC, says WaPo

I know it’s the weekend, and I’m supposed to be chilling, but dammit, this thing with the Washington Post and the hit remake of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” has me all lit up. It is a perfect example of how we are governed — in the broad sense — by joyless assholes who are sick in the head, and determined to make us suspicious and hateful of each other.

You are thinking:

You’re right. I’m sorry. But I’m pissed.

If you are over a certain age, you’ll remember the 1980s folk singer Tracy Chapman, who burst onto the scene with her gorgeous, emotionally resonant song “Fast Car.” It’s a narrative sung in the voice of a young woman who is struggling to make it from paycheck to paycheck in a dead end job. She quit school to take care of her alcoholic father after her mom left them, and dreams of a better life. It is sung to a lover who has a fast car, which symbolizes freedom, and the promise of a better life.

What is especially poignant about the song is its narrator doesn’t imagine that better life in material terms. Rather, she sings, in the chorus:

So I remember we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast, I felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I-I, had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

The song came out in the late spring of 1988, and became a big hit. I remember backpacking around Europe that summer with my best friend from college, walking on the beach at Nice, with Tracy Chapman’s song constantly in my head. Here’s what it sounded like, and what Tracy Chapman looked like 35 years ago, when she was only 24:

I don’t follow country music, but it turns out that the 1988 song has enjoyed a massively popular resurrection at the hands of country singer Luke Combs. Here is Combs, a big-deal country singer who has loved the song for years, and with Tracy Chapman’s permission, recorded a country cover of the song. Here it is:

It’s a revelation. This white boy from North Carolina takes the song written by a black girl from Cleveland, and uncovers its universality. Listening to Combs sing it, “Fast Car” becomes a song about a poor or working-class white kid in the trailer park — as opposed to Tracy Chapman’s version, which one imagined was the voice of a character who lives in the ‘hood. It’s captivating. I had never thought of “Fast Car” as a country song, but it makes perfect sense. It calls to mind the shared experience of being poor and hungry for escape, and how in America, a fast car is a symbol of freedom. But as you know if you listen to the song all the way through, that symbol proves to be hollow, because the guy with the fast car never wants to stop going. “Fast Car” is a terrific song, a terrific American song. Luke Combs’s cover reveals the artistic genius and humanity of Tracy Chapman’s original.

When I first heard the Luke Combs version, my thought was: Man, how much racial mistrust and strife could be dissipated if working-class white people and black people could learn to see each other in this song.

Actually no, I’m lying, though I did eventually think that. Because I heard about the Luke Combs cover through reading the Washington Post story, my actual first thought was: to hell with the Washington Post, and all these sick, liberal, joyless bastards who hate people and hate life. Why? Because I heard about the cover through this piece of “cultural analysis” by Style section reporter Emily Yahr. Think of the angles Yahr could have taken toward the revival of this song. What a wonderful surprise, especially in the age of rising racial suspicion and tension, that a young white country singer from the South discovers something beautiful and true in an artifact by a young black folk singer from the North, of an earlier generation, and brings the treasure to a new generation — and maybe even to a new audience.

Nope. That’s not how University of Maryland graduate Emily Yahr sees it. Excerpt:

To quite a few people, this is cause for yet another celebration in Combs’s whirlwind journey as the genre’s reigning megastar with 16 consecutive No. 1 hits. But it has also prompted a wave of complicated feelings among some listeners and in the Nashville music community. Although many are thrilled to see “Fast Car” back in the spotlight and a new generation discovering Chapman’s work, it’s clouded by the fact that, as a Black queer woman, Chapman, 59, would have almost zero chance of that achievement herself in country music.

The numbers are bleak: A recent study by data journalist Jan Diehm and musicologist Jada Watson reported that fewer than 0.5 percent of songs played on country radio in 2022 were by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists. Watson’s previous work shows that songs by women of color and LGBTQ+ artists were largely excluded from radio playlists for most of the two decades prior.

“On one hand, Luke Combs is an amazing artist, and it’s great to see that someone in country music is influenced by a Black queer woman — that’s really exciting,” said Holly G, founder of the Black Opry, an organization for Black country music singers and fans. “But at the same time, it’s hard to really lean into that excitement knowing that Tracy Chapman would not be celebrated in the industry without that kind of middleman being a White man.”

I mean, my Lord. This is the spot where I go all whatabout, and point out that nobody is anguished over the relative lack of white representation in hip-hop, or the lack of potbellied and bearded Southern bros in dance music (“Where oh where is the redneck Jimmy Somerville?” asked nobody, ever). Tracy Chapman never talked about her personal life, and the only reason anybody knows that she’s queer is the novelist Alice Walker talked about having had a relationship with her in the 1990s.

Why are those numbers “bleak”? Country music is traditionally the music of rural white people. Obviously it has expanded beyond that, but those are its cultural roots. I’m a white guy of Tracy Chapman’s generation who grew up in the rural South, and I really don’t listen to country music. But that marked me as in the minority of white males of my generation in my town. (I was not listening to country radio, like most of them; I was listening to the radio station that played Tracy Chapman.

So what? See, this is what I hate — I mean, truly hate — about the Left today. They have to problematize everything. Everything! So what if black and queer people don’t really like country music? If there are no meaningful barriers to them participating in it, why is it a problem that so few of them are drawn to the genre? Seriously, who cares? Is it a problem when white people who live in the small-town South like hip-hop? Does it matter that a white Southern male like Luke Combs would have almost zero chance of becoming a hip-hop star? Again, aside from the possibility that there is active racial discrimination, which is obviously bad, I can’t see that it does. I honestly don’t get the concern.

But that’s not how the educated Leftist mind works these days. Like the Eye of Sauron, it scans the world, looking for cultural phenomena it can problematize. A white country music star who sings a folk song first made popular by a black queer performer, and who gives her full credit — nope, can’t have that. It’s WRONG, and only goes to show how horrible this world is, this racist, sexist, anti-gay hellscape. So a left-Puritan Washington Post reporter who apparently hates life in all its actual diversity calls up a professional grievance grifter who explains to us why it’s hard to take pleasure in the triumph of Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, and the joy of listening to “Fast Car”.

What does the reclusive Chapman think of the cover? She released a statement to 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.’”

Of course — because unlike the Washington Post reporter and the professional grievance grifter in Nashville, Tracy Chapman is a normal person who doesn’t approach life determined to whine about how unfair everything is because it doesn’t fit their idea of perfection.

Whaddaya know, Emily Yahr found an academic to confirm her thesis:

Francesca Royster, author of “” and an English professor at DePaul University, said the song’s story of the narrator feeling trapped and trying to escape is “a really American iconography” about cars holding the promise of freedom. “This is something country music is very invested in, too: the American dream of reinvention and finding happiness after a life of struggle,” Royster said.

That might be one reason the song hits with the country audience, Royster said. Though, as someone who lived in Oakland, Calif., when “Fast Car” came out and saw how it connected to the queer community, she said, it’s difficult to see the success of Combs’s cover knowing that country music, with its historic emphasis on “tradition,” has generally shied away from highlighting LGBTQ+ artists and their stories — which is all part of the complexity of the current life of the song.

The rednecks like a song that the queers liked first! Oh, the humanity. We might never recover.

There’s a fair point buried in Emily Yahr’s critical sludge: that the history of popular American music does contain a truly problematic (no kidding) mid-century phenomenon: of white performers mainstreaming black music, e.g., Elvis Presley making Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” popular. It was acceptable to the broader public when it was fronted by a white man. This is ambiguous: on the one hand, we can be grateful that black roots music found a broader audience, while at the same time lamenting that the racism of the time meant that it took whites performing it to break it into the mainstream.

But 2023 is not 1953. Blacks are still only a relatively small percentage of the overall US population, but hip-hop has displaced rock-and-roll as the most popular musical genre in America. The idea that white people won’t listen to a black person’s music unless it is sung by a white person is utterly absurd. But these leftists, they have to believe that it’s Forever Selma, or their lives won’t have meaning, I guess. We have a ton of racial problems in America, but there have been so many victories won over the past six decades, and reason to hope for better times. But these people, these leftists, are determined to make us suspicious of each other, to rob any joy we might take in experiencing the lives and culture of each other, in all its messiness and tragedy.

I don’t know for sure, but my guess is that the Combs cover introduced the song to a generation that had never heard of it, and might not have had it not been for him. That is, whites who were too young to remember Chapman’s version, or who weren’t born when it came out, didn’t refuse to listen to it because it was sung by a queer black woman (sorry, Emily Yahr!), but because they simply didn’t know it existed. My older son, 23, is a club deejay, and he has an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music. He knows a lot about the Eighties because when he was in high school, I shared with him the music I loved when I was his age. He tells me that he will introduce a forgotten Eighties song into his club sets (e.g., a minor Talking Heads track), and people of his generation will make a beeline for where he’s standing, wanting to know what that awesome song is.

When I was in high school, Paul Simon’s “Graceland,” which explored South African black music, transposed into the idiom of the American pop song, was a monster hit. And deservedly so: it’s a great, great album. It introduced millions of Americans to the beauty of black South African music. There is zero chance that I, as a high school student in Louisiana, would have bought albums by Ladysmith Black Mambazo had I not heard the black singers perform on “Graceland”. Paul Simon worked tirelessly to promote black South African music, to credit them, and to help Americans understand the moral obscenity of apartheid through in part introducing his US fans to the beauty and humanity of black South African music.

He could never record it today. The Emily Yahrs and Holly G.s, and Francesca Roysters of the world would piledrive Paul Simon into rubble, and any Paul Simons today who might be tempted to do a cross-cultural project like the pioneering “Graceland” know it well, and will have been intimidated into line. And despite the shimmering beauty of “Graceland,” it might not become popular today, because these leftist attitudes, having become dominant in cultural institutions over the last three decades, have conditioned many people who don’t remember what it was like in the Before Times, when liberals celebrated the humanist, healing possibilities cross-cultural collaboration, to be suspicious of and reflexively hostile to anything like “Graceland”. That’s what the Washington Post “Fast Car” article is like. Not even the fact that Tracy Chapman herself likes the cover and is grateful for it satisfies these miserabilists.

Here’s what Luke Combs said when he was asked why he recorded “Fast Car”:

“[It’s] my first favorite song probably ever. I remember listening to that song with my dad in his truck when I was probably four years old,” Combs, 33, recalls his family connection to the song in a press release. “He had a cassette, a tape of it, and we had this old brown camper top F-150.”

“We rode around that thing, and he had a tape cassette player in there, and I have the original cassette — my dad brought it to me a couple of years ago… I have the one, and I have it in my shop,” he continued. “The only music I have in my shop is a cassette player. I love to go to antique stores, and just you can get a bunch of cassette tapes for 50 cents, and some of the best records of all time are on cassette.”

Nothing political there, just a little kid who grew up to become a massively popular country music performer, who learned to love a great song while sitting in the truck riding around with his Daddy. I bet little Luke Combs had that song committed to memory before he even knew its singer was black. I bet he never even thought about why the race of the singer was supposed to matter, until somebody like Emily Yahr told him.

I’m reminded of something a liberal friend back in Louisiana told me in the 1980s. He was a year behind me in high school, but we were friends there. He ended up going to an Ivy League college, class of 1990. But he took a semester off to study at LSU, because it got him a cheaper ride on the study-abroad consortium both his college and LSU were part of.

After a couple of months at LSU, he told me that even though he was quite liberal, and LSU was a pretty conservative campus, it was such a pleasure to be at a college where every damn thing wasn’t politicized. He explained that if he took the stairs on the way to class at his Ivy League college, somebody would inevitably congratulate him for making an environmentalist statement by refusing to use the elevator. He told me everybody watched everything you did, seeking out political meaning, good or bad. It was neurotic and exhausting; he just wanted to move through life like a normal person, but these elites among whom he found himself were too anxious and miserable to do it.

What would these people make of one of the greatest pop-culture artifacts of the last fifty years, The Gospel At Colonus? Ever heard it? Oh man, if not, call it up on Spotify, sit back, and prepare yourself to be blown away. Or even better, watch this filmed performance (yes, that’s a young Morgan Freeman):

It’s a 1983 stage interpretation of Oedipus Rex, imagined as a black gospel music parable. It’s not Christian in message, but rather the Greek myth is told through the idiom of black gospel music. I saw it for the first time on October 12, 1996, in a production in Austin, Texas. I had never heard of this musical, and didn’t know what to expect. I sat in my seat sobbing uncontrollably at the tragedy, and the beauty of this myth. Catharsis? Oh, yes sir. Without this play — lyrics and music by two white men, Lee Breuer and Bob Telson, performed by an all-black cast — I never would have been able to experience this performance of an ancient Greek story as it was originally intended by the Greeks: as a religious performance. This is what the genius of The Gospel at Colonus did for me, and can do for you.

There was a time, not long ago, when this kind of cross-cultural risk-taking was celebrated for what it might teach us about the universal power of art to speak to our share humanity. Breuer and Telson didn’t know that as white men, they weren’t supposed to write gospel music. Morgan Freeman and his fellow black actors didn’t know that they were supposed to feel bad about collaborating with whiteness by interpreting Sophocles’ play in a way that connected the black experience to the classical Greek one, instead of hating the Greeks for being white. All that was to come.

Here’s how the Post story ends:

As Combs’s cover stays glued near the peak of the Billboard Hot 100, there’s the hope in Nashville and beyond that this can add to the discourse of the urgency of change in country music. Holly of the Black Opry said that now would be a great time for Combs to invite a queer Black female artist to join him on tour or to offer his support: “You used her art to enrich your career, and that opens you up to a little bit of responsibility giving back to the community.”

“I think the big lesson here is Black women belonged in country music all along,” Holly said. “If that song can chart as No. 1 today in country, it should have charted in [1988]. ... The only thing different is a White man is singing the song. I hope that’s a lesson that people take away from it: Our art is good enough and deserves to be recognized on the same scale.”

Invite a queer black female artist to join your country music tour, Luke Combs! Tokenism is a sign of moral progress, you see. And as for “giving back to the community,” what a load of crap. As if “Fast Car” were somehow the property of black lesbians. (What do you want to be that Holly G. is eager to suggest that Luke Combs’s “giving back to the community” could come in the form of a donation to her activist organization?) What a cramped, bitter way to view music, and art itself.

I remember being a kid in college in Baton Rouge, and going to a dive called Tabby’s Blues Box, in the black part of the city. It closed down ages ago, but back then, it was run by a black blues guitarist named Tabby Thomas. It was a place where all people who love the blues could come together. The crowd was always about half black, half white. I remember sitting about four feet away from the piano one night, listening to an elderly black performer named Henry Gray, drenched with sweat, playing his heart out, and singing the blues. It was a moment of pure beauty. I remember at one point he shot me a brief gaze, with the strangest look in his eyes. I don’t know what he meant by it — still don’t, though I can see it in my mind’s eye right now, all these years later. It must have been so strange for that old man, who had lived much of his life under Jim Crow, to sit there and play for an audience that included white college boys who had never lived under the conditions that produced blues music, and never lived in a society that imposed those conditions on black people. But there were these white boys — in my case, the son of a man who was probably in the Klan once upon a time, though I didn’t know that then — who were there in the dive bar, sitting at the feet of Henry Gray, rapt with admiration and gratitude for the beauty of his art.

Maybe Henry Gray thought, damn white boys, what do they know? Or maybe he thought, I can’t believe I’ve lived to see this. Who knows? I do know that it would have been hard, even impossible, in the not too distant past for whites and blacks to come together in a juke joint like that, around a love for blues music. Now it was possible, and it was an awesome thing, a thing to be celebrated, but the most important thing, maybe, was that it was a normal thing. What do I mean? This: you could stop and think about all the sociocultural implications of young white college boys going to a black juke joint to hear elderly black bluesmen play, and what it means, man, and racism and the evil of America and all that poison with which the Left embitters so many experiences. But the greater fact, I think, is that the love of music and the experience of art transcended racial and class differences, and drew us young white men into an experience of the lives of people not like us, and showed us that we share a common humanity.

I remember once, as a little kid, being over at a friend’s house splayed out on the living room floor, playing Legos or something, while his dad, home from work early, watched “Sanford & Son” on afternoon television. He sat in his recliner drinking a beer and laughing his butt off at the antics of Fred and Lamont. After the show ended, my friend’s dad said, to no one in particular, “How come all the best shows on TV are the nigger shows?” That was probably the first time I can recall being conscious of how stupid racism was. My friend’s dad’s race convictions were such that he couldn’t simply enjoy a funny comedy program; he couldn’t help resenting that the performers who brought him such delight were black. That poor man, who is still alive today last I heard, is the spiritual brother to cultural leftists like Emily Yahr, who are pissed off that people today unproblematically love a song first written by a black lesbian, but which is lately performed by a white country singer.

The miserable Holly G says: “I think the big lesson here is Black women belonged in country music all along.” Really? I think rather it shows that the borders between folk music, country music, and blues music is more porous than people think. Tracy Chapman wrote a folk song. Luke Combs persuasively recorded it as a country song. It’s not hard to imagine it interpreted as a blues song by a blues musician. The common denominator is that “Fast Car” is a song about suffering — the suffering of being poor, from a broken family, and full of hope for a better life. (And what is blues music other than the country music of black Americans?)

Here, from NPR — of all places! — is an appreciative essay about Combs’s cover by a white editor/host named Stephen Thompson, a Midwesterner just a few years younger than me, who fell in love with Tracy Chapman’s song when it came out, and who is delighted by Combs’s version. Thompson writes:

What I heard in Combs's cover, and what I keep experiencing as I've revisited it in the weeks since, is my own personal perfect storm of nostalgia — for a moment when country music opened my mind, and when a sheltered kid in Iola, Wis., learned that there are Americans out there who seize their opportunities, work hard and still live in shelters. The plainspoken chorus — "I remember when we were driving / Driving in your car / Speed so fast, it felt like I was drunk / City lights lay out before us / And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder" — felt then like a perfect, universal encapsulation of youth: a headrush of opportunity, joy, escape, connection. I feel that same mix of sensations listening to Combs, coupled with the sense of kinship that comes with knowing that someone else out there grew up with the song and came out feeling the same way.

Accompanying that kinship is a sense of hope — hope for a world with fewer boundaries and binaries and roped-in genres, where a North Carolina kid like Combs could grow up listening to Tracy Chapman and experience her as a gateway to telling truths about humanity and the world. It's not just a collective rediscovery of "Fast Car" that thrills me. It's the idea that somewhere, another small-town kid is turning on country radio in 2023 and experiencing the same world-expanding cocktail of wonder and discovery that I did.

Yes! That’s it! When I first heard “Fast Car,” I was not a poor kid from a broken family with an alcoholic father, and the rest. But I was a kid who had grown up in a small town where I didn’t fit in, and who dreamed of getting out, and going to a place where I had the feeling that I belonged, the feeling that I belonged. The feeling that I could be someone.

This is everybody, this longing. I’ve lived long enough now to have met and gotten to know people who grew up with real privilege, but who still felt that sense of being lost and lonely, and desiring escape to a place where they felt at home in the world, and worthy. If you have never felt that yourself, reader, then whatever your race, your religion, your sexual desire or income tax bracket, you are an unusual person. Tracy Chapman’s gift was to tell a particular story with universal implications. Luke Combs’s gift is to have brought his own gifts as a country musician to the song Tracy Chapman wrote, illuminated its universality by seeing it from a different angle, and touching the hearts and imaginations of millions of people who might never otherwise have heard it.

That is a triumph of art, a victory of humanity. And the chronic left-wing miserabilists who afflict our public life by reminding us that the experience of living is fundamentally about oppression and power dynamics — well, they can go to hell. They cannot be happy at all, and they cannot even be satisfied until and unless everybody hates life as much as they do, and learns to stay in their own boxes, hating themselves and everybody else not like themselves. To them, the bonds between human beings can only ever be ones of pain and exploitation. There can be no love between people, no shared understanding. There can only be suspicion and score-settling, and all art, music, and poetry must be browbeaten until it slouches and shrugs and marches in conformity with the leftist miserabilism.

Young people won’t believe me when I tell them that I’m old enough to remember when being on the Left meant you were less uptight than those right-wingers, and found life, and music, to be hopeful, even joyful, and an occasion for celebrating being alive, together. It did exist. I was there, I saw it, and was part of it, once.

I wish we could have it back.

---

(I sent this post to the entire list, but only subscribers can comment. I hope you’ll consider subscribing. Only five dollars per month, for between five to seven fresh posts each week.)