The revisionist history of the song “Fast Car”
It’s come to this:
One recollection that I can confirm with the aid of historical evidence is that [in 1988] ‘Fast Car’ by Tracy Chapman was everywhere. I heard it in seedy gay bars, at civil-service leaving dos, at family barbecues. It is one of those songs that announces itself instantly as a classic for the ages. But unlike most songs in that category, it is beguiling in a subtle way. The acoustic guitar riff is simplicity itself, with just a few repeated, easily imitated notes…
It was a multi-platinum international mega-smash hit…
A recent cover of the song by country singer Luke Combs has returned ‘Fast Car’ to public attention. It has spent the past three weeks at the top of the Billboard Country Airplay Chart in the US, and has reached No2 in the Billboard Hot 100.
I remember the song well, too. It was one of those songs that grabbed you immediately – something about Chapman’s voice, as well as the unexpected rhythms of the song, and of course the understated but heartbreaking lyrics. Although Chapman herself was black and perhaps gay (who cared or even knew about the latter?), the song had no color. It was about hope, how love and obligation can tie a person to a life of failed dreams.
Now, a country artist – a white man, since to the left this is highly significant – named Luke Combs has made the song popular again. Cover songs of old hits are ubiquitous and ordinarily non-controversial, but guess what? This one isn’t allowed to stand without the woke crowd creating a fiction about the new version versus the old:
Sadly, in the Great Age of Stupid that we live in, somebody had to say something daft about the cover, to make it all about race and sexuality. Step forward Emily Yahr of the Washington Post. In a tweet announcing her article, she wrote: ‘As Luke Combs’s hit cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” dominates the country charts, it’s bringing up some complicated emotions in fans and singers who know that Chapman, as a queer black woman, would have an almost zero chance at that achievement herself.’
There is so much wrong in this tweet. For one thing, the fact that the original version is very clearly not a country song, and that Chapman is not a country artist, seems to have passed Yahr by entirely…
The article is on an even stickier wicket when it comes to Chapman’s sexuality. It tells us that Chapman ‘does not discuss her personal life’. Nevertheless, Yahr feels perfectly entitled to do so based on hearsay. She is also blasé about pigeonholing Chapman with the ridiculous word ‘queer’.
Worse still, the thrust of the Washington Post article more or less erases Chapman’s huge success in the 1980s, implying that being a black lesbian thwarted her ambitions. Back in the real world, Chapman was nominated for several Grammy Awards, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year for ‘Fast Car’ (Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ beat her to those, somewhat incredibly). She won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.
Oh, it’s just us old folk who remember. Yahr herself seems rather young, if you go to her Twitter page. The young seem increasingly willing to just make stuff up and ignore history, even recent pop song history, in order to make some sort of leftist point about racism or another “ism.”
Some of the replies there are as follows:
“Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman was nominated for 3 Grammy Awards including Record of the Year and Song of the Year. She won for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and Best New Artist.
She has 7 other nominations for Grammy Awards and two wins.
Never heard of Luke Combs but remember when Tracy’s Album blew up. I tend to listen to metal and I could still sing every word of her song to this day. But I guess that doesn’t make for much of a grievance story.
At this point, I think these “journalists” simply write these stories for the sake of controversy. They spend no time bothering to research the actual topic and instead pretend history doesn’t exist prior to today.
How old are you? This song was top of the charts when it came out and is STILL iconic to Gen X. Sad commentary from you.
Darius Rucker is black and is quite popular in country…
Are you serious.
Tracy Chapman absolutely crushed it with this song.
I still hear it all the time.
I think your editor should be fired for letting you do this story.
I know, right? It’s not like a Black woman could ever do a cover of a country song and have it blow up to be a worldwide hit!
“AND IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIYEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUU…”
It just goes on and on like that, and I see no retraction or contrition from Yahr or the “democracy dies in darkness” WaPo – and come to think of it, isn’t that WaPo slogan racist?
Whether Yahr is a foil or a knave, few will read the comments, or even much of the article. They’ll see the headline, have their woke assumptions reinforced and move on. For those too young to remember, or who willfully forget, this will be their conclusion: Tracy Chapman’s powerful song was largely overlooked when it came out, such was the fate if Queer Black artists back in those horribly racist times of 1988. Now it’s getting attention because it’s been covered by a white man. Such is the way in the horribly racist times of 2023.
Somebody tweeted a turn on Yahr’s tweet about ‘Fast Car’ to apply to ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston and how it reached peaks that it’s poor writer from rural Tennessee (Dolly Parton) could never reach.
It was a perfect reply.
This Emily Yahr person has given us one of the more idiotic hot-take reactions to a minor pop culture event in an era that seems to be dominated by hot-take idiotic reactions to pop culture events.
It’s a fantastic song. I haven’t heard the countrified version of it yet. I’m not much of a country music listener (especially newer stuff) and the name Luke Combs seems only vaguely familier to me, but the lyrics are definitely perfect fodder to be adapted into a poignant country ballad.
Luke Combs is a huge star right now probably him and Morgan Wallen are the two biggest country stars at the moment.
I don’t think his cover is anything special really but as the spiked article mentions he doesn’t change the gender of the narrator so his version includes the line ‘working as a checkout girl’ just like the original which I really like.
The big thing is that his cover exposes the song to a generation that in my experience and this writer would seem to show is woefully uninformed about anything that happened before last week.
Also brings some nice coin for the writer Chapman which I’m sure she appreciates.
When a song is covered by multiple artists it really changes the revenue potential for the composer. Some of the wealthiest people in the music industry are song-writers whose names most of us do not know. Stars who really, really rake in the cash are stars who compose their own songs; songs which are then covered by others. Paul McCartney is a perfect example.
From what I’ve read of her reaction; Ms. Chapman is a true artist and glad that someone is reinterpreting her creation and others enjoy it. I’m sure she also likes the royalty checks that roll in.
Anyone who takes the WaPoo seriously must be an imbecile. It is the house organ for the DC class and most know nothing outside of DC. A lot of Ann Althouse commenters are drifting away as she keeps finding her material in the same old lefty spots, There is now a group of former and occasional commenters that is larger than her blog. Some of us come here for common sense as much as anything.
bezos has made it worse then when buffett owned a controlling share, that is saying something,
I thought the comments by Chapman and the response by Combs were wonderful. Fantastic.
More please.
I can honestly say I’ve never heard, or head of, the song.
Which reminds me of the past success of the late, great Charley Pride.
Which reminds me of a recent exchange re “Til There Was You” from The Music Man. I pointed out that the Beatles had covered it,and another commenter replied that the royalties from the Beatles cover provided more revenue than Meredith Wilson had made from his own recordings of The Music Man.
I have a Tracy Chapman cassette somewhere in a box.
Good old Tracy Chapman. It so happens that during setbreak at the Dead and Company show at Oracle Park in San Francisco this past Friday they played her 1988 smash hit album. Fast Car is the second song on the album and the opener is none other than her pro-crime song Talkin’ Bout a Revolution. That song was also everywhere in 1988 and contains these lovely lines:
Poor people gonna rise up
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what’s theirs
Rather ironic choice given that San Francisco is getting it good and hard these days, with retailers leaving downtown in droves.
No doubt many GenX and older who were around then thought the song was awesome. Careful what you wish for…
As an aside, back then I knew a young Jewish woman who claimed to have been Tracy’s lesbian lover at Tufts University. At the time she was with a male friend.
At time thought it ok but just another song, did appreciate its meaning and couldn’t care what Tracy’s sexual liason was, the song didn’t mention any, just one person wanting to run away with another.
Will sometime listen to new version.
No a C&W fan though good songs are good songs, Luke does a nice version
wait till someone does the rick astley cover,
Off topic, but still of interest.
From CNBC: These are America’s 10 best states to live and work in for 2023, and there are some notable omissions
Which implies that “culture wars are raging” in “red” states, but culture wars are NOT “raging” in “blue” states. Interesting.
Also From CNBC: These are America’s 10 worst states to live and work in for 2023, and there’s a big surprise at the very bottom
I found out that the CNBC Best/Worst States to Live in and Work rankings came from America’s Top States for Business 2023: The full rankings , in “Life, Health, and Inclusion.” Here are the Top Ten in Life, Health and Inclusion:”
Similarly, the bottom 10 in the “Life, Health, and Inclusion” ranking correspond to the 10 worst states to live and work in in 2023, with the bottom ranking corresponding to the worst:
In the next post, I will compare these rankings to population growth rankings.
see relying on cnbc is your first mistake,
Compare the “best/worst to live in and work” ranking to ranking states according to population growth. It would stand to reason that Americans would move to states that have a superior environment to live in and work, would it not? It turns out there is a BIG disconnect, where states high in population growth rank at the bottom of “Best states to live in and work,” and conversely, states ranked at the top of “Best places to live in and work” also rank low in population growth. Population growth of states from Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore (2023)
I used the spreadsheet to rank the states according to population growth, with the top population growth ranked at #1 (Idaho) and the worst population growth ranked at 50th Alaska (West Virginia @ 49th, etc.). I left out the District of Colombia, because it isn’t included in the CNBC Business survey
Similarly, I ranked the states according to in “Best States to Live in and Work” from 1st ( best) – Vermont- to 50th(worst) Texas.
Note that there are four states that are rated in the top ten states to live in and work: Vermont, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Connecticut, that are also rated in the bottom ten in population growth.
Vermont is ranked as #1- absolute best- in “Best/Worst States to Live in and Work,” and 46th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
New Jersey is ranked as #3rd in “Best/Worst t States to Live in and Work,” and 43rd in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore”
Hawaii is ranked as #5th in “Best/Worst states to live and work,” and 44th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
Connecticut is ranked as #10 th in “Best/Worst states to live in and work,” and 41th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
Similarly, of the ten states that are rated in the bottom ten states to live in and work, rank in the top for population growth.
Texas is ranked as 50th -absolute worst- in “Best/Worst States to Live in and Work,” and 8th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
South Carolina tied at 46th in “Best/Worst States to Live in and Work,” and 5th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
Tennessee is ranked at 43rd in “Best/Worst States to Live in and Work,” and ranked at 11th best in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
Florida is ranked at 41st in “Best/worst states to live and work,” and ranked at 12th in population growth in “Here Are the States Americans Don’t Want to Live In Anymore.”
According to CNBC, Americans are masochists who move to the states that give the worst living and working conditions. If you a correlation of the rankings in the CNBC “Best States to Live in and Work” from the “Life, Health, and Inclusion” rankings in the Business Survey, with population growth rankings , you get -0.31.
I note that The Federalist also covered this, but because I wrote most of this yesterday, before The Federalist posted, I am posting this comment
Gringo,
Bizarro world. Who you gon’na believe, the media or your lyin’ eyes?
Why would anyone in their right mind want to live in Tim Walz and Keith Ellison’s Minnesota?
It’s a territorial thing. Yes, everybody heard and knew the song and was moved by its story. But for leftists back then it was a convenient political anthem. Because everything is political. The race and gender angle made someone’s writing and publishing the article even more likely.
It’s still Tracy Chapman’s song. She wrote it and the lyrics still apply more to her than to Luke Combs. This is more of a homage than cultural appropriation or anything else. There’s no quarrel between Chapman and Combs. He introduced a new audience to her song.
It’s not a great state to live and work in if there aren’t many jobs, and you can’t afford a house, and the taxes and rent are killing you.
It may be as much a question of class bias as of political/ideological bias. If you are an affluent professional you can afford to “care” about things that most people have too much trouble to bother worrying about.
I found his cover of “Fast Car” rather uninspiring and uncreative. I expect some noticeable interpretative changes when one does a cover, but the two versions aren’t really all that different.
I hear Chapman’s version all the time- at least a few times a month on the radio. It is a great song and a sad one.
I lived in Connecticut for 20 years. I lived most of that time in the wonderful rural small town of Newtown. And it is the kind of place I wouldn’t mind dying in either except for one thing- the taxes are oppressive.
I guess the WaPoo story was clickbait, like those things you see at the side of the Yahoo Finance page.
Whateverrrrr(vocal fry).
Nowadays, I rarely listen to music on the radio and haven’t heard this cover of Fast Car. This past weekend my daughter and son-in-law visited and the new cover was mentioned. The similarities between the desperation of some young black kids to get out of the ghetto and many young rural whites to get out of dying small rural towns struck me as an obvious one. If not for her deep political bias, I’d suggest that Yahr take a long drive through the poorest parts of Appalachia. Not that it would likely get through her blinders.
“There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.” Jonathan Swift
Yahr’s article sounds like something that might have been written by the notoriously inaccurate ChatGPT. It’s kind of hard to argue against AI replacing your job if you can’t even do better than it in the areas that are widely known to be weak points for AI.
junior on:
To me, the Yahr article seems like it was written by the Babylon Bee.
I was getting a haircut recently and I was talking to another stylist about a local NBA player signing a max extension (Anthony Edwards) to get $50M a year.
My stylist, a portly young woman, suggested she should get paid like that. I told her she’d have to make me look like Richard Gere for me to get behind that suggestion.
After a short pause, I said, “You have no idea who Richard Gere is, do you?”
“No,” was her answer.
So there it is. History started before Richard Gere’s career was over, so I downshifted to Ryan Gosling, and the conversation could start again.
Emily Yahr can’t be bothered to know what happened in 1988. History hadn’t started yet.
As for choosing to live in Minnesota, my mother’s here, and I can’t leave her. My sensibilities are wounded every single day, but until she’s “unavailable,” as we say, I have to stay.
I appreciated this last part of the article Neo linked:
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/18/the-woke-erasure-of-tracy-chapman/
This is a new low for Pravda on the Potomac. While one expects bias and partisanship, the sheer ignorance of Yahr’s piece is breathtaking.
Which reminds me of the past success of the late, great Charley Pride.
Gringo:
Exactly. And he had a helluva run:
_________________________
His greatest musical success came in the early to mid-1970s, when he was the best-selling performer for RCA Records except for Elvis Presley. During the peak years of his recording career (1966–1987), he had 52 top-10 hits on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, 30 of which made it to number one. He won the Entertainer of the Year award at the Country Music Association Awards in 1971 and was awarded a Grammy for “Best Country Vocal Performance, Male” in 1972.
Pride is one of three African-American members of the Grand Ole Opry (the others being DeFord Bailey and Darius Rucker). He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charley_Pride
_________________________
I remember being surprised to learn Pride was black. Not that it was a big deal. Just, oh, he’s black.
Here’s a link to the official live version of Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car”:
__________________________
You know I’d love to hear you sing along. This is one of my favorite songs of all time. It’s called “Fast Car.”
–Luke Combs, “Fast Car (Official Live Video)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr7oYjnt3bM
__________________________
It’s got a bigger sound than Chapman’s, but otherwise it’s quite close in phrasing and guitar playing.
I like seeing the stadium crowd and their excitement. You can see many are singing along.
Yancey Ward
A childhood friend recently served a term in the CT legislature. Loved the leg and all the political give and take in it , but not so the campaigning. A staunch Democrat, she campaigned on improving the CT economy, without realizing that a big reason for the CT economy being in the dumps was the gross overspending by the state government.
A lot of my childhood friends had fathers who worked for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, a.k.a. The Aircraft. The Aircraft’s plant left East Hartford for South Carolina, in part due to the taxes in CT. Yet CNBC tells us CT is a great place to work, and SC is a lousy place to work. But at least The Aircraft is working in South Carolina.
Look at Yahr:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/washpost/57f2027b-73ed-448e-b497-38ad3452a54b.png&w=270&h=270
“It is profoundly weird that people who claim to be standing up for gays and lesbians are actually the ones erasing the history and achievements of homosexual people.”
Something similar has been going on in sci-fi/fantasy novels where female authors are concerned.
Tracey Chapman should do a duet with Luke Combs performing Fast Car live. Preferably on CMT during the Country Music awards. Alternating lines and some harmony here and there. No doubt it would receive a standing ovation .
I’m actually grateful to Yahr. I’d never heard of Tracy Chapman. During the time she was popular I was spending a lot of time floating around in the ocean on Large Gray Boats.
I listen to country music and I’d heard Luke’s version of her song, but didn’t know the origins. Yahr stirring up this controversy brought it to my attention.
Now that I’ve heard it, I like Tracy Chapman’s original version better. It has a smoother, more natural flow to the lyrics. Luke’s is a little slower and almost…hesitant, I guess I’d call it.
Of course, finding that I liked that song from her prompted me to listen to some of her other stuff. She’s very talented. Some of her music I like enough to buy and add to my playlist.
So, even though the premise of it is the epitome of woke stupidity, I’m thankful for the controversy because without it, I’d have never been exposed to Tracy’s music.
Bill Mahar — New Rule: Democracy Dies In Dumbness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu9JGK_yHo
The real solution is to stop listening to these yammering idiots and let the lame merdia die the way it was meant to, years ago.
Amazing; someone comes out with their version of a song and some incredibly stupid, dumb moron assigns all sorts of social implications to this.
I can only surmise that the moron, Emily Yahr, believes she is demonstrating to her cocktail party social and business circle pals, as well as the entire leftist/progressive/Marxist-Leninist community, her superior intellect and reaffirming to them her membership in that community of leftist zealots.
I have not read her article and will not, nor do I know anything about her, but I will take a wild guess that she has written zero about pimps, hoe’s and degrading sexual activities the rap songs of black “artists” describe about black females.
But you see, that’s OK, because blacks are given a free pass when describing female blacks as sex objects.
And while on that topic of “free pass;” note when a white female is in a tiny bikini, well, that’s sexist and demeaning to women. When a morbidly obese black female is shown wearing an outfit bereft of adequate “coverage,” well, that’s OK. She’s just demonstrating pride in her body.
Anyway Emily Yahr has achieved her primary goal of being the center of attention by her stupid, idiotic article. And frankly, IMHO, that is the motivating factor for folks like Emily; they need to be the center of attention.
I am not sure if it this Yahr person’s column or someone else who was indignant that Luke Combs covered Tracy Chapman’s song, but… Whoever it was, was apparently not aware (and didn’t know to use Google) that “Hound Dog” was written by Leiber and Stoller. While slamming Combs for “cultural appropriation” for covering Chaprman’s song, they also slammed Elvis Presley for covering “Big Mama Thronton’s song.”
Apparently, I’m an idiot since I didn’t know Tracy Chapman was black or gay(queer). Music being primarily a audio experience allows you to know nothing about the person producing it unless you want to. I don’t pay that much attention to most of the singers and groups even of songs I like.
I do remember the song and liked it at the time. Frankly it is very much like a lot of songs by people like John Mellencamp, Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen who certainly have crossed over to the country stations if not charts.
I remember the song from 1988 and thought it was boring then, but the “In Living Color” parody was funny. As for the cover? Well, I’m forced to hear modern country music (corporate, maudlin, awful country-pop with faked, hyped-up Southern accents) when I shop in my local grocery store here in rural Virginia, so I’m sure as hell not going to seek out this song. Sounds to me like the worst of both worlds.
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