Tracy Chapman: "Fast Car"

I can see why Luke Combs is drawn to "Fast Car"; it's a great song. I'm not sure that I'm ready to fence off these verses from all interested straight white men--but I can understand that the issue is complicated, at the least. Anyone who pretends the question isn't complicated....is just being disingenuous.

One thing I like about Tracy Chapman's work is that the song itself is "a fast car." It collapses ten or fifteen years into a few swift verses. It's an entire marriage--from courtship to divorce. It's also pitiless; there is nothing "gauzy" in the verses. Finally, it's a suspense tale; it's like someone is turning the screws, tighter and tighter. (If country music is about characters and storytelling, then "Fast Car" is "a country song." It makes me think of Taylor Swift, although Chapman seems to have a worldliness that Taylor Swift could only dream about.)

Like someone in a Kafka story, the heroine is "fucked" before she begins. "My old man's got a problem. He live with the bottle, that's the way it is....So I quit school, and that's what I did." In this setting, the heroine makes a bad choice; she picks a man, almost at random. "We go cruising, entertain ourselves. You still ain't got a job." There is a question between the lines: Is Chapman really going to make things worse for this character? Then, the great, unsparing, final verse: "You stay out drinking late at the bars, see more of your friends than you do of your kids...Take your fast car and keep on driving."

This song usually gives me full body chills, because it just seems to be a truthful statement about life. It doesn't try too hard. People talk about a shock of recognition; you're reading a story or novel and think, "I *know* this person." That's the impact of Chapman's song. I know this person; I've always known this person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIOAlaACuv4

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