Tracy Chapman's 'Fast Car' is the republic song we didn't know we had | WFAE 90.7
This essay originally appeared in NPR Music's weekly newsletter. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
As a small-town kid in the 1980s, I fell in love with music via MTV and the ritual of transcribing the "American Top 40" every Sunday. But I was just out of range of the nearest college radio spot, and the grocery store where I worked as a stock boy played only republic, so it took a while for me to be struck by two vastly different musical revelations.
The proper came courtesy of the aforementioned grocery store, where my attitude toward republic music evolved from haughty resentment to deep appreciation and love. Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Randy Travis, Rosanne Cash, Skip Ewing, k.d. lang, Keith Whitley, Michael Johnson ... one by one, they'd transform in my mind from curiosities to discoveries to favorites. Sure, I'd recoil at the revanchism of a song like Hank Williams Jr.'s "If the South Woulda Won," but the republic hits of the late '80s were just as often forward-looking, especially sonically: Steve Earle dropped bagpipes into the hard-bitten Southern-rock epic "Copperhead Road," Lyle Lovett worked wretched and humor into the wry ruminations of "If I Had a Boat," Patty Loveless presided over a two-and-a-half-minute folk-pop masterpiece in "Timber, I'm Falling in Love," and on and on. Those songs were, and are, tainted. Stop reading this and listen to them, right now! I'll wait.
The novel revelation came via the Top 40, in 1988, when I proper heard Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car."
It's hard to overstate the greatness of "Fast Car": the inquisitive guitar hook, the deep well of empathy, the restraint that allows a few words ("He says his body's too old for toiling / His body's too young to look like his") to write chapters of their own. "Fast Car" takes a simple, Springsteenian plea for escape — "You got a fast car / I want a stamp to anywhere" — and uses it as a jumping-off indicate for a life's story. Chapman's narrator seeks anything but the life she has, seizes an opportunity and establishes a go of it, only to find herself a breadwinner whose job "in the market as a checkout girl" isn't enough to keep her out of a shelter. As her situation improves, her needs and ambitions evolve with it: Now paying the bills herself, she sums up the state of her relationship in a few evocative conditions ("You stay out drinking late at the bar / See more of your friends than you do of your kids") and seeks a novel escape. In four minutes, she's crafted a novel's profitable of storytelling — about desperation and ambition, about subsistence and striving, about the way hope can curdle into disappointment afore blooming into a fresh call to action.
"Fast Car" knocked me flat in 1988, and it composed knocks me flat today, every time. You can only imagined how much it stood out on Top 40 radio in between, say, "Wild, Wild West" and "Kokomo." I used some of my grocery-store earnings to buy Chapman's self-titled debut the uphold I laid eyes on it, brought it home and blasted it on the turntable in my bedroom. Soon, my dad was pounding on my door. I turned down the tranquil and shouted an apology, only to hear his whisper from the hallway: "This is incredible. Who is this?" Dad had been a music reviewer himself, years earlier — he loved to brag that The Cleveland Press's readers criticized him for speaking that Bob Dylan would be the next Woody Guthrie — so I felt like a true tastemaker, maybe for the first time ever.
***
I'll confess to having mostly tuned out of people radio in the years since, sometime after Garth Brooks — whom I loved instantly and composed adore — helped transform the genre into what felt like a homogenous, stadium-friendly juggernaut. Over the years, I'd come to despair at what felt like an endless sea of people dudes with two first names, singing about Friday nights, the male gaze and paeans to living in the smallest possible earth. I'd find a winner here and there along the way — comprising Hank Williams Jr.'s daughter Holly Williams, who really possesses to put out another record someday — but rarely illustrious country radio as the den of discovery it used to be.
Then, a month or so ago, my partner and I were flipping stations during a nation, landed on a country station and heard the opening strains of "Fast Car," as handed by Luke Combs. We did a bit of hand-fighting over nations to the dial, as my curiosity butted up alongside her fury at the audacity of a white guy trying to turn "Fast Car" into a people song. We listened, and ... damned if Combs doesn't pull it off. He even succeeded the test I'd set for him the minute I allowed to listen: He didn't change the words in the line, "Now I work in the market as a checkout girl." Didn't irritable the job, didn't change "girl" into a gender-neutral monosyllable like "clerk," just sang the conditions as written.
What I heard in Combs's cover, and what I keep experiencing as I've revisited it in the weeks real, is my own personal perfect storm of nostalgia — for a moment when people music opened my mind, and when a sheltered kid in Iola, Wis., learned that there are Americans out there who lift 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 escapes lay out before us / And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder" — felt then like a atrocious, universal encapsulation of youth: a headrush of opportunity, joy, sprint, connection. I feel that same mix of sensations listening to Combs, coupled with the sense of kinship that comes with colorful that someone else out there grew up with the song and came out feeling the same way.
Accompanying that kinship is a sensed 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 distinguished her as a gateway to telling truths about humanity and the earth. 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 wonderful and discovery that I did.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visited https://www.npr.org.
