It’s sunny and pretty warm for February, and now seems like a good time to tell new friends that it’s not always tilting at injustice here in this tiny corner of the internet. Sometimes it’s other thoughts; sometimes it’s nonsense.
But I welcome you and hope you’ll enjoy the journey.
This morning I watched Tracy Chapman’s performance at the Grammys with some guy named Luke Combs I’ve never heard of who apparently covered her song “Fast Car.” And I couldn’t help but notice the article put Combs’ name first.
Huh, maybe we are talking about injustice again.
First of all, please watch it, Chapman looks like a Chapman from the Future, and it makes for a strange quantum moment in time connecting those days hearing song unlike any I’d heard before, a song that told the story of a whole life, with whole people, to right now when I have a more seasoned, we’ll say, perspective on it all. All those years, collapsed into nothing.
The only way Chapman has changed is the gray hair. Her voice is just as solid, just as clear.
Combs was good, sure, and from what I understand his cover has done well, but–and this is not my call-but it doesn’t feel like his song to sing.
Because when you have a song that is about a life experience of people who are not white dudes, having it sung by a white dude changes the entire perspective.
At the very least, when Chapman is singing, the person telling the story is a woman, and a Black woman. There are two other layers to the song that vanish when Combs sing it. A song about the struggles women have to keep families afloat often with little support from their partners and while caring for parents suddenly becomes a song about a white guy trying his best, essentially turning the song on its head.
Granted this is my opinion, and only my opinion.
But while watching the video, Chapman looked at Combs with something in her eyes I couldn’t name, I couldn’t decipher. Maybe it was simply the emotion of the moment after all these years, with all these famous singers mouthing along with her. She did win Grammy for the song in 1988.
Maybe it was that it took a white guy singing her song for this moment to come back around.
People have been buying “Fast Car” like wild since the performance, apparently, which is wonderful, I hope she makes a well-deserved fortune, and she’s receiving royalties for the cover, of course.
But when you think of the personal nature of art, it’s a little like sharing your soul with someone else, and no one can sing your soul as well as you.
And with that, I will call it a week. Have a fabulous Friday and a lovely weekend.
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