The weirdness of the racial politics of music is on full display in the aftermath of Tracy Chapman’s performance, with help from Luke Combs, of her popular 1988 song “Fast Car,” which Combs has of course turned into a huge hit. She is, or was, a kind of folk artist, a singer-songwriter who performs solo; he’s a country star who plays big venues that aren’t quite stadiums. She’s Black, a lesbian, and the first person of color to write a number-one country tune; he’s real white, apparently heterosexual, and the singer of many country songs.
Since Sunday, a ton of “takes” on the event have appeared, of course, but they boil down so far, and as far as I can tell, to three political salients. None of them makes enough sense of the song or the event, as I’ll explain after I’ve delivered a representative example of each; but we should always remember that Hegel was right, “the false is no longer false as a moment of the true.”
##########
First up, there is the bizarre response of the MAGA crowd, which has already distinguished itself by getting hysterically and hilariously conspiratorial about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce—by all accounts, a heterosexual relationship, but one that might bestow the muy masculine NFL imprimatur on Joe Biden by way of a Pfizer commercial, a liaison with a liberal pop star, and, oh, a psy-op masterminded by the, uh, Pentagon.
You have read (see above) the delirious tweet of the right-wing lunatic Ben Shapiro, a MAGA media star. The authenticity of the tweet is in question. But in view of the Right’s rage against all things diversified, it rings true whether the madman Shapiro wrote it or not.
##########
The second political salient comes from the once-vital center, where good feelings about racial progress and reconciliation abound, and abide. It’s a place that’s often confused for the residence of unearned white innocence, from which the theft of Black music and earnings has been business as usual for at least a century. It is surely that, but not only that, as the musicians who themselves have crossed, moved, debated, and doubted the color line since 1920 would attest. It has also been, and can still sometimes be, the place where what Harold Cruse called the “black aesthetic” is convened—the place where that color line is acknowledged and tested and changed, but never erased, by creating new compounds from the variant ethnic strains and cultural traditions that make America an unstable isotope to begin with.
From this vantage point, the Chapman/Combs collaboration was an inspiring moment. The view from here can be seen in the recent Facebook post from my friend Michael J. Tallon, the Surly Bartender who presides at Cafe No Se on the east end of La Antigua in Guatemala. (I’ve omitted his citation of the lyrics from “Fast Car” except one, on the assumption that you know them.)
“Like many of you, I watched the Tracy Chapman /Luke Combs duet from the Grammys last night and was powerfully and unexpectedly moved. Also, like many of you, I remember vividly how that song—and that artist—stood out in the spring of 1988, when the radio was blasting INXS, George Michael, and Terence Trent D’arby in a never-ending, power-pop loop. She was just so different. So human and real.
“Tracy Chapman’s voice and talent felt—then, and again last night—like a marble-smooth boulder somehow preexisting the river itself. There was all this stuff—all these gated drum tracks, borderline erotic videos, pyrotechnics—and then, suddenly . . . a lady with a voice and an acoustic guitar. She shut us all up for a minute, sort of a collectively stunned silence of truly listening before, inevitably, we were back into the radio roll of Rick Astley, Poison, and Bobby Brown.
“For all her understated, graceful humility, she left a deeper mark than those acts. One that made hearing her sing again last night more than a bit of nostalgia. It felt, instead, like an escape from temporality itself—a sudden relocation to a space of truth, beauty, and light. God, that was lovely.
“All day, I’ve enjoyed seeing that I shared that experience with so many others, many of whom have commented on the balm of a queer Black woman singing a duet with a white country music star in a way that, for a few minutes, united a very broken land. But there’s a painful truth inside that story of harmony. The story is about what Black folk and white folk were bonding over last night when you dig into the song itself. ‘Fast Car’ is not a ditty about a road trip, after all. It’s an aching plea for meaning inside the heart of poverty, abuse, intergenerational trauma, and unrelenting pain. . . .
“What united the nation last night, beneath the artistry and the harmony of the performance, was a pain that is profoundly familiar to anyone who has had to make those choices because when they turned around, they were all alone with the need. . . What unites us is hope, based on nothing but how sometimes that’s all we have left in the larder. We’re united by how gallingly unfair it is to be stuck in the churn.
‘You got a fast car,/Is it fast enough so we can fly away?/Still gotta make a decision,/Leave tonight or live and die this way.’
“What unites us is the tragedy of how whole decades can go by with no cavalry, no relief, no ending to the pain and the loneliness until we’re brought, once again, to the decision point of failure or flight—yet another final conversation with ourselves wherein we realize it’s all over without escape. . . .
“It was beautiful to take a moment last night and sing that song together, to feel the unity and empathy arcing between two incredibly gifted musicians who lit up our night. But it would be more beautiful, still, if we remembered why Tracy Chapman wrote that lament to begin with. She wrote it because, in America, it’s too damn easy for anyone without the dollars to defend themselves—white or black, gay or straight, immigrant or native-born, cis or trans—to disappear into the darkness without a friend, without a sound, without a song.”
##########
The third political salient in the response to the Chapman/Combs collaboration comes from somewhere on the Left—from Tressie McMillan Cottom, a New York Times opinion writer whose commentary on the plight of Claudine Gay and the meaning of “merit” was uniquely insightful. From this perspective, the color line is so deeply inscribed in every cultural practice and gesture—particularly in musical genres—that it might as well be written in stone. The only crossings at such a border wall are illicit if not illegal. By the corresponding logic of “cultural appropriation,” which might these days be called “colonial” confiscation, a country cover of a folk song written by a Black lesbian must disfigure music that was originally untainted by commercial considerations or by racialized generic codes. Here is how Cottom put it at NYT yesterday, February 7:
“I wanted to bask in the glow cast by Tracy Chapman’s brief return to performing Sunday night at the Grammys, but other people’s cultural projections dragged me down.
“Chapman performed with the appropriately deferential country music superstar Luke Combs. He sang just below her powerful register, often choosing to fade away from the microphone. But in the days since they stood onstage together, the public perception of his deference has morphed into a cringe-worthy form of symbolic politics — namely, the idea that the performance stands for some intangible idea of hope and reconciliation.
“The unnamed politics of that joint Grammys performance are that a Black folk singer (embodying progressivism) and a white male country singer (embodying … something antithetical to progressivism) made music together. The consumer package of the Grammys promises a nice, neat emotional resolution to centuries of racial tension.
“Combs’s version of “Fast Car” is a bona fide hit. It gave Chapman her highest-charting pop single and made her the first Black woman to write a No. 1 country single. Ever.
“The cover is faithful to the tune, but Combs’s version lacks social and political urgency. That is a difference between folk music and country music. In folk music, the messenger matters. When Combs sings “Fast Car,” the lyrics are filtered through his identity. Our country expects men like Combs to be more inclined to be running to something than away.
“That isn’t to say that white American men don’t face social and political issues. But in Combs’s performance of the song, no riffs hint at the grittiness of navigating masculinity when you aren’t born of privilege. No key shifts evoke images of depression, anxiety and identity crisis. Combs’s interpretation of Chapman’s lyrics feels like an ode to an actual car. What a waste.
“The cover is popular in a genre that has long been roiled by racial conflict. Over the past five years, artists and activists have tried to get mainstream Big Country to get with the multiracial program, but they have won little more than nominal, marginal inclusion rather than a reckoning with the industry’s soul. However lovely, Chapman’s and Combs’s performance ties too neat a bow on years of conflict within country music over who gets to play with the genre’s big boys.
“Combs’s crossover hit coasts on the greatness of a Black artist who is already a legend. For country music to claim this as any kind of reconciliation feels like it stole someone else’s medal and declared itself a winner in a foot race that it never ran.
“That makes for a fine pop performance, but it does not say much about social progress.”
##########
All right then, in order. The first response makes perverse sense by grasping Combs’s deference to his onstage antecedent as symbolic atonement for white men making big bucks off the unpaid, unheralded labor of Black people, in this case a talented Black woman who happens also to be a lesbian. Shapiro’s anger sounds a lot like Vivek Ramaswamy’s because both are up against DEI imperatives that smack of affirmative action, a gross violation of the very last unicorn, the “color-blind justice” which the Constitution supposedly demands. The idea that white males, or men in general, are disadvantaged by diversity in hiring or in anything else is, of course preposterous except on the assumption of a macro-economic scarcity which is so comprehensive and severe that it creates a zero-sum logic. But it is the scarcity of imagination that disables the MAGA crowd—these people can’t think their way beyond what they believe was true in and of the fabled 1950s. They forget that the mongrel music called rock ‘n roll got invented then.
My friend Mike’s response makes more sense than Shapiro’s—well, duh—because it recalls the time when the differences between blues, country, and jazz were indecipherable, or at any rate hadn’t hardened into generic domains (“race records,” etc.), because jug bands and glee clubs and itinerant, ad hoc ensembles played the same songs, most often for the enjoyment of audiences that wanted to get up and dance. But that was the time of late Jim Crow, in the 1920s and 30s, hardly a time of racial harmony or reconciliation.
Perhaps Mike is silently invoking a more recent moment of such harmony and reconciliation, maybe the time of rock ‘n roll, or the advent of the hip-hop nation? I think not, because the bond that unites us in his interpretation of the lyrics and the Chapman/Combs duet is the pain of economic destitution and desperation. He’s speaking for the people “without the dollars to defend themselves”—he’s speaking the language of class struggle, not civil rights, racial equity, or gender parity.
And that language offers a reply to Cottom’s complaint, at the level of both lyrics and performance. She emphasizes the differences between the race and the gender and the sexuality of the performers. For example, she’s right to say that in Combs’s cover, “no riffs hint at the grittiness of navigating masculinity when you aren’t born of privilege.” But the reason for that is simple: Combs sings the song from the “feminized” subject position of a working-class person without resources except those he/she/they can muster by working at a convenience store, as a clerk passively waiting on every kind of asshole. In the chorus, he sings, “Your arm felt nice wrapped around my shoulder.” Does that sound like someone who‘s navigating masculinity—or a man who sings, with feeling, as if he were a girl dreaming, desperately dreaming, of escape from a squalid, miserable life of poverty, even homelessness (“We’ll move out of the shelter,/Buy a bigger house, move to the suburbs”)?
That impersonation is, or should be, no more unthinkable than the millionaire Bruce Springsteen performing as—and convincing us for the moment that he is—a working class hero. It is, or should be, no more unthinkable than the movie star Brad Pitt playing, and convincing us for the moment that he is, the sidekick of a has-been actor in late-60s LA.
Speaking of a scarcity of imagination. But look, Cottom isn’t wrong to make us ask whether Combs “coasts on the greatness of a Black artist.” Chapman looked happy and confident on stage Sunday night, but she sounded nervous. Combs looked nervous, and sounded deferential, as Cottom notes.
But the cover he did casts a wider net than the original recording, and not just because the country audience is larger than any other. Combs’s faithful translation speaks the language of class grievance, fear, and struggle, and so speaks for working people of many colors, but it never lets us forget the origin in a Black woman’s lonely, tentative, first person voice and story.
Very interesting to map the perspectives across the reactionary-liberal-radical configurations of contemporary US society. I have two questions:
(1) Your Springsteen reference is apt because isn't "Fast Car" a kind of remake of "Born to Run"? I don't mean remake in a pejorative sense, just that it is in the tradition of the working-class escape/no escape song. Both songs are remakes of "We Gotta Get Outta This Place." These songs all resonate in the moment *between* escape and no escape. They are, in this sense, liminal songs. There's really no arrival or departure in them, just the moment at the door to the car. For some, you can interpret the songs as really proposing the opposite of their titles: Slow Car Not Going Anywhere, Tramps like us baby we were born to try to run but fail to do so, We are actually not going to get out of this place. Or they could lead in the directions they wish for, that they desire. That's what makes them powerful. They are in the moment when the door hinge might be shutting for the trip or shutting for the night.
(2) I once heard Barbara Fields, of all people, perform a bit of racecraft by saying that Black people would never want to listen to country music, and I thought, what?!?!? Country music is so much IN the African diasporic tradition (not to mention beloved in Africa itself). It is coded non-Black as a way to cover this fact up it seems to be: the polyglot nature of the US working-class (sheeet, the global working class)? To that end, many country stars, both identifying as male or female, play precisely with gender, masculinity, race, and class all in the mix. In this sense there's a long tradition of mixing it up in the music, maybe why on stage at the Grammys, one could say, maybe, that Chapman dressed as the butch male performer and Combs seemed a bit more glitzy and glam...not that it was *so* strongly contrasted, but there was a wonderful presentation there of blurring, mixing, and offering something meant, like the song itself, not so much to assert a resolution as to hang in the balance, like a pair of dice from the rearview mirror?
Michael
Very persuasive, Jim!