"Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman + Black History Month playlist, February 3, 2022

In 1988, Tracy Chapman's first single "Fast Car" rose to Number 5 on Billboard's Hot 100. Her performance at Wembley Stadium in Nelson Mandela's 7oth birthday tribute helped to kick-start the singer's career. At the time Mandela was still serving time in prison, and the tribute concert gave a strong message to world against South African apartheid. Chapman produced a string of hits in the late '80s and early '90s, but she is best known for today's song, "Fast Car."

SPEED SO FAST, IT FELT LIKE I WAS DRUNK.  I'm kicking myself because this song is incredible, and it's kind of like I'm just now understanding its beauty. Last week, listened to a cover by Boyce Avenue and Kina Grannis, and that was my first exposure to the song as a whole, but today I listened to the original, which is better than the Boyce Avenue version. For the life of me, I can't remember where I've read about Chapman, whether it was Malcom Gladwell or Chuck Klosterman or if it was something I heard in a YouTube video, but I vaguely remember the discussion about the anomaly of Chapman's career. In a Rolling Stone interview, Chapman discusses her musical influences and whether or not she embracing being a folk singer, a genre most associated with white singer-songwriters. She says:

        I think what comes to people’s minds is the Anglo-American tradition of the folk

       singer, and they don’t think about the black roots of folk music. So in that sense,

       no, I don’t. My influences and my background are different. In some ways, it’s a

       combination of the black and white folk traditions.

If I remember my prior reading correctly, the music industry really didn't know how to market Chapman because music was, and still is, largely segregated. I'm certainly not a music expert, just a fan. And for not being a music expert, I'm much less an expert on race. I've written last year several times about my prior experience with musical segregation--how artists of color were not often given the same amount of airplay or chance at airplay as white artists. I grew up listening mostly to Christian music, and for every Michael Tait, there were at least a Kevin Max and a Toby Mac. 

I GOT A JOB THAT PAYS ALL OUR BILLS. This year I decided to celebrate Black History Month by making a playlist of (mostly) black artists. I included 28 songs, a song a day. This year, I'm much less concerned about making a perfect year with a perfect song to encapsulate that month. I'll listen to my Black History Month playlist again and let the songs speak to me organically, but I'll also listen to other songs which might be a song of the day. I feel it's important, though, to stretch my musical tastes, to include the voices of artists I often dismissed, ignored, or forgot about. I'm not going to go on about each song in the playlist today, and yet, I feel that "Fast Car" deserves much more than the "white guilt" post. I think that every song on this list deserves a post, and may get one at some point. Songs like "Right Now" by Mary J. Blige and "Cynical" by Propaganda did. Others like "Diamonds" and "He Kissed Me" were covered by other artists, but for this playlist, I decided to go with the originals. I don't think that dc talk's "Colored People" stands the test of time, but it was a song that got evangelicals talking about race in a time when some had been trying to forget that they were a part of segregation. This is by no means a perfect playlist, and I'll edit it as I find better songs. But until then, happy listening:

 

Read “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman on Genius