fast car by tracy chapman
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
When I was younger, and my parents had friends over for dinner, my dad would sit at the dinner table long after the rest of us had moved to the sofas and play music too loud (always too loud) on the giant black hi-fi we had in the living room. Some nights he would play Kraftwerk, or R.E.M. (Losing My Religion reminded him of his father) or it would be the Eurythmics and suddenly Annie Lennox would burst out from the speakers; sometimes it was Chaka Demus and Pliers or Bob Marley; other nights my mum badgered him until he put on Bowie or T-Rex. But some nights he played Nina Simone and Ella Fitzgerald and on my favourite nights he played Tracy Chapman. Specifically, Tracy Chapman's eponymous debut album which was released the year I was born.
I remember we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast I felt like I was drunk
Chapman has a rich melancholic voice which vibrates with intensity. I must confess as a child I thought it was a man singing, I remember the delight at finding out she was not (and a similar delight later, finding out she was also queer). Even as a young kid her songs resonated with me, their gentle melancholy, their hope, the depth of the emotion in her voice. If you haven't heard her sing Baby, Can I Hold You and only know the Boyzone version, I beg you to listen to the original. She sang about civil rights and black inequality, she sang about peace and domestic violence. I defy anyone to listen to Behind The Wall, an acapella outcry against violence and the ineptitude of police intervention, and not be moved by her voice. She sang a lot about love. I've always understood For My Lover to be a coded queer tale of all-consuming love: Everyday I'm psychoanalyzed / For my lover for my lover / Deep in this love / No man can shake (Now I read it back it's maybe not so coded...) Her songs are also deeply rooted in narrative. They are American folktales for today, tales of those people most ignored by society, of black people abandoned by the state, of poor young women left to fend for themselves, of the racism and inequality that Chapman saw around her. All her songs are tinged with longing and loss but also a revolutionary spirit.
I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone
It is Fast Car that most inhabits all of this and takes us on the furthest journey in its sad winding story. There is a sense of wanting and melancholy that penetrates through this song and its many verses and shifting choruses. It narrates the story of a young woman longing to be free: her father is an alcoholic, she's working a dead-end job to support him, having quit school and been abandoned by her mother. She longs to escape and get away to someplace better. And escape she does, driving off with her boyfriend in the joyous, uplifting chorus. But she only finds herself back where she started: supporting another man, working another minimum wage job, he starts drinking, hardly seeing his children. The cycle repeats itself. She is left hoping for a better life and mourning her lost potential. The song ends with the chorus again, back in the car and driving, recapturing that moment, however brief, that things might be okay. Maybe this time she'll leave by herself or with her kids and remake herself anew. We're left not knowing, only that something has to change. As a child, I didn't know what that feeling was, but I knew what it was to feel the potential within yourself and to be afraid you might never reach it.
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way
So please, listen to Fast Car on a road trip, volume up, windows down and belt it out as loud as you can. Listen to it at home, headphones on, silently whispering the words to yourself. Listen to it with friends and hold each other as you sing the chorus together. Listen to it and feel deep within your chest, somewhere near your heart, that need we all have to escape, to find a better life someplace. Keep driving.
Listen to Fast Car as loud as you can here