I think "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman is the second best song of all time. When I first heard it, it was a revelation. The production and simple arrangement gives it this youthful, haunting-yet-vulnerable feeling that supports the lyrics of a woman being taken advantage of time and time again, being at the end of her rope, and setting an ultimatum for a man who most likely will fail her one final time. The anecdote about the father failing in his role as a husband and father adds a much deeper level of generational, psychological, and economic tragedy. There are a lot of great pop songs about young love but this might be the only one I've heard that feels so realistic, like it's a telling the archetype many of us have seen from people we've grown up with, or even in some cases, ourselves. (I identify with both the man and woman at this song for different reasons.) The themes are universal and transformative in that way us artists tell ourselves all art is but deep down now only great works can accomplish. The song can change your worldview, if you open up to it. Either, it can make you reflect on someone you had once dismissed as being "trash" or some other slander as having unfair challenges you were lucky enough to have avoided, it can show you why promising young girls may waste their time on men who for all appearances seem to be going nowhere in life and are quite content with that (not to dismiss the tragedy of the male character, either, which I would say is present but far more subtly conveyed). The verses are all so gritty and raw, yet the chorus uplifts you from the hellish struggles of simply trying to exist and live a decent life in the same way carefree moments together once did for the narrator or for the more fleeting, self-harming way getting drunk likely does her lover. At the end of the song, the haunting chords play, like this is one cycle in a neverending loop in our country. I've never tried it but you could probably play the song on repeat and it would sonically play as though it has a circular structure like The Wall or Finnegans Wake. Because it does, as our own narrator's mother seems to have went through the same struggles the narrator is at by the climax of the song. The only nitpick that might take .01 off it's 15/10 rating is that a comedian once pointed out, "Aren't all cars technically pretty fast?" and I can never forget that joke when I hear this song. The only modern song that I think competes with this is "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac.
For a few weeks, I probably sounded like I was proselytizing it to everyone I knew, like I had discovered this gem in the coal mines of the Spotify playlist algorithm. Everyone else was just like, "Yeah, Tracy Chapman's a household name. Everyone has always known this is a great song." This song helped me a lot while writing Honest Work, particularly Ione's portion of the narrative. I've always been endeared to characters like Hedda Gabbler and Lady Macbeth in a way that could probably warrant Freudian evaluation. I didn't want to write a female villain, though. I wanted the story to be one of three people all putting their honest effort into raising a child and into their own personal lives and despite their equally good intentions, they come out with very different results. I wanted to create a character who starts the book as a victim and blossoms into a complex human being. In the first scene written about her, it is described as though she is a prisoner of her own home that we view through a security camera in all her private, mundane, and embarrassing moments. She's an actress upon a stage without a script to follow, so, she's just existing before a crowd of voyeurs. (This is not long after the introductory chapter, in which another character directly addresses the audience of a classroom, planting this motif in a reminiscent fashion of my personal favorite play, Our Town. You see her perspective of her husband and later her husband's perspective on her. You know their loneliness, their inner struggles, how one has an idealized view of romance and the other has a more cynical, "realistic" perspective on it. You (hopefully) don't really know what will come of it until the ultimate betrayal in a relationship is committed. (In this instance, I would compare the act of penetration to that of impaling oneself or more accurately, the ending of Romeo & Juliet in which one character stabs herself, mistakenly thinking her lover has already left her behind.) At that point, you can view it from a multitude of ways, nearly all of them valid to some degree, ethically speaking. She ends the life she has been building towards and in turn, destroys the man living to serve her, which she (but not he) sees as setting him free, (mixed metaphor incoming) ripping the already-peeling band-aid of their marriage off so that he has the opportunity for rebirth. She did, what she at least, saw as the right thing in a confused fashion, much like the comedy of errors that their romance was ("You cheated on me." "I cheated on you? You've been cheating on me." "No, I was working late and exhausted so I could provide for you." "You never provided for me emotionally." and so on.) depicted in until it's take too far and becomes a tragedy. (See above.) So, thank you, Tracy Chapman.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI will update this as soon as I can, as long as I don't feel too anxious about it. I have a rough draft of a blog ready to go but it definitely needs some polishing. This whole page will be updated ASAP. Archives
November 2023
Categories |