is fast car a concrete universal? is this affirming what should be negated?
Sometimes I think I should drink more or try weed or something because when I’m under the influence I can have a thought or feeling instead having my mental and emotional life reverberate with second guesses. It gets exhausting. (This is me being mad that I’m embarrassed that I want to write about having big feelings about a performance at the Grammys, while also thinking that it is still low key kind of embarrassing.) Did punk do this to me? A protestant upbringing? Generally unhappy childhood? Higher education?
Anyway, did you see the Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs duet of Fast Car at the Grammys? Someone posted it on twitter. It’s here: https://twitter.com/EZRideryoyall/status/1754317628661768555 Fast Car is a fucking great song, but I’m not going to start there. In the performance, Combs looks like the world’s most grateful kid having won a shopping spree at the most bad ass combination toy and candy store. He loves the song and he loves Chapman as an artist, that’s so loud on his face and in his singing the lyrics off mic. The camera cuts to Taylor Swift being transported singing along in the crowd too, she’s a billionaire and shit but here she’s another music lover transfixed by a great piece of art. Chapman looks delighted at the (fully deserved) appreciative crowd response, presumably more so because she’s not an active performer on a regular basis at this point. It’s all just nice and wholesome and elevating, people who are in effect in love, wholesomely so, it’s all working out right not, everyone caught up in the music and as someone for whom music is the most important thing other than my kids and who has been transported individually-and-together by music with friends many times, it’s lovely to see that super important life experience reflected back in a recording and one where I’m also very stoked on the song.
Then there’s the song. It's a fucking great song. It’s pretty. And it’s devastatingly sad. This is where the video throws me. All of the above is so upbeat and positive, yet this is a song that makes me cry unless I exert a lot of self control, and I find that combination really emotionally confusing.
The song depicts the ordinary hopes of ordinary people on an ordinary downward slide, and those hopes are themselves heartbreaking in their smallness - respect, a release from the relentlessness, stable housing, a little disposable income. Part of what the song does really well is to convey the singularity of its narrator - this is a real person, fully unique, in their own unique life circumstance - yet also the representativeness, in a sense the universality, of that life experience, relative to some populations in a real time and place. I’m probably reading in my own interests here but I think it’s a social murder song. The dad’s wrecking himself with alcohol - ‘his body’s too young to look like his’ - and doing so in response to the damned if you do, damned if you don’t choices he’s allowed to pick from in life. The narrator cares for the dad, feeling trapped as part of the break up of their household, then ends up trapped in a different low paying job and living in a homeless shelter. It’s a series of snap shots of people who are being destroyed. It’s deeply empathetic social realism depicting a deeply fucking grim world.
It makes me think about all of my aunts and my mom, all pregnant by 20 at the latest, struggling with substances and what gets done to working class people who struggle like that, my one aunt dying from heroin and her kids ending up in foster care. I used to worry about my parents dying and what’d happen to me and my brothers. My mom took care of my grandpa when he was dying of cancer, he died at 54 - ‘body’s too young to look like his.’ She was 30 when he died, I think it was about a full year of full time caregiving? I was eleven. I haven’t really processed these experiences, and there are many more, it’s a whole texture of life, and not one unique too me or my family. I think the limited class mobility in my life - in the sense that I met a lot of middle class people via higher ed and ended up in a job that sounds fancy though the pay is meh - may have impeded that processing. In important respects this class mobility is more like a displacement, or like I’ve simply been misplaced, reshelved in the wrong spot. I lost touch with most people who I knew from my class background and found the trappings and socialization of my education plus the fancy degree and my limited professional successes have inhibited my ability to connect with people with similar life experience to mine. All of that creates a degree of isolation in the unprocessed grief, compounded by awareness of this sense of fracture and estrangement - the people with experiences like mine are people I no longer have access to or opportunity to connect with - while on the other hand I’m surrounded by people in professional settings who don’t have these life experiences in the same frequency - the commonality of it I mean - like people where I grew up, which creates a second isolation in the grief. Not to say I’m the victim here, I’ve got a better life than my parents did at my age for the most part, let alone a lot of other people I know and am related to, just saying that part of the response I have to the song and to other art like it is tied to the way these social patterns are inflected in my experience and circumstantial difficulties in processing the experience.
I’m not much of an acoustic guitar and singer/songwriter listener. I like louder, more sonically aggressive music - shit that spikes my anxiety a little, a caterwaul intended to move the whole body, even if I personally listen to it almost exclusively in headphones - and for the past few years my listening has leaned significantly toward the inarticulate, and arguably the inarticulable. I mentioned last time that I think a certain kind of uneasy jungle may be a good fit artistically for life in the over-but-not-really pandemic (call it oh-why-are-you-masking-core). I also like a lot of punk where the vocals are shouted and the music’s pretty percussive, basically a different kind of shouting, with a lot of that stuff very bleak and sad lyrically. I’m old enough now to admit that I think this has long reflected my own limitations in processing emotions (‘processing’? maybe just ‘feeling’?) - welling up with grief, wanting to retain composure, I’ve bottled up a lot then as a lot wells up as it all ferments I’ve periodically burnt that off via controlled anger through music.
A little while back I heard this EP by Dave Hause - https://davehause.bandcamp.com/album/paddy - taking very brash songs by the punk band Dillinger Four and stripping them back to their fragile, overwhelmed core, which is basically the same as Fast Car, though a little more forced composure due to masculine emotional stuntedness, and I realized how much these were actually not songs for drunken euphoric shouting (as on does at a D4 show) but are in fact for crying in the shower. This is another for crying in the shower, John Samson singing about everyone in the rehab center, the community of real solidarity and deep suffering, “not getting better, but not getting better together.” https://johnksamsonmusic.bandcamp.com/track/17th-street-treatment-centre
Hause paired that EP with an other of covers of Patty Griffin songs, who I’d never heard - https://davehause.bandcamp.com/album/patty-2 - and these too are Fast Car, even more so - more articulate, less dudely, more aware of the compounding grief of unending loss. It reminds me of my grandparents, my aunts and uncles again, my mom.
The unfairness of it all hits hard sometimes. I don’t regret anything, not anything major. I wish I’d been kinder and more patient sometimes but I’ve played all the hands I’ve been dealt with (on average) average skill, at best, so I’m not bragging, but I’ve lucked out insofar as my life’s comfortable enough and above all being my kids’ dad I am largely at peace personally, and I figure all of my life conspired to make that happen so I wouldn’t change any of it.
Still, sometimes the unfairness in some loved ones’ lives is hard to sit with. And all the moreso for the class mobility. That’s supposed to be a gift or some shit, and as I said I would change anything because the road brought me to my kids, but the class mobility does have some painful sides in that I’ve seen just enough of the lives of people just a rung or three above me on the thousand step social ladder to know that not everyone gets destroyed at the same rate and with the same frequency, so I can’t accept it all. It’s not just life. It’s not how things just are. It’s what the nobodies get and I’ve seen how somebodies don’t get chewed up as much. I hear the “fuck you” that the social machinery mutters to itself when it pushes the the nobodies into the woodchipper. Reading Marx didn’t help. Someday humanity will set all this right - someday all this will be set right and then there will be humanity - but in the meantime to know this is to be raw nerves a lot of the time. On the other hand, it’s also to know that all the mistakes that ordinary people make that add to the suffering are themselves the result of people flailing in a clusterfuck, trying to shelter themselves and each other from forces they can’t slow, let alone stop, and so often end up either reaching for various kinds of distraction and anesthetic or wrapping their own bodies around their loved ones in hopes of absorbing some of the blows.
Artists like Chapman give a gift to the world and dignify the experiences of social nobodies with their work and that matters so much. It’s also part of how we can comprehend the reality: to truly understand social murder is to understand that every individual crushed in the teeth of the death machine had a complicated interior life and suffered appallingly in the crushing and was infinitely valuable in their singular humanity so that the thousands and millions of losses are an incalculably large avalanche of loss. And while Chapman says a lot in the song, the lines about the dad ‘that’s the way it is,’ ‘body’s too young to look like his’ is also a powerful example of leaving so much unsaid because what even is there to say? It’s important that artists put words to the violence of class and also evoke how that violence exceeds our expressive capacities, leaves us rightly speechless.
And this is where I’m a little uneasy about all the joy in the performance. It’s not only confusing to be so happy and so sad all at once, I wonder if there’s also a way in which the joy, especially in a glamorous setting like the Grammys, pushes against the dignifying critical empathy of the song as a deeply sad piece of art. Maybe some day it'll be played in museums as a way to evoke what capitalism was like, as part of where the emancipated society remembers and grieves.