We don’t usually get songs like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Despite its confirmed endurance, often lined by anybody with a guitar and a world too small to carry their goals, “Fast Car” feels fragile each time you hear it, a piece so filled with craving for one thing that the speaker trembles to articulate, lest it vanish without end. Thirty-six years after the 1988 tune catapulted Chapman to fame (following an impromptu performance at Wembley Stadium for a live performance in honor of Nelson Mandela’s seventieth Birthday), the legendary singer-songwriter made a shock look and a uncommon public performance at the Grammys, for one in every of the greatest awards present moments in latest reminiscence.
“Fast Car” has been on a wierd journey over the final 12 months, turning into a mega-hit as soon as once more after nation singer Luke Combs’ cowl exploded in reputation over the summer time. Combs’ success with Chapman’s 1988 traditional turned a cultural flashpoint, re-surfacing discussions about white appropriation of Black artwork broadly, and the lack of assist Black and queer artists have in the Country music business extra particularly. (It’s price noting Chapman owns the publishing rights to her music, and subsequently makes a minimize on cowl recordings like Combs’.)
At Sunday’s Grammy awards, Combs paid tribute to Chapman in a recorded phase about the outstanding success of his cowl, and what “Fast Car” (for which Chapman received Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1989 Grammys) means to him. To the viewers’s shock and delight, Chapman joined Combs on stage afterwards to carry out the tune — one in every of the few public performances the reclusive and famously personal artist has made since releasing her final album, 2008’s Our Bright Future.
Awards exhibits are unusual affairs, usually gaudy celebrations of commerce over artwork, gladhandy and self-congratulatory in methods that may be very faraway from the causes individuals love artwork to start with. But at their greatest, they’re a stage like another: one the place, the proper individual, with the proper tune, can forged a spell over everybody — the celebrities in the viewers or a drained commuter watching a clip on social media, remembering a dream that they had about getting away from all of it and discovering a spot they belonged.
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