1,586 words
Five years ago I wrote an essay called “Rediscovering a Song” in which I discussed my mistaken initial assessment of “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the famous 1970s hit by Harry Chapin. I had put that assessment in a box in my mind, sealed it up, and never bothered to reopen it until many, many years later:
Our minds are like bookshelves in our bedrooms, and our memories and ideas are like the books themselves. Some people have deeper shelves, taller walls, better lighting, greater square footage. Some of us put our books in closets; others leave them strewn about the floor. Some of us put our books in boxes to make room for other books. When I rediscovered “Cat’s in the Cradle,” I was reminded of how important it is to understand that despite whatever use we get out of these boxes, they do prevent us from thinking about what’s inside. And opening a box much later than you should have may be thrilling, but it can haunt you nonetheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqI9vCI8JbE
I remember when I first heard the song “Fast Car” by Tracy Chapman. I was just a kid and was unimpressed, to say the least. I didn’t like Chapman’s crunchy folk look. I didn’t like her plaintive folk sound. I didn’t like her short dreads. And I didn’t really like the people who liked Tracy Chapman — probably because they didn’t care too much for me. This, I believe, is the crux of most pop music journalism: assessing not so much the music itself but the people who enjoy it. This is why I believe a rock critic such as Dave Marsh will list old Motown hits like Marvin Gaye’s “Heard It Through the Grapevine” or the Four Tops’ “Reach out (I’ll Be There)” as among the greatest singles of all time, while dismissing enduring — and in my opinion superior — classics such as “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd or “Margaritaville” by Jimmy Buffet. He doesn’t particularly care for the people who like these latter two songs (i.e., ordinary white Americans), but he does care for folks who still listen to Motown well past its expiration date (i.e., older blacks who remember the Civil Rights movement, or snooty white rock critics like Marsh himself).
I was pretty darn snooty as a kid, and so “Fast Car” quickly went into a box in my mind labeled “This Song Sucks.” I taped it up real good, threw it in the back of my closet, and that was that. Any time I’ve heard the song in the 35 years since, my ears are completely deaf to it.
But as with “Cat’s in the Cradle,” I have come to reassess “Fast Car.”
It seems that country music is enjoying a resurgence nowadays. I could be wrong, since I don’t closely follow the genre. However, YouTuber Rick Beato recently listened to the top ten country songs on Spotify and loved all of them. This is significant, in my mind, for a genre that is so often mocked and derided as country is. In 2023 country star Luke Combs released a cover of “Fast Car,” which came on the radio one day as I as driving. I wasn’t paying attention, so the song got past my defenses. I began enjoying it before I realized what it was — and once I did, I was forced to reassess.
Now, Combs’ version is excellent. This is probably why it soared to the top of the charts and was named Single of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards last year. Listening to the song, however, I had to resist the mild temptation to indulge a very naughty thought: What if Chapman’s version of “Fast Car” still sucks, and it simply took a white man like Combs to bring out the best in it? I didn’t take this notion seriously, of course. Still, I went home right away and listened to the original, half-expecting five excruciating minutes of acoustic sanctimony.
Boy, was I wrong. I was fighting tears by the time the thing was over. “Fast Car” really is a great song. It has an original and easily identifiable instrumental hook. It has a chorus which incorporates elements of the song’s narrative while adding emotional depth. Interestingly, it dispenses almost entirely with rhyme. It deftly juggles themes of escape, hope, alcoholism, and heartbreak, and it manages all this through the allegory of a fast car — as well as anything by Bruce Springsteen. The song is also very real and very relatable — especially for working-class people. Perhaps this is why it was such a big hit in 1988 when it came out.
You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.
“Fast Car” also shares something in common with “Cat’s in the Cradle”: It has an ironic twist at the end in which the song’s familiar leitmotif suddenly achieves unexpected poignancy. Unlike “Cat’s in the Cradle,” however, Chapman doesn’t beat you over the head with it. Instead, the irony emerges not through the heavy hand of a clever songwriter, but through sheer discovery. The listener experiences the song’s bitter irony, probably just as Chapman had when she was writing it. This is the very point of music, and why “Fast Car” is one of the finest pop songs ever written.
As for the elephant in the room, the fact that Chapman is black had nothing to do with my initial distaste for the song. Yet, as I grew to accept race realism in adulthood, I found it harder and harder to appreciate black cultural achievements, largely because so many of them are either negative or, thanks to affirmative action, illegitimate. Blacks are not merely a competing demographic with whites. They, as a group, are also hostile, violent, corrupt, and a net drag on civilization. For these perfectly good reasons I would rather not share a nation with them. Whatever good they bring to the table cannot possibly outweigh the stinking, overstuffed bag of negatives that they as a people drag along with them.
Sometimes it is hard for me not to resent individual blacks who lack all the manifest demerits of their race, but who still deny racial realities. We tried benevolent supremacy for many years in the South after the Civil War, and blacks ultimately rejected it. They apparently prefer absurdly high levels of crime, illegitimacy, and drug addiction to the orderly lives that most of them enjoyed prior to “integrating” with whites — all in pursuit of the demonstrable lie of racial equality. I have no respect for that.
As a result, I will look askance at anything black people accomplish in fields beyond their natural purview of sports, jazz, dancing, and the like. But these accomplishments do happen, and for me to remain sane and honest I have to draw unbreakable lines between macro truths and micro ones — and still respect both. Inventor and computer scientist Mark Dean did remarkable things at IBM. This is a micro truth. So are the classical music recordings by Wynton Marsalis and Kathleen Battle. So is the civic courage of Allen West, or the chess commentating of Maurice Ashley, or the comprehensive honesty of Lipton Matthews.
Being a race realist means one must admit the good as well as the bad about all races. This, of course, does not override a person’s right to prefer his own race to others and to protect his racial interests. But it also does not override a person’s right to appreciate accomplishments from other races. “Fast Car” falls into this category, and Tracy Chapman deserves all the credit in the world for it.
I nevertheless can’t help but feel that there is an additional layer to the song, one entirely unintended by its author. The song is about a woman who makes a deal with a man who has a fast car. They team up to escape their bleak lives in order to build a better one together somewhere else. She revels in the thrill of freedom and a sense of purpose while riding with him. She has the seductive feeling that she could actually be someone. But time is not on their side. They have to make a decision: “Leave tonight, or live and die this way.”
In the end they do leave together, and ultimately, he lets her down. She realizes too late that all the thrills he had given her were ephemeral. They weren’t real. Thus, by the song’s end she once again tells him to make a decision, but this time it is his decision, not hers: get in his fast car and leave, because she cannot live and die this way.
Doesn’t this also describe the relationship between whites and blacks in America? Whites have accepted blacks as equals since the 1960s. They have also accepted blacks as co-citizens in the country their ancestors had founded and fought for. What has it gotten us? A lot of thrills, sure. Blacks can enthrall us with their sporting prowess. They can make us marvel at their dancing. They can entertain us with their music. They can make us laugh at their jokes. They can tell us what is hip and what is cool. Yes, their car is quite fast. But it is ultimately taking us to a bad place — a place of poverty, violence, degeneracy, and ruin. This becomes clearer and clearer every day.
White people will need to make a decision very soon: “Leave tonight, or live and die this way.”
28 comments
On the whole, the Americans have behaved more decently than the British. Which is no wonder, given that their Irish and German stakes there are in opposition to the British.
The British murdered more cruelly, the Americans on the other hand were more cowardly and handed over their prisoners to the communist “allies” in the East.
My mum has a lovely cat-green eyed beautifully shaped face, she owes to her bloodline. As a 2-year-old girl fleeing from East Prussia, she saw the flaming sky over Dresden from a distance of 30 kilometers, her first conscious memory.
The memory of this “enrichment” is deeply engrained in our collective consciousness, the perpetrators should not remain in the mistaken assumption that we will ever forget all this!
The French let captured Germans starve, the Britsh not. In the British occupation zone no German died of hunger. Yes, the British surrendered to the Soviets many Russian anti-Bolsheviks, Vlasovtsys, Cossacks, as well as Soviet Asians and Caucasians from the Wehrmachts Eastern Legions who found themselves in their zone, but perhaps the reason was that the Soviets were holding hundreds of Englishmen liberated from German captivity, and in order to return their British subjects the British authorities agreed to this dishonorable deed. But the Americans did it too.
Good heavens I love the way you write. Honesty is the horse you ride in on and it just never disappoints. Fast Car grabbed me at age 22 when I first heard it despite never having gone out of my way for “black” music. This song felt like it could easily have been sung by a white person from day one. Hearing it again recently from the country guy tore my guts out, but honestly not as much as the original. One thought: is it really about a fast car or drugs?
Thank you so much, Weave! I think the drug analogy is a stretch. She gets specific a couple times about alcohol, and never mentions the narrator partaking in anything. The fast car can be an analogy for fast times in general, though.
Back in ’88 I thought Chapman was going to be a superstar because her first two singles- Fast Car and Talkin’ Bout A Revolution- were fantastic. However, she kinda fell off after that.
Harry Chapin IMHO is very underrated. Like Roger Miller, Warren Zevon and Jim Croce he was a natural born storyteller.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXQW4UxDFSc&list=PLD36FCFE4EC53191B
Could it be said that Tracy Chapman, with her 1988 debut, wrote a ”White” album? Perhaps not, but the quality of many of her songs here, even one such as “Baby, Can I Hold You?” is undeniable.
The song is explicitly what it’s about. I always thought it was the most whistful, lovely song, and I have superior musical taste. Give credit where it’s due–where would we be without Michael Jackson and black eyed peas? Hello? Kanye?
Another great song recently covered in 2019 was Informer by Snow. But the original is more awesome in that case.
I’d heard this song on the radio from time to time but never heard of Tracy Chapman. I thought the singer was a man, a white one. The voice is too deep and masculine to evoke any sense of femininity, but too whimpering and tender to be truly masculine. I imagined a sort of Jeff Buckley lookalike, crooning about how depressing life is and demoralizing the listeners. It also sounded like something from the early 2000s, so learning the song’s true age was about as shocking as learning about who/what wrote and performed it. Regardless of who wrote it, there’s no way this is black music. It’s as black as Eminem’s music is white. And I’d say the song itself is a pretty good rendition of white songwriting, or it would be if it wasn’t such a bummer.
Interesting take. So you don’t like ‘bummers’? That probably rules out Springsteen’s Nebraska and half of The River for you, right?
It rules out the majority of ’90’s grunge that I grew up listening to, it rules out Radiohead, it rules out music that strives to bring an overall negative listening experience. It rules out artists who choose to sing about how much life sucks and how bad they smell and how nobody likes them. It does not rule out music that chooses to broach overall negative subjects in an uplifting sort of way. “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact – but maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” The sort of music I despise usually leaves out that last part and simply says “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact, the end.” I do miss that somewhat uplifting twist in Fast Car, it does not make me feel good, as I’m the sort who lets music influence my mood a great deal. That said, I can even enjoy something like The Smiths a great deal because the music is never pathetic, feeble, depressing, weak, even if the lyrics may explore a great deal of negativity and hopelessness. It’s just how I experience things. Music is so subjective, it’s sometimes pointless to even discuss it.
Springsteen’s “Live 1975-85” 5 album set from the 80s. Side 6, This Land is Your Land, Nebraska, Johnny 99, Reason to Believe. Alone in a stadium with acoustic guitar and harmonica. powerful delivery, scorching, gut wrenching subject matter.
Beautiful – both the songs – the original Black woman and the country cover.
This music review is also very beautiful. Great work.
I’d like to work with you, send $ to you.
Keep the faith bro,
Jaye Ryan
TPC Radio Show
Occidental Dissent blog
Hi Jaye, thank you so much. No need to send me anything. But please donate to Counter-Currents here:
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Concerning Harry Chapin, “Cat in the Cradle is a good song, but the best is “Taxi”
“I stuffed the bill in my shirt.” Great line.
My favorite is the live version of A Better Place To Be. Still gives me goosebumps.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MNz9MhrzDfo&pp=ygUZQSBiZXR0ZXIgcGxhY2UgdG8gYmUgbGl2ZQ%3D%3D
I recently bought Nilsson’s Pandemonium Shadow Show on vinyl and was blown away by a song called 1941. It immediately made me think of Cats In The Cradle, with lyrics about a boy following in his father’s poor example. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jxuVZ6F9ZS0&pp=ygUMMTk0MSBuaWxzc29u
Actually, it has been so many decades that I listened to Harry Chapin that I completely forgot my favorite song by him. “Taxi” is only #2. “Old College Avenue” is the best.
Thanks for this article and your “objective” appreciation of art! Chapman reminds me a lot of Odetta, whose music I can also appreciate even though she was leftist lesbian. I’ve always liked “Fast Car” as did my Father who was brought to tears the first time he watched the song’s video.
This is a timely article for me. I’ve recently been binging on both songs (Cats in the Cradle and Fast Car) and both bring me to different periods in my youth. Cats reminds me of Dad and Car of my mother. For sure “Fast Car” is a timeless wistful tune and they definitely don’t make them like this anymore. “So I quit school and that’s what I did.” Nice work Spencer.
Yes, I should have included the detail about quitting school to help her alcoholic dad. That’s truly an endearing moment of the song.
I checked out the video of the top twenty acoustic guitar intros you linked to but was surprised not to find Dust in the Wind listed there. That is an acoustic guitar intro right? Either way, this is yet another song that reminds me of my parents. I was born in 1970 and these were the songs of my youth that they were the target audience for.
This hit home for me, having grown up in a working-class community and seen so much suffering. I’ve been revisiting Tolstoy lately and loving him even more than ever. I can’t remember the piece, but his anti-liquor arguments had me squirming in my seat, though I myself am not a problem drinker. I would hate to introduce someone to alcohol and the find them on Skid Row ten years later. Also, thank you for giving credit where it is due. Black people have musical talent and there is no reason to minimize or deny that fact.
Also, amazing cover! Are you familiar with youtuber Dan Vasc? He did a great cover of Dream On you might check out. Tyler’s voice never did that amazing song justice IMO. That was years ago, and he’s gotten better since.
I enjoyed Fast Car when it was released for the working class rhythm and lyrics; fairly recently I learned it was written by a black woman. Another black woman who had the musical gift was Whitney Houston. Her rendition of I Will Always Love You is great but I could also remember Dolly Parton’s original, which Parton also wrote.
The song I only really listened to the lyrics recently is Alone Again, Naturally by Gilbert O’Sullivan. It always seemed like an old Donovan knock off until I heard the sadness of the lyrics. The name should have clued me in, but I never really paid much attention until it kept popping up on my Spotify. Sometimes it helps to slow down and really appreciate what the songwriter is trying to convey.
Re: great acoustic guitar intros
https://youtu.be/qVcl0Iw3fs8?si=AqbMsmNDpz9_bYHl
I unironically liked the song then, and still enjoy it today. Crossroads is another great song of hers. Sorry, but if I’m responding positively to a song or artist, I’m not going to turn that switch off because I read My Awakening or Camp of the Saints a few times.
Yes, never let your understanding of human nature and your dissident mindset get in the way of enjoying life.
I don’t know the country version. Sounds the same as the original to me. I remember the song when it came out but didn’t think about it either way. I thought she was a 15 year old pudgy boy when I first saw pics of her.
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