And An Argument for Her Overall Underratedness
“Don’t you know? Talking about a revolution sounds, like a whisper”
“Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution”, Tracy Chapman, 1988
Leave it to America, to leave it to a black woman, to create the most important political music of 2020.
And leave it to the year 2020, to leave it to the year 1988, to write about it.
Woodie Guthrie.
Nina Simone.
Bob Dylan.
Gil Scot Heron.
Bruce Cockburn.
Zack De La Rocha.
Killer Mike.
All important political voices in American music.
Tracy Chapman deserves to be among them, if not foremost, in conversations about the most important political voices in all of American music history.
She is underrated as Bill Whithers was underrated, and possibly for the same reasons: she is a black artist with an acoustic guitar.
Not once was she named the voice of her generation. Maybe because she was ahead of hers, but probably because she’s a black woman and not a white man.
Since Tracy Chapman’s debut in 1988, no American musician has written as powerfully about the injustice of poverty in America, as she has.
And even though her debut album was 10th on the Rolling Stones 100 Best Albums of the 80s I argue she is still underrated as an artist.
She is quite simply one of the greatest artistic voices of the 20th century.
And since no one has done anything like what Tracy Chapman did, since Tracy Chapman did it, I’ve found myself going back to her music time and time again in this, the year the American system – with its social-racial inequities, its wealth inequities, its access to education and healthcare inequities – has come to a boiling point under the pressure of a once-in-a-century pandemic.
3 Tracy Chapman Songs That Are More 2020 Than Anything in 2020
“Talking ’bout a Revolution” was on the demo Tracy Chapman recorded, solely for copyright purposes, in the mid-1980s. A demo fellow student Brian Koppelman had to steal from Tufts University radio station because Chapman didn’t take his inquiries of helping her, seriously, until Koppelman’s dad heard “Revolution” on the stolen tape, and immediately flew to meet her.
It’s the first song on her first album, and it’s an overture of all the themes she’s built her work around.
It is also very 2020.
“Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution”
In April 2020 America lost 20.5 million jobs and “the unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent, the worst devastation since the Great Depression”
“The share of the adult population with a job, at 51.3 percent, was the lowest on record”, wrote the New York Times.
While they’re standing in the welfare lines
“Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution”, Tracy Chapman, 1988
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion
Pandemics have occurred as long as humans have existed.
But 2020 in America is still unprecedented.
Never before has humanity been so well equipped to deal with a pandemic, so completely failed to deal with that pandemic.
The bigger the GDP, the harder the fall.
Unlike our great grandfathers, our failures are not technological, they are primarily systemic, and they’re entrenching a generation of already angry young people into more and more progressive views on the wealth inequities they’ve watched grow their entire lives.
The rise of Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism wasn’t even close to a thing in 1988 when Chapman sung about a class uprising.
Poor people gonna rise up
“Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution”, Tracy Chapman, 1988
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what’s theirs
America was winning the cold war, the Berlin wall was about to fall (1989), and the USSR was about to disband (1991).
Socialism was akin to communism, and communism was the worst thing an American could be. Wrapped up in the idea of communism was class: America worked because of upward mobility, and therefore anyone who talked about class as anything but something that is transcended by hard work, was simply complaining, probably lazy, and worst, a communist trying to destroy freedom.
At least, that’s the narrative my generation grew up with only to find that, by the time we grew up, it was capitalism that had failed us.
The 2008 recession took from us the “guaranteed job” we were to receive simply for graduating college.
The colleges charged us so much to attend them they created a generation of kids, raised middle class, who faced bankruptcy in their early 20s. A generation who then scrambled for jobs they were once assured they would be overqualified for, and took those jobs from people who may have used them as a ladder out of poverty.
The coronavirus has further exposed those systemic weaknesses.
That is, if “exposing systemic weaknesses” is euphemism for “forcing people out of work, into poverty and death, while giving millionaires more millions“.
Poor people gonna rise up, and get what’s theirs.
“Subcity“
People say it doesn’t exist
“Subcity”, Crossroads, 1989
‘Cause no one would like to admit
That there is a city underground
Where people live everyday
Off the waste and decay
Off the discards of their fellow man
In Minneapolis, in the last couple years, large encampments have been swelling and cresting under overpasses, alongside highway exits and within one of the top rated park systems in the country.
“The Wall of the Forgotten Natives”, also known as the Franklin Hiawatha Encampment, was perhaps the most prominent in local memory, but the current encampment at Powderhorn park is at a population of 400 tents.
Just a few days ago the local park board “set aside a plan to limit the encampments after getting pushback from residents and activists.”
Here in subcity life is hard
“Subcity”, Crossroads, 1989
We can’t receive any government relief
Won’t you please, please give the President my honest regards
For disregarding me
It’s very possible encampments existed like this at various points over the last 18 years that I’ve been in the twin cities, with me wandering from college bubble to mid-20s narcissist bubble to career professional bubble, but I’ve never seen them like this before.
They are the city underground that Tracy Chapman sings about in the follow up to her debut album, Crossroads.
Conservative politicians have been winning the argument for years: that the problem with America is too many people have too much assistance from the government. That hard work is a virtue in and of itself, and that lazy people the country over are raking in the dough for doing nothing.
But in the last 20 years assistance from the government has been dropping.
Since 2000, overall funding for the 13 major housing, health, and social services block grant programs in the federal budget has fallen by 27 percent after adjusting for inflation, and by 37 percent after adjusting for inflation and population growth.
Source
When Tracy sings “we can’t receive, any government relief” she may as well be talking about the native tribes who just started a suit against the U.S. treasury for failing to pay the tribes the $8 Billion coronavirus stimulus they promised to pay by the end of April.
The New York Times reported that this matter,
pits Alaska Native corporations, for-profit businesses which serve tribal villages in Alaska, against federally recognized tribal governments in the lower 48 states who argue the corporations should not be eligible for the coronavirus relief.
The Trump administration has sided with the Alaska Native corporations.
Source
While The New York Times points out that part of the delay in payment is due to the 574 tribes “feuding over who is entitled to the aid” (a weighted sentence to say the least: “feud”, “entitled”, “aid”) the American government: pitting native tribes against each other, not paying Native Americans what they promised, and siding with a corporation whose claim for these funds, even Nancy Pelosi calls “ridiculous”, is too everything-about-American-history to be a coincidence.
They say there’s too much crime in these city streets
“Subcity”, Crossroads, 1989
My sentiments exactly
Government and big business hold the purse strings
When I worked I worked in the factories
I’m at the mercy of the world
I guess I’m lucky to be alive
A lack of subsidies creating sub-cities.
“Bang, Bang, Bang”
Black Lives Matter, as a name, is poetic. It is stream-of-conscious in the way The Civil Rights Movement, as a name, is stoic.
It is a complete sentence.
Like the band names of the times, it reflects our current scattered, national conscious.
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Temptations, The Four Tops. The Civil Rights Movement.
Juice WRLD, JPEGMAFIA, Panic! At The Disco, Walk The Moon. Black Lives Matter.
Black Lives Matter is a sentence that should not be controversial, that should not require marches.
But, as with unemployment and the injustice of poverty, it was a problem at the start of Tracy Chapman’s career, and it is still a problem now.
The entire song “Bang, Bang, Bang” is so eerily prescient to the current national conversation, it seems as though it was written yesterday, not 28 years ago.
What you go and do
You go and give the boy a gun
Now there ain’t no place to run to
Ain’t no place to runWhen he hold it in his hand
He feel mighty he feel strong
Now there ain’t no place to run to
Ain’t no place to runOne day he may come back
Repay us for what we’ve done
Then where you gonna run to
Where you gonna runBut one fine day
“Bang, Bang, Bang”, Matters of the Heart, 1992
All our problems will be solved
Bang bang bang
We’ll shoot him down
And yet, 26 years before Tracy Chapman wrote “Bang, Bang, Bang” the Black Panthers, in 1966, included “an immediate end to police brutality” as part of their founding beliefs, the Ten Point Program.
There are 2 parts to the ten point program (the second section titled, “What We Believe“), but I will share the first section entitled,
What We Want Now!
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black and oppressed communities.
4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.
6. We want all Black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale
Tracy Chapman wasn’t writing about something new.
She was, sadly, writing about something that was as old as the country she was born in.
Black people have been fighting for “the same shit my grand daddy fought for”, as Nicki Daniels Jr. of Sleep Is For The Rich Gun Club, said in his powerful, impromptu speech after defending a group of women from race-related harassment.
White America – myself included – is only now discussing this seriously.
Why Has No One Else Taken Her Place?
When the music industry fell apart due to the internet, artists had to accept commercial money (often, literally, for use of their music in commercials) to make a living.
That could, possibly, be part of the reason we don’t hear protest songs as often as we once did.
It’s also very possible that this very powerful system is doing what it was designed to do, so well, as to influence the thought patterns of the artists it creates.
But the real, 100% accurate reason no one has written songs as powerfully conscious as Tracy Chapman, since Tracy Chapman, is because there hasn’t been another motherfucking Tracy Chapman.
And cloning people is not a thing in 2020.
I hope.
Despite it all, I hope.
Excellent examination of our country’s ills and an underappreciated but most talented black, female, singer-songwriter!