Leave Tonight or Live and Die This Way
The aesthetics of Solidarity & Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs's duet of "Fast Car"
For much of my life, I wasn’t a weepy person. At a friend’s birthday party when I was in sixth grade, we gathered to watch the movie A Little Princess and when the movie ended and everyone around me began bawling their eyes out, I remember looking around and wondering what was wrong with me. But these days? A light wind could make me cry. Seeing a baby in a keffiyeh. A brightly colored weed peeking through the sidewalk. And of course, Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’s duet of “Fast Car” at the Grammys.
Tracy Chapman is a lyricist on par with all the white men people trot out as the great Word Workers of Americana, the Springsteens and the Dylans (and the Cashes because Capital-C Country musicians were once great lyricists too, but that’s an essay for another time). And “Fast Car” is a natural choice for any artist of that tradition such as Luke Combs. The car (or in some country varieties, the truck) was a frequent metaphor in American pop culture as both a product of supposed American ingenuity, a modern means for achieving the violent fantasies of Manifest Destiny, and a tool for job access and through it, upward mobility.
I’m not as interested in the politics or aesthetics of Combs’s cover of “Fast Car” on its own – I thought it was done well enough, and, for me, it would also never compare to the original. Both things can be true. His solo version feels a touch overwrought with twang (he has his own genre conventions to consider, it just doesn’t really interest me sonically). Covers have a rich history by Black and queer (and Black-and-queer) artists as a work of reinterpretation, of defiance (Nina Simone’s rendition of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” or Danielle Ponder’s “Creep” come to mind), and the change in narrative voice that Combs offers isn’t exactly novel. But their duet undid me in a jarring, ugly, crying-on-the-couch-into-my-morning-coffee-kind-of-way that made me want to dig a little deeper.
My friend Camara remarked to me when I began working on this essay that “Fast Car” isn’t really a song that lends itself to duetting. There’s a single narrator, a clear and linear storyline. And the marvelous thing is that, through the act of the duet, of Combs’ and Chapman’s back and forth retains that unity. He doesn’t change the gender of the narrator, she’s still working in the market as a checkout girl. The song retains its emphasis on that Black queer girl, and in doing so, recognizing that without her, nothing is possible.
In Chapman’s original rendition, “Fast Car” chronicles a story of queer Black feminist self-determination. Where decisions were once made for you, where family making was foreclosed, where the ability to just breathe was always-already criminalized, she reminds listeners that we can leave tonight. Freedom (and all the ups and downs that come with it) is on the horizon.
Watching the duet, I was reminded of the philosophy of Accompaniment, outlined by American Studies scholars Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz as: “both a commitment and a capacity that can be cultivated… Accompaniment does not erase differences or suppress disagreements in the name of an artificial and premature unity. In accompaniment there are times when it will be wise to work together and times when it will be wise to remain apart.”1
Ok now before I say what I am here to say, I’ll remind us that, to borrow a phrase from Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter on Defining Food Justice this week, “there should be a healthy concern for being too utopian about the transformative power of food, which can only be in place if other needs and desires are met” (emphasis mine). Until Luke Combs (or Tracy Chapman for that matter) starts throwing bricks at cop cars or staging a sit-in, I’ll try to avoid grandiose statements.
In their book Insubordinate Spaces, Lipsitz and Tomlinson write that accompaniment occurs through “experiences of sharing that might make revolution possible.” Because to put it plainly, all the duet reminds me of is what is possible when we recognize one another in our circumstances, in the circumstances of the most marginalized among us. Not what currently is in the space of the song, of the Grammys, of the institutions inside which they sing.
The video I watched from the Grammys starts on Chapman’s hands picking out the opening to the song. Slowly it pans up and onto her face before widening into a shot of her and Luke Combs, each at their own mic. It roots us in her hands, her creation. And she sings the first stanza.
You got a fast car
I want a ticket to anywhere
Maybe we make a deal
Maybe together we can get somewhere
Any place is better
Starting from zero, got nothing to lose
Maybe we'll make somethin'
Me, myself, I got nothing to prove
It’s true, she has nothing to prove, here in the year of our Lord 2024. This isn’t Wembley Stadium in 1988 (which, I will note, was a performance in celebration of Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, while he was still being held prisoner by the apartheid government). She isn’t 24, this isn’t her debut, she isn’t there to fill in last-minute for someone more famous. Luke Combs is up for the Grammy because of her. Just before she starts to sing, her shy smile tells me that she knows this.
Combs takes the second verse, repeating the opening line “You got a fast car.” The exact repetition serves as an act of mutual recognition, an ability to see their circumstances in one another’s. Alone, his stanza might read as a reification of a typical American bootstrappy narrative – he’s got a car and a plan, so he and his can make something of themselves. But for me, within the context of the duet, the last line takes on a new meaning – living under whiteness, even with the trappings of upward mobility, is not freedom. We gotta get out of here and see what living really means.
As Chapman begins the next verse, Combs mouths the words along with her as she sings. I a little annoyed by this at first but in the context of his constant furtive glances as over at Chapman throughout the performance, I read it as admiration. As though if he isn’t present for every moment, every word, it might disappear. The sheer joy on Combs’s face is part of what elevates the duet from goodtime publicity stunt to a Performance of the Decade. Far too often, when white artists draw inspiration from Black music, there’s no recognition of the history they’re drawing upon. Blackness is seen as this endless fount of artistic capital from which white artists can draw, and with the trappings of whiteness, find fame and fortune. But in his smile, I see his delight at getting to share the stage with her, and his public declaration that being Seen by her and her words is its own gift.
Combs takes the pre-chorus, laying the stakes of the project bare. They have to make a decision, or risk living and dying this way, separate, in their own lanes.
And while I’m rarely interested in some sort of rah rah Kumbaya multicultural liberal facade of unity, the move into the chorus embodies that sense of comradeship that I feel in the best of times, on the picket line, in the pit, at the National March on Washington for a Free Palestine. Your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder, tangible, a reassurance. They sing in unison, the unique tones of their voices a harmony all on its own. I had a feeling that I belonged here next to you, they seem to say. I had a feeling that I could be someone, be someone, be someone — a condition made possible by their togetherness, divorced from the isolation of the typical country crooner. I am because we are.
We live in desperate and often desolate times. And I think my sobs there on the living room couch watching the video revealed how truly desperate I am for that experience of mutual possibility. My heaviest tears fall then as I grieve all that we’ve lost and as I prepare myself for the world that I hope is to come, with my comrades at my side. That though the odds are stacked, I am not helpless. We can leave tonight, if you’re ready. I’ll pack my bag. I’ll get in the car.
Next week, I’ll return to our regularly scheduled Gulf Coast angst.
NYC Friends! I’ve got a show coming up this Saturday - come for the jokes, stay for my attempt to write poems on command in response to said jokes. Should be a hoot and a half.
Currently reading: Maus by Art Spiegelman
Spinning: My dear friend Noah Parnes’s cover of Lady Gaga’s Joanne
Feel free to email me for the link to the PDF if you’re interested in reading more.
Loved every moment of this essay and also thanks for setting me up to also sob over my morning coffee while (FINALLY) watching this duet