For the release of his third album of greatest hits, deceptively titled Greatest Hits Volume II, country music megastar Alan Jackson included two brand new tracks, something of a rarity for greatest hits compilation albums. The first of these is It's Five O'clock Somewhere, a beachside bar anthem featuring legendary flip-flop enthusiast Jimmy Buffett. The other song, Remember When, plots a much different emotional course through the listener's ears, en route to the depths of human existence. There is no description of this song that can adequately explain the internal anguish Remember When inflicts upon the listener. It's a song that isn't heard so much as experienced, and that experience is pain - an excruciating and lingering pain that refuses to leave you even when the tears have dried and the mascara has been reapplied.
Remember When tells the life story of a generic romantic couple from the first-person plural perspective. It chronicles the life stages of a romance, from falling in love as teenagers, to begrudgingly accepting the ravages of time and awaiting the cold embrace of death as an elderly couple, with some light adultery somewhere in the middle. Although a reading of the lyrics does not provide a clear race or gender for either the narrator or the spouse, the song has a distinctive white, heterosexual vibe to it. You can practically hear Alan Jackson's signature cowboy hat and mustache in his voice. Sure, modern country music has adopted trap beats and Darius Rucker, but if we're all being honest with ourselves, the sound of country music conjures images of straight white people doing straight white people things, and Remember When sits comfortably in that chalky, alabaster, mayonnaise zone of whiteness. There's also the fact that Alan Jackson, who has released two full-length gospel albums during his career, wrote the song for his wife, so there really isn't a lot of room for ambiguity in the song's intention even if there is a lack of pronouns in the lyrics. If Chic Fil-A was a song, it would be Remember When.
If we dig a little deeper into the narrative of the song, however, a few subtextual observations can be made. The couple in the song are clearly following a path or participating in an established system that appears to be so rewarding that neither the narrator nor the spouse seems to have any desire to deviate from it. They are free from the hardships of external forces in the wider world. They are content with the provisions laid before them. They are Adam and Eve before the ruin of Eden. God's favorite children. The true sadness evoked by Remember When is the revelation that their lives of comfort, like life in the garden of plenty, must also come to an end.
Sadness, part II.
In the summer of 1988, a 70th birthday tribute concert for Nelson Mandela was held in London's Wembly Stadium. Stevie Wonder was secretly brought in for a surprise performance. He was set to take the main stage when his technicians discovered that the storage device containing the synthesized tracks for his Synclavier (a really old electronic music machine) was missing. Unable to play at such a special event, Stevie left the stage in tears. To fill his time, organizers asked a young singer who had just released her debut album a few months prior to take the stage again after playing an opening slot earlier in the day. Tracy Chapman took the stage and performed Fast Car before an estimated worldwide audience of 600 million people watching the broadcast. Fast Car went on to become a massive hit, leading to millions in album sales and three Grammy awards in 1989.
Fast Car, like Remember When, also tells the life story of a couple and how their lives change over the years. However, from the very beginning of the song, we are told that this story will carry a very different emotional burden. The narrator, who we are told is a young woman, enters into this relationship as a means of survival. She states that she clearly views the relationship as transactional and not romantic - "You got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere, Maybe we make a deal, Maybe together we can get somewhere". Right away, the listener is left broken hearted for the narrator, basking in the hauntingly morose (and brilliant) melody written by Chapman. The narrator describes her reasons for wanting to get away from her current situation in life. Her father is an alcoholic with health problems for whom the narrator has dropped out of high school to take care while working at a convenience store. The chorus gives the listener a brief respite from the pain of the narrator's life by describing the exhilaration of riding in her partner's car as they finally drive away to the promise of a new life and possibly love in the city. However, we are quickly brought back to grim reality of life in poverty, as the narrator tells us that she is working as a checkout girl to support herself and her partner who are living in a shelter. She is still hopeful she will be promoted and that her partner will find work and the added income will allow them to move into their own home. By the final verse, we see that her hopes have been dashed and she finds herself in the same situation she initially tried so desperately to flee in the beginning of the song, working and raising her children while her alcoholic and chronically unemployed partner is absent from their lives. She closes out the song by ending the relationship and telling her partner to use the same car that drove them away from their old life to leave their new one as well.
Tracy Chapman is black, and Fast Car presents a distinctly black American perspective on life and relationships. While Alan Jackson's narrator found his life in white America to be so fulfilling and idealized that the only thing he had to fear was that life coming to an end, Tracy Chapman's narrator found living in black America so bleak that her only hope in life was finding some way to leave it. There's no room for love and romance in her story because all of her energy, emotions, and time are spent on survival. The one dignity afforded to her is pride in her survival and her children to whom she will pass on that hope in a better future. How much more can possibly be taken from her?
Allow me to introduce you to two-time Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year award winner Luke Combs. In 2023, he released a cover of Fast Car that became an immediate hit. It reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, which was higher than the original Tracy Chapman version that only reached number 6. At one point, on August 5, 2023, Combs' version of Fast Car sat at number 3 on the Hot 100 behind two other country songs - Try That in a Small Town by Jason Aldean and Last Night by Morgan Wallen. Now, if you don't know why I would mention this fact that includes those two songs and artists in particular, well, yeah, it's because racism. Try That in a Small Town is a conservative protest song that implicitly threatens to shoot and possibly kill anyone from urban areas who would somehow impose what Americans would consider "liberal" values on rural people and featured a music video filmed at the Tennessee courthouse that was site of at least one lynching in 1927 while showing clips of riots projected on the building. In 2021, anti-mask philanderer Morgan Wallen was caught on camera using the N-word on a drunken night out with friends and briefly suspended from most country music radio stations and awards shows. That's not to say that Luke Combs should necessarily be considered part of an unholy racist trinity here. By all accounts, he has led a squeaky clean and controversy-free career thus far. However, this is the company in which he finds himself and his music. He shares the same fan base.
To be clear, Tracy Chapman has given Luke Combs legal and public approval to cover Fast Car. She accepted the Country Music Association award for Song of the Year as writer of Fast Car, becoming the first black writer to win that award. She even performed Fast Car with Luke Combs at the Grammy Awards earlier this year. As the writer, Tracy Chapman has made a lot of money from Luke Combs' recording of Fast Car. To his credit, Luke Combs agreed to record and perform the song as originally written with no lyric changes that would present the song from his white male perspective. The production value and arrangement on Luke Combs' version of the song are tremendous, and the song pops from the speakers with a sonic heft not found in the original version. Tracy Chapman made the decision that was right for her as an artist and as a person and that decision should be respected and admired.
And yet, something about it just doesn't feel very good.
It feels tainted.
As a child of the 80s, Fast Car was one of the first songs that really made me feel something magical in music.
And now it doesn't.