About That Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs Performance

when a duet is more than a duet

I’m not a Boomer, but this is me when it comes to the Grammys:

Interestingly, my Boomer mother watches them every year…

I didn’t watch, but quickly heard about Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, who teamed up to sing “Fast Car,” Chapman’s 1988 song that country singer Combs covered last year. I’d heard Combs’s version before—Spotify serves it up unprompted every so often, and I liked it because it had a real reverence for the original. And Chapman and Combs’s live performance is transcendent. The Grammy organization released the full version after the broadcast.

The performance went mega-viral and launched a thousand social media posts and reaction pieces. You know you’ve hit a nerve when Joni Mitchell’s first time ever performing on the Grammys feels like a footnote in comparison. During their duet, the camera cuts to Taylor Swift singing along, and Brandi Carlile standing in awe, and one can picture them as young girls, on their Christmas tree farm and in hardscrabble rural Washington State, respectively, discovering that song for the first time. As for me, as a high schooler, I wore out my cassette of Tracy Chapman’s debut album, not just for “Fast Car,” but for “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution,” “Across the Lines,” “Why?” and more.

People reporting openly weeping while watching it. And I feel what they feel. I can’t listen without goosebumps. There’s something healing about seeing this elder Gen Xer together with a millenial performing a song for the ages, a gay Black woman from Cleveland, and a straight white male who attended Appalachian State, a poet who lamented police ineptitude in domestic violence situations, and a man who majored in criminal justice and once dreamed of being a cop. 

They share the song beautifully, and be sure to note the way Combs centers and respects her. No showboating, no colorful trucker’s hat which he often wears, just a straightforward rendition, with both of them clad in a simple classy black. Favorite moment is at 1:14 of the video, when Combs looks down sheepishly as if he can’t quite believe he’s singing on stage with Tracy Freaking Chapman. 

Here at the Blue Room, we like to both savor and reflect. My feelings are complicated about this week’s Fast Car phenomenon. There’s a purity to what we saw, a warm feeling we desperately needed amid, well, the 2024 of it all. But like a lot of good art, and the entire body of Chapman’s work, this duet about the plight of the underclass also indicts and implicates the culture at large. 

I’m going to risk some pop-culture whiplash and tell you what this performance, but especially its emotional reception, reminded me of almost immediately:

Black Jeopardy. 

Specifically this episode, from SNL: 

If you haven’t seen it, take a look at the above sketch from October 2016. In it, Tom Hanks plays the MAGA-loving Doug. Doug is coded as a “redneck,” certainly poor: when Black Jeopardy host Kenan Thompson looks quizzically at him, wondering why he’s there, Doug says simply that he’d heard this was a place to win a little money. The hilarity ensues when he starts to get answers right. Like his Black co-contestants, he loves playing the lottery. He distrusts the government. Instead of going to the auto repair place, he’s “got a guy.” And in response to “Skinny women can do this for you,” he says, “What is ‘Not a damn thing’?”... for which he receives high-fives from the Black women he’s competing against.

This sketch also went viral at the time; I recall people loving the warm-hearted satire and the chance to laugh, mere weeks before the 2016 election, and to believe that maybe we would be OK. But it’s not a universally feel-good sketch. The button of the scene has Kenan Thompson revealing the Final Jeopardy topic: Lives That Matter. After a knowing pause, he says, “Well, it was good while it lasted, Doug.” Because yes, there are limits to our solidarity in these here United States.

Back to the Grammys. Why was this performance such a balm? Because it feels aspirational, maybe even eschatological… and so removed from the realities we see reflected back to us on the news, especially in an election year. But why is this vision so removed from reality? For a lot of complicated cultural reasons. 

The duet gives us a glimpse of what’s possible, but the performance also left me sad. Maybe wistful is the better word, with an aftertaste that was equal parts bitter and sweet. They’re singing about quitting school to care for an alcoholic father, about longing to leave the homeless shelter and buy a big house in the suburbs… while the reality looms that they will probably “live and die this way,” just as way too many people do in this country—black and white, urban and rural. 

Chapman released “Fast Car” in the waning years of Ronald Reagan, whose racist trope of the Black welfare queen still loomed large, despite the fact that most of the people on welfare, then and now, are white.
…And then the song was covered last year by a 33 year old whose generation is still waiting to buy that big house; rates of home ownership, long a marker of the American dream, are appreciably lower for today’s younger adults when compared to previous generations at the same age.
…And then it was performed as a duet in 2024, in a year when faux populist politicians will exploit racial and cultural grievance and stoke resentment against immigrants, trans kids and the like, they’re to blame for your problems, and never mind about those CEO bonuses and runaway profits, and companies shipping your jobs overseas or busting your unions. 

Here’s my point. If these two very different artists had come together to sing, I don’t know, “Turn Turn Turn,” then it’s purely a cross-genre feel-good moment. But instead they’re singing that song. Which makes it something else altogether, something we need to linger over and not memory-hole when the next hit of pop culture dopamine arrives. The cynical among us like to roll their eyes at so-called “kumbaya moments,” and I get it, but we forget that one of the verses of Kumbaya is “Someone’s crying, Lord.” And that it was a slave song.

I recently attended a workshop sponsored by NEXT Church on preaching as disruption—we talked about how to be courageous yet thoughtful when we need to say hard things from the pulpit. Since that workshop I’ve been asking myself, before I write, What am I trying to disrupt here? What dysfunction do I see in the world that needs the fresh grace of the gospel? 

Not all disruptions are jarring: Chapman and Combs disrupted the anxiety and rancor that’s so thick in the air these days, and gave people a catharsis. Now, I wonder, will we let that feeling dissipate? Or will be allow the disruption to be further disrupted? Will we work to ensure that the world they embodied on stage, and that the song longs for, is possible?

Your Turn

• Did you see or hear the Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs performance, or its aftermath? What did you notice in it?

• What do you think needs to be disrupted these days?

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What I’m Up To

Speaking of preaching, and the Grammys, a group I’ve done some work with described me in a promotional email this week as the “Taylor Swift of the preaching world.” Good Lord. I’m old enough to be her mother. Still… time to update the bio? And you can watch last Sunday’s sermon here and decide whether I’m enchanted or an anti-hero. 

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Link Love

• For old times’ sake: another favorite Black Jeopardy sketch, this one featuring Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa.

• And another favorite Grammy performance from years past, this one by Brandi Carlile. 

Steady on.