Sweet Sixteen Action: (7) TRACY CHAPMAN vs (6) KATE BUSH

FINAL SCORE: (7) TRACY CHAPMAN 74, (6) Kate Bush 53

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(7) Tracy Chapman, "Fast Car"

Analysis by Manuel Muñoz

It’s never a good idea to study a bracket too closely, either before or after the playing starts, but Tracy Chapman’s appearance in the Sweet Sixteen suggests unheralded strength rather than an easy draw. I was sure she was going to fall to The Smiths in the first round, but her earnest delivery carried “Fast Car” through. That might suggest (might!) that the voting pool considers the combo of plaintive but warm voice plus easily graspable lyrics more potent than the committee anticipated. Only the voting bloc that witnessed the Chapman/Eels showdown knows for sure.

“Fast Car” might be the most straightforward and story-like of the songs we’ve got left, leaving little room for second-guessing its considerable narrative of burden and responsibility. The previous write-up on Chapman already made mention of the song’s “speed” chorus, its rush of longing and vulnerability. But before that, we hear the speaker lay out how parental failure has forced a guilty hand. “Somebody’s got to take care of him,” says the speaker of an alcoholic, broken-down father, “so I quit school and that’s what I did.” For all its merits as a song of broken hopes and disillusionment, it’s also one that surprisingly insists that bigger family circumstances can matter just as much as a lack of individual options for a person at a crossroads.

For pushing thirty years of age, “Fast Car” has held up well as a song representing the early half of the bracket era. I admire how its folk sensibility managed to crash a couple of boundaries in 1988. Is it college radio or straight-up adult contemporary? Is it 120 Minutes or VH1 during the daytime? However we might answer those questions, the impact of the song and what it meant to a lot of people might best be demonstrated by the “roll call” moment in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing from 1989. Just a year after her big hit and Chapman (thrillingly to my young movie-going ears at the time) got to take a well-earned place on a very deep bench.

Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and two short-story collections. He’s midway through a third, with recent work in the current issue of American Short Fiction.

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(6) Kate Bush, “This Woman's Work”

Analysis by Danielle Cadena Deulen

It’s those first sung notes—somehow both sweet and distraught, sharp and tender—an exhale that draws the breath out of a room. It’s a hurt-pleasure like pressing the cut at the tip of your finger, or the anxiety that arises in the moment someone you love touches your shoulder, turns you around because they need to tell you something. Something big. Something that will probably make you cry.
And I do whenever I hear this song.

Admittedly, I’m sentimental. But I don’t think that’s all that’s at work here. Most sad songs are sad to me because I connect them with my own memories of loss, but this song has been floating through my life a long time now, landing my attention in various moments that have no aligning personal narrative. It’s not unlike the aesthetically disjunctive context of the song’s original life, having been written for the 1988 John Hughes film, She’s Having a Baby. 

I watched it on TV as a kid, largely unimpressed by Kevin Bacon’s supposedly comedic performance, his character’s hysterical response to the expectations of fatherhood striking me, even then, as immature—Oh, grow up, thought my eleven-year-old self. Then his wife goes into labor and something is wrong. A drop of blood falls slowly to the hospital’s white floor and Kate Bush’s voice rings out over a montage of scenes that haven’t earned it. For a moment, I forget that I don’t like what I’m watching, that I am bored, only a child, and am merely suspended in her voice, in perpetual present tense.

The song has always arrived to me this way, at moments in my life that should make me resist its emotional call: Drunk at a party, or driving on a bright day through the mountains, or sitting with my high school ex-boyfriend in his Volkswagen Rabbit, still saturated with the stink of cigarettes and Eternity for Men, stifling a laugh because he’s shown up at my childhood house years after we split with an engagement ring for the girl he left me for—to get my opinion, he tells me—but the ring’s so godawful (white-gold dolphins diving around a diamond chip) and his obviousness so ripe (he wants me to be jealous) that I have to clasp my hand over my mouth, when the first notes of “This Woman’s Work” reaches out through the radio—

And I forget where I am, what I was thinking, who I’m with, and despite the context, my eyes well-up. He places his hand on my shoulder sympathetically. “No,” I try to say, “it’s just the song,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe me, that he thinks he’s got what he came for.

What I’m trying to say is this: the song creates its own space. Kate Bush starts singing and even though I know what must come next, I want to know what comes next. This is probably why it keeps resurfacing in the voices of different singers, gender notwithstanding. Its sadness is beautifully arresting, the call of a lone bird, the moan of a train at night. I suppose this is what I want from any song: to be transported so far away that I forget myself to ache into it.

Give me these moments back. Give them back to me.

Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Lovely Asunder and Our Emotions Get Carried Away Beyond Us, and an essay collection, The Riots. She’s the poetry series editor at Acre Books and teaches for Willamette University. You can find out more about her here.

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