HEN I was 12 years old, 12 years old, and sits with my family and watches the free Nelson Mandela concert on TV. As a clan, while trying to release Mandela, we were old hands after years of marching and boycotting for years, and this concert felt like a climax. There was a lot of excitement in the room: we squeezed it on the couch and opened the windows. (If the wind blows in the right direction, you can hear a Wembley viewer from Willesden.)
Many world -famous musicians played that day. I don’t remember most, but I will never forget: Tracy Chapman. I think many people feel this way, but when you watch the images again, you realize what it is against. Nobody cheers when he goes on stage. In fact, the crowd does not seem to be aware of coming. People chant, chat or just make party.
Prepared as a replacement of Stevie Wonder with last -minute technical problems, an unknown 24 -year -old child must have received a lot of courage to play in front of 90,000 people in order not to talk about 600 million television viewers. And in the first line of the fast car, his voice breaks a little. For a moment, you are watching Harvard Square Busker, which he has recently been to, and demoralized by all vehicles and hurrying students…
But a second later, he attracted everyone’s attention. Now there are only his guitar, melody, words. I want a ticket everywhere / maybe we make an agreement / maybe we can go anywhere together. Very sincere, unexpected performance. He was a bomber’s music style, and especially Wembley was the home of demonstrations and theaters. Chapman was completely different: a protest singer with acoustic guitar. It is great to watch that the crowd of mammoths fell into a silence of Audi.
When we got back to Willesden, perhaps we were quite surprised for different reasons. It was the shock of acquaintances for us. It was dressed like young activists you see during walks-Cowlneck T, black jeans, black boots-and even our mother like our mother: no makeup and the same three-inch dreadlocks. He was very familiar. We also familiar with the music lineage. It is rich alto tinbre. It was like listening to Joan Armatrading’s daughter.
But what was such a person doing on television? This made it really like unprecedented. And he just didn’t look like people next to the screen, he was singing our songs. Daily struggle songs, working class experience, poverty, beverage, political protest, indigenous troubles, blocked dreams. He was talking about a revolution. In BBC!
We lived in a monoculture in 1988. At the end of that summer, everyone who was interested in music made a pilgrimage to Woolworths or our price and seemed to buy his first album Tracy Chapman. In autumn, these 11 songs were buried deep into the lives of many people who affected our political thoughts, romantic dreams, existential beliefs, our first 10 list. They’re all because of this one performance.
None of this was typical. Most of the artists of that period had Juggernaut PR machines around them, but communication with Chapman could not be anything from singular and directly, from the singer to the eardrum, and there was no extra to strengthen it. I don’t remember reading a single interview with him years after this concert, and I don’t think I saw his performance again with Luke Combs in 2024 Grammys.
For years, the only photo I have ever seen was the photo in front of that first album. Nevertheless, although he knows nothing about him, me and millions of people have been listening to him for decades. When you write songs like Tracy Chapman, you don’t have to do anything else. The first output is the expression of this principle: 11 excellent songs that do not contain oil and filling, directed by an open purpose union that moves and never allowed itself.
This is an album about “The People. They speak directly about a revolution and are kept in mind: their labor, hopes and desires, loves and losses they have won, their mistakes and their shame, even crimes. They are known as lyric, but they are never idealized. The poor are definitely working, but more than the “proletariat”. They are also human. Full of human contradictions. Sometimes, for example, instead of freedom, they want the “mountains of things .. They rarely do not do dangerous or stupid things, or they make bad decisions that make their harder lives even worse. Behind the wall, a man beats his wife. Love people cover everyone, but love is often broken or crushed by the emergency demands of survival.
It is never forgotten, not even for a line, but how the American game is equipped against them at every opportunity. Creating them to die for half or to create a division where solidarity is necessary for the minimum wage: Opposite the lines / Who dare to go / Under the bridge / HEWhites separate from whites / trails?
One of the things that moved me the most about this album not only challenged the separated policy of American life, but also the unity of American music. Since Beyoncé can overcome the country’s graphics and have musicians such as Rhiannon Giddens, who perform equal expertise at Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals, to remember how hard the American music business is in the 1980s and 90s. It was incredibly difficult to imagine a folk singer with a guitar outside the paradigm determined by Bob Dylan at the time. It could be hip-hop and often “protest music ,, but black women were spirit singers or pop stars. We could say Blues and jazz, but the people were another country. Chapman has switched to all these lines, passionate about a country and working people living there, and used a robbery that still feels very radical.
Because I imagine that a young artist explains to the record companies that they want to record a Cappella lament about domestic violence. But somehow, in Tracy Chapman, here is an unforgettable human voice that emerges with something else, saying a compelling truth. It is not good to call / the police always come late / if they come.
The poor people described in Tracy Chapman do not have all answers, but they open to reality. They don’t want to lie anymore, not by politicians, employers, neighbors or lovers. The facts they want to hear are not particularly complex, but they are important. I think this is the job of a protest singer: to remind the technocrats and politicians and those who have the power of the basic concerns of the people.
Why is he listening to the piece? Now, since this skillful album is reused, it is surprising how little answers to Chapman’s basic questions right now: Why do babies suffer from hunger? / Why are there enough food to feed the world / Why are there many so many / still lonely people? // Why are the missiles as peace forces / when they aim to kill? / Why isn’t a woman still safe / when she’s at home?
This simple, honest language protest is the instrument of the singer. In the meantime, the following Orwelian Doublelespe continues to be employed at the highest levels of American power: Love is hate / war peace / no yes / We are all free.
Chapman’s pure melodic beauty and a gift to the listeners of Cömert Lyrics. But I feel that his career, which started with this extraordinary album, is an amazing and humble example for the artists. It reminds us that an artist can follow an individual course without an individual. You can talk to many people without talking to the press. There is such a thing as privacy, and every human being has the right to it.
Finally and the most vital, your soul is worth holding. Actually, that’s almost all you have.
