Tracy Chapman - Revolution in a Whisper

Tracy Chapman is probably the most important Black folk singer-songwriter since the Eighties, even though, having lost the spark of her stunning debut, much of her later work has turned out somewhat confused and fragmentary. What's certain is that her self-titled 1988 debut album, Tracy Chapman, revitalized American folk songwriting, influencing many female artists of generations to come.

What also strikes you about Tracy Chapman is her ever-humble, reserved attitude, almost misanthropic, that has always accompanied her. Suffice it to say that, despite enjoying great success, she never intended to leave her native Cleveland, Ohio, where she was born and still lives today. It was there, from an early age, that she taught herself to play various instruments, among them the acoustic guitar, which she played in a direct, simple way, free of pointless virtuosity. These instruments would later accompany her trademark voice, rough and deep.

After finishing high school she won a scholarship to Tufts University in Boston, where she majored in Anthropology and African American Studies. It was there that she developed a passion for folk culture, to the point of deciding to merge this new interest with the music she had cultivated since childhood. Every evening after her university studies she performed solo in various Boston coffee houses, earning a solid following, until one of these performances caught the attention of Brian Koppelman, who recommended her to his father Charles at the independent label SBK and to Joni Mitchell's producer, Elliot Roberts. Thanks to these contacts, Tracy Chapman managed to sign with Elektra and release that classic, her self-titled debut album.

What's striking about Tracy Chapman (1988) is how an artist barely into her twenties could be endowed with the moral authority of the best Bob Dylan and the limpid, never-rhetorical lesson of Joni Mitchell, sharing with them the ability to create a "confessional" kind of folk. But that's not all. Her record became a genuine phenomenon. Chapman stood light years apart both from the women of that era, including Black women, who exploited MTV to gain visibility, and from those who adopted snobbish, intellectual postures as a reaction to the former. Chapman chose an entirely personal path. Consider the classic included on this record, "Fast Car", which lucidly tackled the typical problems of Black inner-city America: unemployment and the struggle to get the benefits needed to survive. Such a theme, coming from another Black artist of the time, could have been delivered with anger and aggression, whereas Chapman cast a spell through the sheer gentleness and delicacy of her delivery. The same goes for "Talkin' About A Revolution" or for that tale of domestic violence in "Behind The Wall", sung a cappella with quiet intensity: a desolate portrait of rough neighborhoods and police who always arrive too late, if they arrive at all. Sung entirely a cappella in a deep, melancholy, androgynous voice, it is also the only moment on Tracy Chapman's debut not accompanied by the warmth of her acoustic guitar and percussion, the one where her gospel roots come forcefully to the surface.

If the shifting colors of "Across The Lines," buoyed by an almost ethno-pop phrasing, seem less bleak than one might expect, the delivery still wounds with its sharp, accusatory edge. Her approach is so forthright that within a few months the newly graduated anthropology major would be hailed as an authoritative voice on human rights and the anti-apartheid struggle, helped along by her participation in Amnesty International's Human Rights Now benefit tour and, even more famously, in the concert celebrating Nelson Mandela's seventieth birthday.

The injustice depicted in her songs seems so devoid of resolution that even the love one desperately clings to just to get by is anything but comforting. Stripped of tenderness and respect in the bittersweet "Baby Can I Hold You," whose blatant romanticism—and the fame it brought—gradually stripped it of its original intent, yet still worth protecting even at the cost of jail time and steep bail, as told in the stately country ballad "For My Lover." It's a love that makes you lose control, one to burn through immediately given the lack of any future, yet impossible to give up—the kind that closes the album on the delicate waltz of "If Not Now..." and the bare, almost desolate "For You," tracks in which Chapman proves she has perfectly absorbed the intimate lessons taught by Joni Mitchell.

Escaping such a harsh reality seems to be the only way to leave so much despair behind, but only when daydreamed does it translate into a happy ending, in the album's lighter moments. While the South American echoes of "Mountains O' Things" (a blueprint Ed Sheeran would later use to build at least three of his nagging hits) sketch out the ideal setting for a utopian life of comfort, the even more carefree Caribbean cadences of "She's Got Her Ticket" offer the only faint glimmer of hope in the entire narrative. Because when the escape becomes real in the disillusioned "Fast Car," chosen to launch the album, every effort to rebuild a more dignified life—immortalized in a luminous refrain that opens memorably over its chant-like melody—is destroyed by a poverty that, like a bloodhound, tracks down anyone born with that social stigma.

Bearing in mind the everyday political contradictions listed in the stark rock-blues of "Why?" (admittedly a bit too naive), all that's left is to wait for a revolution that sooner or later has to break out, even if the awareness needed to bring it about is still in its infancy, sorely tested by hunger and unemployment. And it's the vibrant stammer of the rousing "Talkin' Bout A Revolution" that opens a record whose themes, more than thirty years on and in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, still feel remarkably current.

The debut album received rapturous reviews all over the world. The understated delivery and the undeniable pop sensibility running through her songs made it not just a cult record but also a commercial success that would go on to sell twenty million copies over time. An unexpected outcome, given the subject matter and the stripped-down sound — hardly the kind of R&B one was used to seeing at the top of the world charts in those years.

Tracy Chapman would become the standard-bearer for all socially engaged artists, performing at Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! Tour and at the Nelson Mandela Freedomfest between 1988 and 1989.

Everyone, however, was waiting for the second album, a true trial by fire for Chapman. That second work was Crossroads. The album was the ideal continuation of the debut. This time the influence of Mitchell-style confessional folk was weaker, while the spirit of Dylan, and also of his disciple Springsteen, came through more strongly on the unmistakable "Born To Fight". More universal themes, and certainly more political.

Although it didn't receive the triumphant, hysterical welcome of the debut, it still earned some excellent reviews. Some critics, however, pointed out that her overly reserved, almost excessively private character could become a dangerous limitation for someone who, like her, wanted to be a politically engaged artist. By deliberately staying solitary and withdrawn, she risked being less incisive and effective when tackling social issues.

Those critics weren't wrong, and this contradiction surfaced on the third album, Matters of the Heart. Even the title track, dealing with a love story that carries on without the passion it once had, has a less direct, less immediate impact compared with the splendid "Baby Can I Hold You" from the debut album. Her talent is beyond question and her voice still never fails to move you. The protest song "Bang Bang Bang", meanwhile, is a real gunshot that hits hard. But it's genuinely difficult for all this to sustain ten songs, unless one is willing to bring the themes up to date.

If Crossroads was the ideal continuation of the debut, Matters of the Heart is its faded copy. The audience, too, sensed Chapman's shortfall, and the eight million copies sold by the debut had by then become little more than a distant memory. Chapman then took a three-year break to reflect.

When she returned to the scene in 1995, she chose New Beginning as the title of her new album. The "new beginning" stemmed from her awareness that she no longer wanted to force herself into the role of politically engaged folk singer-songwriter that had defined her on the three previous albums. Musically, too, thanks to new producer Don Gehman, Chapman offered her usual brand of folk, now blended with blues on the splendid "Give Me One Reason", now with acoustic rock, now with acoustic country-rock. The result was a pleasant breath of fresh air. And commercial results were not long in coming. "Give Me One Reason" entered the Billboard Top 10 and stayed near the top of the charts for months, pulling the whole album along to sales of three million copies.

After the follow-up titled Telling Stories, released in 2000, which marked a return to the sound of the first two albums (the producer, indeed, is the same, David Kershenbaum), she returned in 2002 with a new studio work, Let It Rain, which inevitably bears the mark of 9/11. Acoustic folk-rock, but also unusual influences such as gospel, characterize the songs, with lyrics that are almost always harsh and dramatic. It's a spare, essential record, resting on arrangements stripped down to the bare minimum. A narrative runs through it, all the way to "Over in Love", moving between the melancholy of "dark" pieces like "In the Dark" and "Broken" and the lightness of a song like "You're the One". Nor are her usual social references missing, as in "Hard Wired", with explicit allusions to reality TV's Big Brother, or in "Say Hallelujah", an invitation to hope, though always rendered in chiaroscuro.

Co-produced by Chapman and the well-known sound engineer and mixer Tchad Blake (Los Lobos, Peter Gabriel, Pearl Jam, Tom Waits, Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson), Where You Live (2005) offers 11 new songs ranging from ballads ("3,000 Miles", "Going Back") to coarse-grained Americana ("Before Easter", "Taken", "America"), to flashes of fiery rock (the single "Change").

As usual, the lyrics alternate between intimate introspection and social commentary: in "America", Chapman reflects on the price of Western imperialist expansion; with "Going Back" and "3,000 Miles" she examines the struggle for identity in an increasingly inhumane world, while songs like "Talk To You" and "Love's Proof" carry on the romantic tradition of love songs like "Baby Can I Hold You" (1988) and "I Am Yours" (2002).

Among the guests, bassist Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) contributed to three tracks, while Chapman herself, besides writing the lyrics, handled parts of the guitars, keyboards and clarinet.

Such a massive deployment of resources, however, produces nothing more than a solid, workmanlike album, far removed from the vibrant echo of her debut.

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