Tracy Chapman

Last night I heard loud screams behind the wall

and then a silence that froze my soul,

I prayed I was only dreaming

when I saw the ambulance in the street…

"Behind The Wall" is a bleak portrait of domestic violence, rough neighborhoods and police who always arrive too late, if they arrive at all. Sung entirely a cappella in a deep, melancholic, androgynous voice, it's also the only moment on Tracy Chapman's debut not accompanied by the acoustic warmth of her guitar and percussion, the one where her gospel roots surge powerfully to the surface. In her coexist the soul rooted in her Baptist upbringing and the blues, but also the vivid folk storytelling of Dylan, whom she fell for from a young age — a combination that makes her the natural heir to Joan Armatrading, only more essential and austere.

Her earliest performances in college settings, during her university years, caught the attention of a fellow student, the son of a well-known record executive, who courted her at length before finally getting her to sign with Elektra Records in 1987. Several producers, however, refused to work with such an outspoken up-and-comer, hard to mold and steer toward commercial territory; nearly a year passed before a far-sighted David Kershenbaum finally grasped her potential, helping her record an album as faithful as possible to the sobriety of her artistic vision.

There couldn't have been a better moment to seal such a debut: the neon glow of the '80s was fading, Reaganism was nearing its end, and the wider public seemed more receptive to less frivolous, more politically engaged music, as shown by the recent triumphs of U2 and Sting. And frivolous is simply something Chapman could never be. Reserved, well-read, not exactly conventionally attractive by mainstream standards, the singer from Cleveland experienced discrimination firsthand in a city that since the '60s had been the stage for one of the longest and most brutal racial uprisings in American history, one that led to severe economic depression. Who better than her to sing about the barriers dividing Black and white Americans, about the violent clashes that killed so many young people and, with them, the American dream itself?

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 brutal social snapshot Chapman captures in just over half an hour could be seen as the Black answer to the equally raw portrait Springsteen had immortalized years earlier on "Nebraska," but the restraint of the performances and the undeniable pop sensibility running through her songs made it not just a cult record but a commercial success that would go on to sell twenty million copies over time. Unexpectedly so, given the subject matter and the spare sonic dress it wears—hardly the kind of R&B one was used to seeing atop the world charts in those years.

Over the course of her long but low-key career, Chapman would never again match the sharp focus of her debut, even though her activism and top-tier songwriting remained intact (as proven by excellent tracks like "Crossroads," "Give Me One Reason" and "Telling Stories") and her collaborators grew ever more prestigious (Neil Young, Eric Clapton and B.B. King). Alongside an inevitable lack of stylistic range, her sound would gradually grow somewhat more polished, replacing the demo-tape rawness that made her early songs so urgent and so capable of reviving the entire American folk scene, going on to influence generations of singer-songwriters eager to tell their own stories with nothing more than a guitar and a deep voice.

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04/04/2021