It caused something of a sensation.
With the exception of another hit somewhat belatedly in 1995 (“Give Me One Reason”), it seemed all too easy for the pop world to leave Chapman behind. Until the Grammys viral moment I didn’t even know the name of the song was “Fast Car.”
It was just a song I knew, and knew that I loved. It’s kind of symptomatic of the modern pop song. The station I check in with these days advertises itself as playing the best of the “80s, 90s, and today,” literally lumping three decades into that last signifier. I mean, the only reason the ‘90s are listed at all is because four decades would probably be too much. I mean, we’re here in 2024. Time to knuckle up and name the ‘00s, the ‘10s (even if a century ago we didn’t until the “Roaring ‘20s,” even if that’s a poor excuse at best). Call them the Oughts, the Tens, or Twenty-Tens if you must. I mean, what the heck are we gonna call these decades when they are the relevant nostalgia period?
The ‘90s are a whole decade that still define pop music, but for all the wrong reasons. “Boy bands” are now Korean, but they still contain no actual instruments. Rock music was so ruthlessly dismissed it effectively killed it as a mainstream phenomenon (and even today, the acts that do manage to make it are mocked or ignored when discussing what happened to the genre).
The ‘80s were hair bands and Michael Jackson, the splintering of rock into pop and various kinds of heavier sounds that increasingly had no place in the mainstream. And you had Chapman, who in the ‘60s would’ve been accepted as the prodigy she was. What a pure voice, such perfectly spare composition, the stuff they built that decade around.
And she vanished without a trace for twenty years, and took back the stage with effortless grace.
I guess that’s its own commentary. Wait long enough and I guess things will be rectified. If you’re lucky you might even be able to enjoy it personally.
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