Tracy Chapman - Tracy Chapman
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Free Music Notes for Tracy Chapman
Free Music Review: Where Have All The Prophets Gone?
Hit: 5 Stars
Tracy Chapman's first album is a rare classic. Each song tells a story, and alot of subject matter is covered. Everything from love, heartbreak, politics, fascism, poverty, and spousal abuse. Wow, take a deep breathe. I like how each song tells a story, almost like a painting. The song "Talkin' 'Bout A Revolution" kicks off the album. This song reminds me how naive we all were in 80's, thinking this world would or could change for the better. Ending poverty sounds like an ideal concept but it's like fighting the powers that be, and actually things seem like they have gotten worse since 1988. The rich get richer and the poorer get poorer. The whole concept of this album that I think Tracy Chapman was trying to convey is hope. Trying to come from nothing and become something, anything. Build from the ground up. I dedicate "Mountains O' Things" to Oprah. When I heard the song recently it reminded me of her. Like the lyric "draggin' my furs on the ground". It really makes a clear statement of fascism and how we all are caught up in the rat race called life. The deep subject matter Tracy Chapman sings about is what makes her Tracy Chapman. It's pretty dark but she tells a story and makes it beautiful music.Free Music Review: Soulful sounds, but hard-left lyrics lead to questions...
Hit: 3 Stars
...like when the poor people come to "get their share," will it include the share owned by rich recording artists? And when the poor people do that rising up and "take what's there," aren't there other, less poetic terms for that -- like "theft" and "looting"? Just asking!
Also, if you've got a fast car, and enough gas to drive it around in an attempt to ease your existential angst, why would you be living "at the shelter"? Doesn't it make more sense to sell your fast car and use the money as a down payment on a modest apartment or even a mobile home, and take the bus to the grocery store where you work? And shouldn't you dump your drug addicted boyfriend who's bringing you down? Aren't *you* the one responsible for your life choices? Just asking!
Also, is an upper-middle-class, Connecticut private school-educated, Tufts-attending singer really the right vehicle to explore life at the bottom quintile of American society? Is she authentic, or just a poseur? Is she really "angry" or is she just faking it? Just asking!
Free Music Review: Comes Very Close to Music
Hit: 1 Stars
Tracy Chapman demonstrates how simple it is to read random selections from a newspaper in a sing-song voice. I particularly liked how they chose to accompany her with musical instruments in order to suggest melody. The CD has eleven tracks. This was done, no doubt, to suggest divisions in what seems to be a 30 minute exercise in how to affect odd inflections of the voice. Perhaps, in the future, Tracy will treat us to imitations of other musical structures. Free Music Review: Chapman's mellow voice
Hit: 4 Stars
Chapman's mellow voice always has the ability to make me disappear somewhere else. My favorite track on the CD is Fast Car. The ballad about running away from life, and a drinking father with the one you love. The music is superb, and brilliant. Her soft voice, and mellow sound make you melt, and want to run away too.
The somber sound in her voice is uncaptured by almost anyone else. Her music is very important, stoic, and meaningful.
If you like laid back music with some feeling behind it- that you could lay in bed and listen to by candlelight- then this might be the CD for you.
Free Music Review: The Chiding
Hit: 1 Stars
'Fast car' was a remarkable single for it's time. We all talked ourselves into the rest of the filler on this cd, about which the best you can say is it's all extraordinarily average. If however art to you is didacticism, you will be in heaven. This has twee rhetorical questions ("Why are the missiles called Peacekeepers?"), exhausted imagery (I know somewhere in here a baby is crying) and worst of all an acapella sermon. All it lacks it some sort of "Save the bunnies" track. All of this gets filtered through Chapman's self-annointed "nobler than thou" suffering and humorless delivery, and of course that ridiculous all-purpose quaver. She doesn't exactly deliver a message subtly. Oh Tracy, won't you be my conscience?
This schtick had no future and noone bought her follow-up C.D.. But this garbage is still being pushed on us by "enlightened" radio stations, and I still hear the lesser songs from this cd all the time. It's a shame. I HATE these songs. To paraphrase the movie Bull Durham, "Aw, Tracy Chapman is as full of cr*p as anyone." You wouldn't know it from all of this unbearable condescension. I think her dream job would involve a cleric's collar and a pulpit.
Some liberals feel that music is just another place to be a drag. (And these remarks are coming from a massive liberal!) I don't subscribe to that hogwash. 10,000 maniacs, Midnight Oil and Tracy Chapman are the bottom of the barrell; a very humorless barrell.
This CD is an unrefined brow-beating.