Meeting Tracy Chapman In The Spaces Between
Tracy is wearing a plain, worn, black T-shirt, no pockets, no sly sayings, and I imagine her waking up in it, in just that T-shirt, and walking around my small basement bedroom in the Oakland split-ranch that I am sharing with 5 other grad students for $200 dollars a month each, so cold we can see our breath. Tracy is getting me a glass of water from the bathroom, brings it to me, sitting down beside me, and her legs whisper secrets before they fold beneath her. Her brown legs gleam—has she used up the last of my lotion? Tracy sings to me: revolution, problem fathers, fast cars, being jailed for who she loves. Tracy is bold, but looks away from me as she sings. Her smile is a shy secret in the dark. Tracy's hair sparks in a million different directions. She is wired to the sun.
Watching Tracy Chapman, and listening to her 1988 self-titled debut album, helped me say what I hadn't yet said out loud.
For a brief while after the release of the album, Tracy Chapman occupied my dreams –and perhaps everyone else's. She was everywhere in pop: (twice); touring with Sting for Amnesty International, celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; in concert at The Oakland Coliseum. At age 24, plucked from a coffee house near her college campus for her sincerity and stage presence and chops and offered a contract by Elektra Records, Chapman became a star, albeit a reluctant, or at least a quiet, one. captured the attention of the world with these 11 songs of struggle, resilience and survival, without cleavage, without choreography, without bling.
