Tracy Chapman: On Her Own Terms

Excuse me. Are you Tracy Chapman?”

She hears the question everywhere she goes, and her response is always the same. First, her eyes flash with wariness and momentary distaste; she looks as if she were ready to deny it and walk away. Then she grins: it’s an embarrassed, nervous grin, not a happy grin. Then she looks down at the ground, and without raising her eyes, she nods her head, quickly and almost imperceptibly. And finally — the process has taken all of one or two seconds — she answers the question. “Yeah,” says Tracy Chapman, in a voice so soft it’s barely audible.

It’s a question she hears a couple of times every day: in restaurants, airports, hotels, even laundromats and gyms. At the moment she is hearing it as she sits at a table just inside a Japanese restaurant in Atlanta. In two hours she is due at the Atlanta Center Stage Theatre for a concert that was the fastest sellout in the venue’s history; now, midway through her tempura, there’s a woman standing over the table, asking for an autograph.

Chapman tries to be gracious as she scribbles her name or, a matchbook, but mostly she looks uncomfortable. The woman stands at the table a moment longer, a big grin on her face. “I couldn’t get tickets couldn’t get tickets to your show here,” she says, “but I’d recognize that face anywhere.” A pause. “And that hair.”

Tracy Chapman fingers her short dreadlocks, grins gamely and sighs. “I think,” she mutters under her breath, “I gotta get a hat.”

It’s too late for a hat to do much good. For Tracy Chapman, public attention now comes with the territory -be- cause in the five months since the release of her album, Tracy Chapman, on Elektra Records, her territory has come to include a Top Five album; a striking and widely seen video for the single “Fast Car”; a stunning performance before millions of fans at Wembley Stadium and in the television audience for the Nelson Mandela Birthday Tribute, in June; and currently a slot alongside Bruce Springsteen, Sting, Peter Gabriel and Youssou N’Dour on Amnesty International’s worldwide tour, Human Rights Now! She may be shy and private and uneasy with some of the trappings of fame, but this young black woman from working-class Cleveland is the new artist of the year, maybe the new artist of many years.

For Chapman it’s all come as a surprise. “Actually, I made a bet with somebody who said that the album would go gold quickly,” she says. “I thought, ‘Well, it might be a gold record eventually’…And they were right, and now they’re kicking themselves, because the bet was for an ice cream or something.”

What went right? You could start with the fact that Tracy Chapman is a stunning debut, a collection of songs that sketch the lives of the disenfranchised with vivid clarity and bluntly insist that a change had better come. David Kershenbaum, who produced the album, figures “people really wanted what she had, and they weren’t getting it. She got there at the right moment with stuff that was good,” Charles Koppelman, who signed Chapman to the record-production arm of his company, SBK Publishing, before she had a record contract, says it was “the most incredible word-of-mouth project that I’ve ever seen.” And Bob Krasnow, the chairman of Elektra Records, simply says that the songs connected with everybody else the way they connected with him the first time he heard them.

Certainly that’s what happens when Chapman takes the stage of the theater in Atlanta. It’s less than a week after Jesse Jackson brought down the house at the Democratic convention with his plea to include the disenfranchised in the political process. Chapman gets a standing ovation as she walks onstage to sing songs whose characters are, she admits, the same people that Jackson is trying to reach (she admires Jackson but says she stays away from party politics). In her jeans and sleeveless black T-shirt, she plays for just under an hour, armed only with one acoustic guitar and fifteen songs, ten from her debut album and the rest from her large backlog of unrecorded material. The crowd is hushed and attentive, cheering every time they hear a particularly striking lyric.

The set is arranged thematically, though she says later that’s not deliberate: she begins to explore her terrain with the bitter “Across the Lines” and the edgy love song “For My Lover”; sings about people caught in dead-end lives (the a cappella “Behind the Wall,” a devastating song about domestic violence, is followed by haunting versions of “Fast Car” and “She’s Got Her Ticket”); runs through a series of love songs (from “For You” to the unrecorded “This Time”); and ends with the defiant “Born to Fight” (“They’re trying…to make me into white man’s drone…But this one’s not for sale”) and the angry social commentary of “Mountains o’ Things.” “Talkin’ bout a Revolution” and “Why?”

All evening long the sense of the audience’s outright devotion is palpable, and the shouts of “We love you, Tracy!” seem heartfelt rather than rote. Chapman hits emotional chords the way the best folk singers always have — but whereas female folkies have traditionally been painted as vulnerable, fragile creatures singing about their loves and fears, Chapman trashes that stereotype. While there’s a vulnerability in her best songs, there’s no fragility, just forthright dignity.

“It seems to me that that image was created for female folk singers because they actually had a lot more control than other women in the music scene,” Chapman says later, “They wrote their own songs, they played them, they performed by themselves — there you have a picture of a very independent person, and trying to make them seem emotional and fragile and all puts a softer edge on it. As if there was something wrong with being independent.” Independent and assertive as she appears onstage, though, Chapman doesn’t talk to the crowd. Between songs she looks down at the ground, fidgets with the guitar, sips from a paper cup of water and steadfastly ignores the fans who shout, “Talk to us!”