Monday, June 12, 2023

Music Monday: Tracy Edition

Happy Pride month, where we will always stan for our lesbian music icons. And they don’t get much more powerful or enigmatic or iconic than Tracy Chapman. This clip of her singing “For My Lover” in 1986 — two years before “Fast Car” skyrocketed her to international fame — is as disarming as it is devastatingly good. Could you imagine being in the theater settling down for some unknown singer to start and then this happens? And those dimples? Holy fucking shit, those dimples. I sometimes wish Tracy Chapman hadn’t been so adverse to the trappings of fame. But then I totally get it, too. Just because you’re a once-in-a-generation talent, doesn’t mean you have to give yourself away to be devoured by the world’s endless appetite. Our tendency to eat people up and spit them out is one I understand wanting to avoid entirely. At least we have the songs we have, and the knowledge that a performer of this caliber walks amongst us somewhere. I do wish she’d let us see those dimples a little more often. But I’ll take what I can get. Happy Pride Monday, all. (Yes, every day this month is Pride something because suck it Nazi, TERFs and garden variety bigots. Happy Pride!)

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