https://variety.com/2024/music/news/tracy-chapman-luke-combs-grammys-perform-1235891995/

Sources say Tracy Chapman will perform 'Fast Car' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Car) at the Grammys with Luke ... Combs' version of “Fast Car” was ranked as the fifth biggest song ...

I am sick of that song.

God bless you always!!!

Holly

The Grammys' Tracy Chapman-Luke Combs "Fast Car" duet is what award shows are made for (https://www.polygon.com/24062412/tracy-chapmans-fast-car-grammys)

A perfect moment for a perfect song

By Joshua Rivera Feb 5, 2024, 2:50pm EST

We don’t often get songs like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Despite its proven endurance, frequently covered by anyone with a guitar and a world too small to hold their dreams, “Fast Car” feels fragile every time you hear it, a work so full of yearning for something that the speaker trembles to articulate, lest it vanish forever. Thirty-six years after the 1988 song catapulted Chapman to fame (following an impromptu performance at Wembley Stadium for a concert in honor of Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday), the legendary singer-songwriter made a surprise appearance and a rare public performance at the Grammys, for one of the best awards show moments in recent memory.

“Fast Car” has been on a strange journey over the last year, becoming a mega-hit once again after country singer Luke Combs’ cover (https://youtu.be/Y8X4TwZ5oiA) exploded in popularity over the summer. Combs’ success with Chapman’s 1988 classic became a cultural flashpoint, re-surfacing discussions about white appropriation of Black art broadly, and the lack of support Black and queer artists have in the Country music industry more specifically. (It’s worth noting Chapman owns the publishing rights to her music, and therefore makes a cut on cover recordings like Combs’.)


At Sunday’s Grammy awards, Combs paid tribute to Chapman in a recorded segment about the remarkable success of his cover, and what “Fast Car” (for which Chapman won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the 1989 Grammys) means to him. To the audience’s surprise and delight, Chapman joined Combs on stage afterwards to perform the song — one of the few public performances the reclusive and famously private artist has made since releasing her last album, 2008’s Our Bright Future.

Awards shows are strange affairs, often gaudy celebrations of commerce over art, gladhandy and self-congratulatory in ways that can be very removed from the reasons people love art to begin with. But at their best, they’re a stage like any other: one where, the right person, with the right song, can cast a spell over everyone — the celebrities in the audience or a tired commuter watching a clip on social media, remembering a dream they had about getting away from it all and finding a place they belonged.

I am sick of that song.

God bless you always!!!

Holly

I've despised the song ever since it first came out. One of the local stations here plays it on an almost daily basis and Luke Combs didn't make things any better by covering it.

^^^ The stations in my area act like there is no other song to play and that right there is just it. It isn't just the country stations anymore. The non country stations are playing it too because of the song's non country track record.

God bless you always!!!

Holly

Why it's hard to find the Tracy Chapman-Luke Combs "Fast Car" duet and other Grammys musical performances online (https://slate.com/technology/2024/02/grammys-video-clip-fast-car-tracy-chapman-luke-combs-craig-brittain.html)

The Grammys made it impossible to share videos of the night. Here’s why.

BY NITISH PAHWA
FEB 07, 20245:30 PM

At this year’s Grammys, a lineup of veteran artists blessed the stage at Crypto.com Arena: Joni Mitchell gave her first-ever Grammys performance, Billy Joel debuted his first song in almost two decades, and Tracy Chapman broke a yearslong performing hiatus to team up with country star Luke Combs, who’s found massive success with his Nashville-twanged cover of Chapman’s signature hit, “Fast Car.” But if you didn’t catch Sunday’s ceremony on either CBS or Paramount+, it was—and still is—difficult to find good clips of any of these highlights; the Recording Academy still hasn’t shared any full performances on its YouTube channel.

So it wasn’t surprising that people flocked to a string of video clips posted on X (formerly Twitter) by user Craig R. Brittain. His post with the Chapman-Combs video traveled especially far on the platform, gaining more than 29 million views and earning a boost from both a Chapman fan account and X CEO Linda Yaccarino (who appears to believe that the notoriously offline Chapman runs the fanpage, but I digress). Astute observers quickly pointed out that the Grammys-tweeting Craig R. Brittain was the same Craig R. Brittain who previously operated a revenge-porn and victim-extortion site, waged a few long-shot Senate campaigns in Arizona, and has a long history of racist, sexist, scammy, and conspiratorial posting.

If you want to know how the current leadership of this site is doing, here's Linda Yaccarino with an excited reply to an account that is not Tracy Chapman retweeting obviously copyrighted video posted by a former revenge porn site operator pic.twitter.com/ZFoQSaQuAi

— Alex Koppelman (@AlexKoppelman) February 5, 2024

Brittain wasn’t the only tweeter to put up the Chapman-Combs performance; popular posters like Trung Phan and Yashar Ali also shared the full video. As of Wednesday, however, none of those videos are visible thanks to “a report by the copyright owner.” (The same even went for the Hollywood Reporter’s tweet of Billie Eilish’s performance.) The copyright ax also fell upon Brittain’s clips of performances by Burna Boy and Joni Mitchell. Whatever the legal merits, it seems strange that, given the massive audience demand for the special Chapman-Combs “Fast Car” duet—a one-time, unique event that doesn’t have an audio equivalent on Spotify—the Recording Academy hasn’t made a full video more widely available across the internet.

There are accessible videos for all the Grammys performances, but they’re all hosted on the Recording Academy’s official website and are almost impossible to share elsewhere. While the YouTube videos for acceptance speeches are embedded on the site, the videos for the live performances are hosted on a different digital streamer altogether, one you can’t spread as easily. Those videos are native to the Grammy website’s Nomad content management system, so if you try to copy a link to any of the videos, the resulting URL will redirect you to the particular webpage on which the video is hosted—which means you can’t get those videos to play on any platform except the Grammys’ own website.

This wasn’t always the case. Back in 2011, Peter Kafka noted in the Wall Street Journal, the Grammys site didn’t host any performance footage from the CBS broadcast. A spokesperson for the network told him that such clips “aren’t typically available online due to rights clearance issues,” which certainly makes sense: All recorded songs (even live covers) have various strands of ownership, like publishing rights, public performance rights, and the composition and master copyrights. At that moment in the early 2010s, when music streaming services were beginning to supplant the previous decade’s downloads-and-piracy trends, legal tangles over the free availability of music posted online were only just getting sorted out. Alternative video platforms like Vimeo and Dailymotion hosted bootleg recordings of Grammys performances, though they didn’t escape the major labels’ notice.

Today, it’s an entirely different ballgame. In 2022, Billboard reported that “the Recording Academy signed a two-week exclusive” deal with Facebook, on which performance clips would “live for a limited time … on individual artist pages”—a deal that reportedly “all of the artists” agreed to, as did CBS and the record labels. That appears to have been a one-time deal, as there are no such videos on Facebook artist pages this year (outside of some clipped Reels). It seems that in general, all stakeholders are fine with directing viewers back to the Recording Academy’s website.

As for Brittain and his Twitter clips? Early Tuesday morning, Brittain blamed “a copyright vandal who doesn’t actually have any right to remove any of this material,” claiming that a “third party” activist affiliated with a video-tracking company was behind the takedown. Brittain added that he’d countered the deletion and that his “Fast Car” video should be back on Twitter in the coming weeks. In the meantime, he appears to have set up a novelty account, @FastCarGrammys, that offers an MP4 recording of Chapman and Combs in its bio. That file, naturally, is hosted on a website named for Brittain.

I was able to find the performance on the internet, great job by Chapman (she hasn't lost a thing) and Combs. Fast Car is one of my favorite records from the 1980's.

Internet gets weird over Tracy Chapman (https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/2/9/24065282/tracy-chapman-song-fast-car-grammys-meaning)

Did you know Tracy Chapman (https://xtramagazine.com/culture/tracy-chapman-grammys-internet-262818)'s song “Fast Car” isn't about an automobile traveling at a heightened velocity?