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Crossroads
Tracy Chapman |
Same musicians, same producer, same sad-eyed Tracy Chapman,
a girl oh-so-seriously burdened with matters great and small
- poverty, injustice, freedom, materialism, truth, affairs of
the heart and the soul, that kind of stuff - warbling a new
set of songs in exactly the same grim way as she did on her
debut LP, a record which (you may recall) met with unexpected
and quite dizzying success.
Just how do you top a mega-record like Tracy Chapman? Chances
are, of course, that you don't. If you're brave, or foolhardy,
you may try to, but those of a more cautious disposition often
choose simply to remix the ingredients of their success and
cross fingers that something as tasty as last time turns out.
While it might be unfair to accuse Tracy Chapman of faint-heartedness,
it's true that Crossroads is a Tracy Chapman 2 if ever there
was one.
The songs on the second record, however, are nowhere near as
good as those on the debut LP. There's nothing as acutely observed
as Fast Car, nothing as romantic or melodic as Baby Can I Hold
You, and nothing as punchy as For My Love. There are, predictably,
protests aplenty: for instance, Freedom Now, the pro-Nelson
Mandela rallying cry of her Amnesty appearances, and Born To
Fight, in which a disenfranchised black persona refuses to be
a white man's drone.
There are also a number of songs which are concerned with the
idea of her very soul being threatened - either by her bewildering
success or by honey-lipped lovers who without exception seem
to prove fickle or unfaithful. The LP's title track glances
obliquely at the devilish pressures that fortune and fame have
brought to bear on her personal integrity. Save my soul, save
my self, little girl lost is left muffering to herself.
There's further renunciation of the dubious joys of material
success (we're a long way here from the Cinderella daydream
of Mountains Of Things on the first LP) in Material World and
in the closer, All That You Have Is Your Soul. Don't be tempted
by the shiny apple, don't give or sell your soul away, Mama
told her. Instead, she's determined to keep on dreaming of a
world of clear consciences and clean hands. Unfortunately, similar
idealism in love affairs seems to have brought only broken hearts
and misery (Be Careful Of My Heart and This Time) though there's
still residual pride on the best of the love songs, A Hundred
Years, even though she admits weakness in pleading Sweet baby,
come back home after only a few days of being alone.
And so the songs all troop sadly by in typical Tracy Chapman
fashion. Whether she's moping about heart-hurts and lessons
learned or grouching about the system, her vocals are invariably
gloomy, and though the odd banjo, accordion, or harmonica is
tossed in as delicate decoration, drums, bass, acoustic guitar
and an empty room equalisation give the LP the same starkness
of sound as its predecessor.
On first hearing the soundalike sameness of this new record
to the much admired first LP might seem to be the most unsatisfactory
thing about Crossroads, but subsequent playings are likely to
confirm that, despite her admirable personal and political integrity,
the material here just isn't strong enough. Crossroads fails
to confirm Tracy Chapman as the major songwriter that many critics
would have us believe she is.
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