But if we want a single American epic song, I’d nominate Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” whose multiple covers (including by male and white artists) showcase its ability to speak to the broader American cultural experience, and the tragic gap between aspiration and achievement. To my ear, Chapman’s original 1988 version is still, forever, the best. Her wonderfully controlled structure tells a heartbreaking narrative that lasts less than five minutes, but gestures at an epic narrative. Like the Homeric poems, the song makes powerful use of repetition and formulaic language: simple repeated words take on new meanings on later iterations: work, drunk, got, feeling, belong, away, you, me, somewhere, anywhere. The desire for eternal kleos drives the Homeric warrior; Chapman’s speaker is driven by the desire to “be someone, be someone,” and for her, as for Achilles and Hector, the stakes are life or death: “Leave tonight or live and die this way.” And yet the “anyplace” that should be better than here never materializes, however fast the car. Achilles in the final sequence of the Iliad moves from his overwhelming, limitless rage, to a partial awareness that loss is inevitable, and mortals must accept the inadequate comforts of grief and community in the short time we have to live. Chapman’s speaker enacts a comparable but different emotional arc, from the zealous hope of youth to the despairing, attenuated hope of middle age. The fast car, that iconic symbol of American industry and the highway out west, which had seemed to promise a trip out of poverty and away from the speaker’s broken rural home into the wealth of the city, becomes useful only because it might, just might, enable her unemployed, absent, alcoholic partner to “fly away” from her. The narrator, whose choices have been limited to her ability to work, “pay all the bills,” and take care of her nonfunctional male family members, nostalgically remembers a feeling of release in the fast car of the past that partly echoes the habits of her father and her partner: she “felt like I was drunk.” The car is a place of eternal motion, and only in this nowhere place – not the impoverished country, not the disappointing city, not the unattainable suburbs – she “had a feeling that I belonged.” The Iliad and the Odyssey are both focused on warriors who are alienated from their communities, and find a slow, painful way back to a place of belonging. But both poems acknowledge the experiences of suffering and conflict, even at moments of triumph. Chapman’s American epic tells a story of hope, joy, memory, and connection, and a repeated longing for the sense of belonging that may be, for some Americans, forever out of reach.
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