An Entirely Unoriginal Take: That Tracy Chapman/Luke Combs Duet Was Awesome

Here's a confession: I didn't watch Tracy Chapman's and Luke Comb's beautiful duet of "Fast Car" until last night.

I know, I know; I've been missing out.

Here's my defense of my lapse.

The day after the Grammy's, I was reading Ryan Broderick's always excellent Garbage Day newsletter (never the wrong choice).

In it, I saw the Youtube embed of Chapman's live version of that song that she performed at Wembley Stadium in 1988. I'd seen it going around Twitter that day, and read a very cool story of how that performance came to be. Broderick linked to it in the newsletter.

The small section of the newsletter ended with this:

Do not, however, interact with the unfortunately viral video on X of Chapman performing at the Grammy’s last night. You can read more about that here.

That link leads to this tweet:

Those details seemed less than good, so I looked him up. Sure enough, that was the case; here's The Verge writing about him suing Twitter in the mold of Donald Trump to get reinstated on the site.

So, I avoided the video because it was only to be found on Twitter at the time, and I didn't want to give this dude the traffic.

Then the predictable happened: I sort of just forgot about it.

So when I saw the Recording Academy/GRAMMYs Youtube account had posted the video a few days ago, I dove in, having thoroughly enjoyed all the love it was getting online. And now I've watched it, oh, about 25 times on a loop.

Am I sharing it here again? Yes, yes I am.

Do I realize that's probably not all that necessary? I sure do.

But here's the thing: Do you remember how everyone was talking about this duet afterwards? You'd be forgiven for assuming it had solved most of our divisive issues ahead of this year's presidential election, based on the way we were clamoring over it.

I don't fault anybody for diving in and clinging to a feel-good moment; there are, by and large, too few of them. Here it was on a big stage, and it was a damn fine performance on top of that.

So maybe this will become one of those beloved Twitter artifacts (this legit one, not the one from that revenge porn guy) that people automatically reshare every. single. time. they. see. it. Like, Tom Holland's dance/lip sync to "Umbrella."

We all agree: We don't make the rules; reposting is required.

Tracy and Luke deserve that. They did something special that night. They made us feel better for a few minutes, and nothing would make me happier than being pleasantly surprised by this video every so often and doing my duty by sharing yet again. I mean, that's what happened here. After I forgot about it, I couldn't wait to listen when I saw it, and now my count is up to about 30 times in the time it's taken me to finish this post. Still not tired of it.