"Talkin' Bout A Revolution" For Thirty-Five Years

Ready. Aim. Sing! If revolutionary songs had the power of revolutionary deeds, then Tracy Chapman would be right up there with Lenin and Mao. Sadly, we cannot sing justice into existence.

SHE HAD ME from her very first, defiantly acoustic, opening chords. Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ Bout A Revolution, released thirty-five years ago, was one of those songs that captured the spirit of its times, or, at least, the imaginations of a great many of the people caught up in those times.

In 1988 I was caught up in the bitter ideological fight that was tearing the Labour Party apart. A year after Chapman’s song sent a chill running up the collective spine of the youthful Left, Labour would finally split in two. David Lange – soon to be replaced by Geoffrey Palmer – squared-off against Jim Anderton and his NewLabour Party.

Considerably more momentous changes were simultaneously sweeping the wider world. In 1989, the student rebels occupying Beijing’s Tiananmen Square were massacred. A few months later, the Berlin Wall was torn down.

Certainly, the images filling the world’s television screens screamed revolution. The squares of Eastern European capitals were filled with crowds. The masses controlled the streets. Governments capitulated.

It was difficult not to cheer, but it wasn’t a revolution we were cheering. Only later did it become clear to us that the events we were applauding were part of a global counter-revolution. Two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union itself blipped off the historical screen. Capitalism’s triumphant apologists proclaimed “The End of History”.

That we were in an age of endings, not beginnings, was right there in the lyrics of Chapman’s song. The people she described weren’t getting ready to storm the gates of paradise, they were waiting, heads down, in the welfare lines, taking shelter in Salvation Army doorways, wasting away with the rest of the unemployed. Chapman wasn’t talking about revolutionaries – which meant she wasn’t talkin’ bout a revolution either.

Oh sure, there was the obligatory reference to poor people rising up to claim their fair share of societal wealth. But pious hopes never toppled a resolute regime – and it is difficult to conceive of a regime more resolute than American free-market capitalism in 1988. Reversals of fortune notwithstanding, it wasn’t the bosses who were going to run, run, run, run, run.

The tables had already turned on poor Black America. They’d turned decisively when rich White America elected Ronald Reagan eight years earlier. They would turn again when Democrat Bill Clinton put an end to “welfare as we know it” in 1996. The most tragic turn would come in 2009, however, when America’s first Black President, Barack Obama, refused to say “Yes we can!” to the revolution progressive Americans had elected him to make.

Thirty-five years on from Talkin’ Bout A Revolution’s release, it is even more difficult to envisage what such an upheaval would look like. Especially given that, by the late-1980s, the Right’s mantra – that there was no viable alternative to free-market economics – had done its work. But, if economic transformation in favour of the poor is no longer to be included in the art of the possible, then what exactly are we talking about when we’re talkin’ bout a revolution?

Turns out we were talkin’ bout victimhood, bout identity, bout tearing down the cruel hierarchies of race, class and gender. Turns out we’re talkin’ bout toppling an even bigger statue than these inherited states-of-being. Turns out the revolution will entail the overthrow of objective reality itself. Being a revolutionary in 2023 is all about exercising the right to say 2+2=5.

How could it be anything else when the foundations of capitalist society have been ruled out-of-bounds? If the existing distribution, and future redistribution, of wealth – and, hence, of power – in our society cannot be discussed, then reality, too, will be denied a platform. But, politics divorced from reality can only be a politics of make-believe – a politics of magic words and symbols. Good only for rendering us fiercely loyal – and loyally fierce.

Fast Car, that other great track off Chapman’s 1988 album, powerfully anticipates this magical politics. The song’s protagonists are fleeing an unbearable reality for a make-believe future they’ll never reach. Rather than confront the injustice that has stranded them in America’s nightmare, they drive on through the city’s bright lights towards America’s dream, America’s mirage. A revolution that cannot outlive their fast car’s empty gas-tank.

We should have known from Chapman’s opening lines. Revolution never sounds like a whisper!

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 14 April 2023.