Me n U2

When your first favorite song isn't "Fast Car."

Friends! Hello! 

I write to you from high in the sky as I’m flying back to New York after a whirlwind 24 hours in Vegas. I was there to see U2 at the sphere, and I can report that the experience was worth the hype. The visuals, the sound, the Bono. Behold U2 firing at all cylinders in the video below. 

Anyway, I’m watching the Grammys now and Luke Combs just pulled off a lovely and poignant surprise performance of “Fast Car” with Tracy Chapman. (Chroist almighty, Tracy Chapman is so gorgeous and cool and smart and talented and a lesbian icon and the only good thing to come out of Ohio ever.)

I didn’t know what to think about Combs’s cover when it first came out. I wasn’t too thrilled to see a cishet white dude get rocketed into fame based on a queer black woman’s work. I think we can all agree those aren’t great optics. But in the past few months Combs has given Chapman lots of credit and even expressed discomfort over how much the cover blew up. He seems like a genuinely gracious guy. (Here’s a link to the full performance.)

“‘Fast Car’ was my favorite song before I even know what a favorite song was,” Combs said during the pre-performance footage. I love that. Call me a sucker, but I find the idea of a southern white boy falling madly in love with a song by a black lesbian activist to be, well, charming. Dare I say music is healing? I loved watching Combs sing the lyrics,  “You still ain't got a job, And I work in a market as a checkout girl” with the original pronouns intact. Combs’s love of “Fast Car” shows us that we don’t have to relate to a song in the exact way the artist who wrote it does for it to still be personally meaningful. In the midst of rampant stan culture, I think we could all use a little distance from our idols.

I like to imagine that Fast Car’s message and its genuis songwriting took on more meaning for Combs over the years, especially as he embarked on his own musical career. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. At least he can feel good about the fact that his favorite song when he was a baby was an amazing and important song. Not every toddler has such great taste. Which brings me back to me and U2. 

I also have “a favorite song before I knew what a favorite song was.” It’s U2’s “Babyface,” a random track from their ‘93 album Zooropa, AKA the one they rush released right after their masterpiece, Atchung Baby. My dad listened to Zooropa a lot when I was growing up, and I fell in love with “Babyface”’s swanky groove. I decided to revisit “Babyface” after getting inspired by the “Fast Car” performance and Combs’s childhood love of such an important song. Perhaps my favorite song from childhood was also a beloved ballad about the cycles of poverty. It’s U2, after all. 

I don’t know why I never looked into “Babyface” before. I guess because I’ve always known it and loved it. I’ve been mindlessly singing the lyrics “baby face, slow down darling let me untie your lace” for so long, that I’ve never stopped and wondered if what I’ve thought the song was about since I was 5 years old—a Dad helping his impatient daughter untie her double-knotted shoelaces—is actually true. (I know you think you know where this is going, but it’s actually going somewhere so much worse) 

Unfortunately, “Babyface” is neither a poignant working class anthem nor a tender meditation on the father/daughter bond. It’s not even your run-of-the-mill, sexy love song because that would require the participation of two consenting adults. And in “Babyface” there’s only a creep and his television. 

From the official “Babyface” thread on the U2 Reddit group: 

• “It's a shallow song about voyeurism and sex in the era of supermodels and cable tv”

• “This song just misses the mark and has an uncomfortable amount of Lolita vibe happening.”

• “A U2 song about cable porn? No thanks.” 

Excellent. Terrific. Very cool. Very cool things to hear about my favorite childhood song. I guess all I have to say at this point is good for you Luke Combs. Congrats on being a woke baby. I’m gonna go take a shower.