Like many of you, I watched the Tracy Chapman / Luke Combs duet of Fast Car from the Grammys last night and was powerfully and unexpectedly moved. Also, like many of you, I remember vividly how that song — and that artist — stood out in the spring of 1988, when the radio was blasting INXS, George Michael, and Terence Trent D’arby in a never-ending, power-pop loop.

She was just so different. So human and real.

Tracy Chapman’s voice and talent felt — then, and again last night — like a marble-smooth boulder somehow preexisting the river itself. There was all this stuff — all these gated drum tracks, borderline erotic videos, pyrotechnics — and then, suddenly . . . a lady with a voice and an acoustic guitar. She shut us all up for a minute, sort of a collectively stunned silence of truly listening before, inevitably, we were back into the radio roll of Rick Astley, Poison, and Bobby Brown.

For all her understated, graceful humility, she left a deeper mark than those acts. One that made hearing her sing again last night more than a bit of nostalgia. It felt, instead, like an escape from temporality itself — a sudden relocation to a space of truth, beauty, and light.

Country music wankstain Jason Aldean recently aired a video for his song "Try That in a Small Town" and outed himself as yet another in a seemingly endless line of pathetic, talentless, terrified racist white dudes with stylists and record contracts out of Nashville.

The song is a paean to violence against the upstart wokes, it's a hymn about the sacred, insular, hateful "ethic" of sundown towns in rural America where "outsiders" should fear for their lives if they don't like the way we do things around here.

Aside from the artist being a garbage-soul, "Try That in a Small Town" is also just an awful song of bad writing, canned phrasing, gaudy production, and ham-fisted tropes. It's a godawful mess, and I do not suggest you bother with it for one minute more.