Tender Tracy With Her ‘New Beginning,’ Tracy Chapman Seems To Have Come Out Of A Funk, Lightened Up

From Tina Turner to Kiss, pop music loves a second coming. And none has been more sudden or surprising than the re-emergence of the once dour Tracy Chapman, whose aptly titled fourth album, “New Beginning,” has become a platinum-plus top 10 hit.

It’s success is driven by a song called “Give Me One Reason,” a sultry blues shuffle that she wrote 10 years ago but that sounds nothing like the protest folk that made her famous in the late 80s.

The song is sassy, even sexy, unencumbered by politics; in short, Tracy lite. “Give me one reason to stay, and I’ll turn right back around,” she sings. It’s a refrain that is not only reigniting Chapman’s career but one that also encapsulates her struggles with what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery behind the popular song.”

In pop star terms, the 32-year-old Chapman has always been an anomaly. Though she served an apprenticeship singing in coffeehouses and on the streets of Harvard Square, her first recording, “Fast Car,” from 1988, became a top 10 hit - a rare feat for a woman of color playing folk music.

Ennobled by her honeyed, heartfelt alto, “Fast Car” tells the story of a young woman desperate to drag herself up from a world of shelters, alcoholic fathers and dead-end jobs.

In an era defined by dance-pop tarts, sequined soul divas and gangsta-girl rappers, Chapman’s polished vocal skills, downbeat subject matter and decidedly unglamorous appearance (she wore dreadlocks, T-shirts and jeans) was a tonic.

She was alternative before the term became meaningless, and along with Suzanne Vega and Natalie Merchant of 10,000 Maniacs, she seemed to be part of a new, intelligent musical sisterhood.

Her 1988 debut LP, “Tracy Chapman,” a collection of sociological statements about world hunger, domestic violence, racial strife and unemployment, topped the Billboard chart, sold 10 million copies worldwide and earned her three Grammy Awards.

In the company of Bruce Springsteen, Sting and Peter Gabriel, she took part in Amnesty International’s Human Rights Tour, cementing her reputation as one of rock’s voices of conscience.

In 1989, she released “Crossroads.” Despite selling five million copies worldwide, the album was considered a critical and commercial disappointment. A backlash began.

The rapper Chuck D. of Public Enemy remarked, “Black people cannot feel Tracy Chapman.”

Though she was raised by a single mother in a poor section of Cleveland, she won a scholarship to the Wooster School in Connecticut and graduated from Tufts University with a degree in anthropology. Some critics suggested that her largely white audience embraced her socially conscious message as a way to assuage their middle-class liberal guilt.

By the time she teamed up with the legendary rock producer Jimmy Iovine for the 1992 album “Matters of the Heart,” which flopped, the press had begun to reduce Tracy Chapman to a cliche: the strident neo-hippie crusader, the quaint queen of “Kumbaya.”

Pop music thrives on its very disposability, and ever since Live Aid and “We Are the World” turned celebrity philanthropy into a land of hope and self-glorification, the shelf life for politics in pop has become extremely brief.

In the ‘90s, anger and rebellion remain rock’s best-selling gestures; compassion and commitment are too grown-up to be relevant. By staying true to her causes, she experienced the indignity that befalls the characters in her songs: marginalization.

Famously reticent, Chapman (who posed unsmiling with eyes shut on her first three LPs) did little to alter the perception of her.

In a rare interview in 1992, she said: “I don’t even care if people think I’m humorless. They don’t know me, so what do they know?”

For a while, she retreated from the fray. In her absence, a new breed of female performers, most notably Courtney Love, energized rock-and-roll. Rootsy groups like Blues Traveler and the Dave Matthews Band scored hits.

MTV’s “Unplugged” series created hit albums for Eric Clapton and Nirvana, making acoustic rock fashionable again (witness the rise of folk-influenced singers like Jewel).

VH-1 established an identity as the music channel for those who were too old to rock-and-roll, too young to die. For the same audience, a new radio format, adult alternative album-oriented, emerged.

By then, Chapman had moved to San Francisco, formed a band and recorded “New Beginning.” On the front cover is a sunflower. There’s a coupon inside entitling the purchaser to a packet of seeds, redeemable at Chapman’s concerts).

On the back, the artist is bathed in sunlight, smiling. On the album, there are songs about ecology (“The Rape of the World”) and working-class zeros (“Cold Feet”), but mostly there are tender songs about love.

Slowly, if a bit unsurely, Tracy Chapman is renegotiating her contract with the demands of pop-music fame. She has added versions of “Amazing Grace” and “Proud Mary” to her recent outdoor concerts for the picnic-hamper set.

At a recent Los Angeles benefit for summer-camp programs for inner-city youths, she engaged in a Lettermanesque gambit: reading comments from file cards filled out by the audience on their way in.

She sang songs by John Prine and James Brown and reminded us all to vote. “Tracy for President!” one middle-aged fan bellowed.

She shook her head and laughed, a little shy, a little embarrassed and clearly a little amused.