1988: Talkin' Bout a Revolution - Tracy Chapman
“Don’t you know? Talking about a revolution sounds like a whisper.”
The wonderful Tracy Chapman might have felt like the tables were finally starting to turn at the end of the 1980s, but almost forty years on, it turns out that those tables turned in the wrong direction. On the opening song of her eponymous debut album, released in 1988, she sang that:
Poor people gonna rise up
And get their share
Poor people gonna rise up
And take what's theirs
Since then, though, thanks to the ongoing entrenchment of neoliberalism in our politics in the West in the wake of the elections of Reagan and Thatcher; the rise and proliferation of Silicon-Valley led surveillance capitalism and Technofeudalism and the ever-widening divide between the parasitic, extractionist billionaire-class and the workers amongst us (that is, the other 99% of the population), none of us poor people have had much of a chance to rise up, get our share or take what’s ours.
According to Arup Banerjee at Windfall.com, the gap between the richest and poorest Americans more than doubled between 1989, a year after Tracy Chapman released her debut album, and 2016, when Donald Trump was elected as President for the first time. In 2024, when Trump came back into power, an Oxfam study found that “the world’s five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes from $405 billion (£321 billion) to $869 billion (£688 billion) since 2020, while the wealth of the poorest 60 per cent - almost five billion people - has fallen”. Since that report, two years ago, the billionaires have massively accelerated in their accumulation of wealth. Can we all say the same thing?
Trump has consistently run on a promise to deliver for the working class, to undo the order of the establishment and return the power to the people of America. It’s as if he had taken heed of Randy Newman’s 1974 call, “Mr President, have pity on the working man”.
But Trump has never much cared for the working man, any more than he’s ever worked an honest day in his life. He wouldn’t know a working man if he stood in the middle of fifth avenue and shot one in the face, and he certainly doesn’t know anything about pity.
No working class man or woman will ever benefit from any of his actions, policies or practices. In the UK, we have suffered similar indignities as a nation during the disastrous and self-inflicted injuries brought on by 14 years of Conservative governments, and seem to be on trajectory to go one worse next time out by electing the fascist and snake-oil conman Nigel Farage into high office.
Just as with Trump’s donors in America, Farage’s Reform Party is in receipt of millions of pounds in donations from our country’s super-rich elite because all of their policies are designed to benefit the super-rich elite that they claim to rail against. These so-called and self-proclaimed anti-establishment parties are actually so deeply entrenched in the establishment that it is impossible to separate them.
Farage and Reform have received eye-watering sums in donations from individuals with direct ties to the fossil fuel industry, climate-change deniers, financial services industries and to tax havens around the world (including millions invested by party chairman Richard Tice, who lives in Dubai for tax-related reasons).
Open Democracy have said of Reform that “our findings reveal that, despite claiming to represent a break with the current political establishment, Reform is largely funded by ex-Tory donors, who account for around a quarter of the £4.8m it has received in large donations (only those who give £11,180 or more in a year need to be declared to the Electoral Commission) since 2023”.
The money that is invested into any political party, movement or candidate is never invested out of pure altruism, of course. All of the money being dropped into these politicians’ pockets is not being given out of the goodness of the donors’ hearts, but is being exchanged for an influence in the policies those politicians will go on to propose. Is it any wonder, then, that Reform are against the newly introduced Workers Rights Bill having taken so much money from big businesses? That they’re against the development of wind and solar energy systems, having taken so much money from the fossil fuel lobby? That they want to introduce an American style insurance-based healthcare system in place of our globally renowned and nationally loved NHS, considering they have received significant donations from individuals and entities linked to the private healthcare insurance industry?
Incidentally, though Reform pretends to be the party of patriotism, its wish to dismantle the NHS runs contrarily against huge swathes of public opinion. A 2023 poll, taken in the run-up to the NHS’s 75th anniversary, conducted by Ipsos and The Health Foundation found that 54% of Britons maintain that the NHS is their biggest source of national pride.
Donald Trump gave us a glimpse of Nigel Farage’s dream future this week, when he told the collected press that “it’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things”, before giving the justification that “we have to take care of one thing: military protection”.
Of course, Trump’s reckless and illegal military action in Iran—which began with the USA bombing an all-girls primary school in Minab, killing at least 175 and injuring a further 100—was backed by Farage and Reform from the start. But what else would you expect from the party who promised to introduce an ICE-Style enforcement unit to these shores in order to tackle their overblown fear of foreign people only a month after ICE publicly executed American citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti (not to mention the suspicious deaths in ICE custody of Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Parady La, Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz and Heber Sánchez Domínguez in January 2026, as well as the death of Wael Tarabishi, or any of the 35 custody deaths in 2025).
Far from heeding the call in Newman’s ‘Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)’, Trump seems much more to be in line with Newman’s supposed-to-be-satire ‘Political Science’, in which the narrator bemoans the fact that “all around, even our old friends put us down, so let’s drop the big one and see what happens”.
In fact, the only time that Farage has gone quiet on his most recent episode of toadying up to Trump and his demented global actions was when the commander-in-chief brought Iran to the brink of nuclear annihilation. “A whole civilisation will die tonight”, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform this week, “never to be brought back again”.
Farage, unusually, was silent in response (less unusual, but no less deafening, was the lack of response from our prime minister, Keir Starmer).
In 1997, Bob Dylan sang on ‘Love Sick’ that “sometimes, the silence can feel like thunder”. In 1980, John Prine sang in ‘Storm Windows’ that ‘silence is golden til it screams right through your bones” and Simon and Garfunkel warned us all about the sounds of silence. In 1988 Tracy Chapman sang “don’t you know? Talkin’ bout a revolution sounds like a whisper”.
While they're standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotionDon't you know
Talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper
But we don’t have time for whispers and silence anymore.
There’s no time for the silence that comes between all of America’s “No Kings” protests—the liberal marches which make no demands of those in power, bring no call to arms to the working class and offer no solutions to any of the political problems that we’re faced with—and there’s no time for the silence from world leaders, would-be world leaders, house democrats, journalists and citizens who sit idly-by whilst Trump promises to set the world on fire because, one of these days, he just might do it.
Right now, with America’s permission, Israel are doing to Lebanon what they spent the last three years doing to Gaza. Whilst the Western world is more concerned about the rising cost of oil, the people of Bayrūt, Ṭarābulus, Ṣaydā, Ṣūr, Baʿlabakk and beyond are having to flee their homes, or else pull the remains of their loved ones from the ruins and remnants of their houses. Since the start of the aggression, just over a month ago, over 1,700 people have been killed in Lebanon, including at least 130 children, and over 1.2 million people have been displaced from their homes.
Here in the West, people have gathered together en-masse to protest the rising costs of fuel, meanwhile in Lebanon, The National news correspondent Nada Homsi reports that “search and rescue operations continue to find people who are still missing under the rubble. I wish I could say that these are search and rescue operations, but these are more search than rescue”, before adding that “we have visited so far four of the sites that were struck between yesterday and today and I can personally say that every single site we have visited was a residential building that was struck, in a very busy and very inhabited, densely inhabited, neighbourhoods in the city, the centre of the capital, in the busiest time of the day”.
Those bodies were put under the rubble by the same people who caused the shocking increase in fuel prices, though, and the shocking increases in the price of just about everything else, as well.
This brutality is being conducted by our governments. By the officials we chose and elected to serve us, but who instead only serve themselves and their billionaire backers. It’s being done in all of our names, and it’s being done using all of our tax money. Whilst in our own day-to-day lives, the cost of absolutely everything is rising out of our reach, what little money we do have is not being spent on materially improving our lives, or the lives of the more needy overseas, but instead is being spent on raining death and destruction upon millions of people through taxation.
With each passing day, the distance between us working class and the ownership class, the billionaire class, widens evermore. We have so much more in common with the people who are having bombs dropped on their heads and their houses than we do with any of the people who authorise the firing of those bombs in the first place, or with the people who authorise the planes that carry them to take off from our military bases and airport.
It’s this establishment, propped up by people who claim to be against it, like Donald Trump, Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage—who claim to put the welfare of the working-man first—that have allowed us all to slide towards poverty. Who sell off our personal data and our medical records to surveillance companies, and who allow tech companies to diminish our chance at ownership and instead turn everything into subscriptions and rental. Who strip us of our rights to protest whilst they strip our quality of life and even threaten the very existence of our species on the only known planet in the solar system that can support and sustain life. It’s no wonder, then, that they don’t think twice about sending an unending amount of bombs to rain down on the Middle East.
The same people who are waging this war in the Gulf region are the ones who have been waging class war against all of the rest of us since capitalism emerged in England in the 16th century. The same people who pit us all against each other in the hope that we don’t realise we have a common enemy.
As Zack Polanski told a packed-out and voluminous crowd last night in Margate’s Where Else?, “our enemy does not travel in on small boats, but flies in over our heads on private jets”.
We are actually well beyond the time for a revolution, and we are well beyond the point of only whispering about it. Our revolution needs to be as loud as the bombs that our establishment continuously drop on civilians around the world. “Oh, I said you better run, run, run, run, run, run”, Chapman sings in a call to arms on ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’. “Run, run, run, run, run, run”. Maybe it’s time we finally started running.
Choose sides
Run for your life
Tonight the riots begin
On the back streets of America
They kill the dream of America
Before starting out, I intended to spend more time in this piece talking about what a great song ‘Talkin’ Bout a Revolution’ is, but, like Bob Dylan said in another song I wrote about recently “You know, it’s funny how things never turn out the way you had ‘em planned”.
I intended to write about what a perfect, inspirational, life-affirming and inspiring album Tracy Chapman is, and just generally what a great artist Tracy Chapman herself is. What a beautiful voice she has, what an incredible way with words she’s got and how incredibly cool she is, and has always been.
I meant to write about the shocking and visceral ‘Across the Lines’—one of the most striking and powerful protest songs of all time—and about the astonishing and heart-breaking beauty of ‘Baby Can I Hold You’, ‘She’s Got Her Ticket’ and, of course, of ‘Fast Car’.
I had it in mind that I wanted to write about how much my mum used to play Tracy Chapman around the house when I was growing up, and how inspirational I have always found the album to be. How inspirational my mum has always been to me. About how it’s always been one of those albums you can never tire of hearing. How you can’t hear it too many times, and how miraculously, each time you hear it, it still has the power to impact you and affect you in all new ways. To tell you something new.
About how we never really hear albums like this anymore, and about how we’re poorer culturally, politically and on a human-level for that fact. We need less people in the world like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netenyahu, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Sam Altman, and plenty more as brilliant as Tracy Chapman. We’d all be much richer for it.