Jonas Blue's Fast Car Ft. Dakota (Also featuring everything that's wrong with the music industry)

As a general rule, I try to avoid writing about music I dislike. Perhaps as a musician, I have an underlying respect for people trying to do the same thing, even if their music doesn’t necessarily resonate with me. On listening to Jonas Blue’s cover of Fast Car featuring Dakota, I felt compelled to make an exception. Let me begin by contextualising my feelings. Part of my job is to perform music at weddings, and this mostly includes covers. Out of the same respect I spoke of above, I really try to capture the essence of the song without trying to re-create the artist’s specific sound. I also created a cover of Peggy Lee’s exceptional song, Fever, alongside prolific producer, Joachim Pastor, just last year. My reservations towards Jonas Blue and Dakota’s creation don’t stem from a purist perspective. I also believe Dakota to be a great vocalist with a beautiful richness to her voice and Jonas Blue to be a perfectly adequate producer.  However, their collaborative effort to re-create Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car is at once entirely unoriginal and completely soulless.

However, the cover has reached second place on the UK Singles Chart, while Chapman’s original song had the peak of its popularity at number 5. This is interesting. One of the reasons that covers of popular songs fare so well at weddings and corporate functions is that familiarity is king. Combine nostalgia with a current artistic trend (tropical house), and you have a winning formula. So, if you look at Jonas Blue and Dakota as a smart business team, it’s difficult not to commend them. But, artistically and even morally, I cannot respect what they have done here. Their success rides on the artistry and emotional depth of Chapman’s original song, and of course the licensing agreement means that she is receiving what is due to her.

So perhaps my qualm does not lie with the artists themselves, but the public, for being far too easy to please.  If listeners were being just a tiny bit more critical about what they listen to – they would be able to recognize that all tropical house sounds exactly the same. They would realise that the raw emotion of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car is completely lost in this manufactured party-ready summer hit. Perhaps my take is too harsh, and I should allow people to listen to what they like, but if we are not finding meaning in art, I’m afraid that it’s difficult to find meaning anywhere. This is what’s wrong with the music industry and it is why many great artists remain undiscovered.