Tracy Chapman's fingerpicked anthem arrived like a dispatch from America's forgotten margins, her contralto voice narrating economic desperation with novelist's precision. The convenience store shifts, the alcoholic father, the fast car as both literal escape vehicle and fading dream: every detail landed with documentary weight while David Kershenbaum's restrained production let the story breathe.

That it conquered pop radio, rock charts and the Grammys simultaneously in 1988 proved audiences were starving for something real. Three decades later, those verses still sting.