The one genre Tom Petty always looked down on: “Stupid”
Tom Petty always wanted to have music that made an impact.
He wasn’t in the business to chase trends or go after what he thought would get him in the charts, and a lot of his greatest songs were practically a love letter to the kinds of tunes that he had loved as a kid. But when he looked at where music was going at various points in his career, he wasn’t sure that he liked what he heard every single time he turned on the radio.
Because if there was one thing for sure, Petty was not going to be lumped in with the trends that were happening around the same time. He didn’t need to be considered new wave to be a star, and when you look at some of the biggest stars that were happening around the same time, anyone who thought that Petty belonged in the same genre as Devo and Blondie really needed to get their ears checked.
The heartland rocker was on the cusp of something much bigger, but every single decade he found himself in had the same kind of problem. Everyone on MTV really threw him for a loop whenever he started working with them, and even if he adapted to music videos fairly well, he wasn’t about to give a compliment to country music when they were becoming nothing but a poor man’s take on soft rock music.
But it’s not like those trends were about to stop, either. Petty had had his fill of the phoney side of rock and roll, and yet The Last DJ was his commentary on the kinds of tunes that seemed to be slipping away. He knew that nothing was going to last if it didn’t have something with more depth behind it, and if rock and roll was already going in a strange direction with every single nu-metal band, then the dance music craze happening around the same time wasn’t going to be high on his priority list.
Granted, it’s not like every band from around that time were terrible by any stretch. Moby, Fatboy Slim, and The Prodigy had been taking their cues from what rock and roll bands had been doing around that same time, and even though Petty could admire the genre from afar every now and again, he always understood that he was looking at a trend that was about to die down within a few years.
The next generations may have pulled from the relentless rhythms, but Petty was going to pick an actual rock band over DJs that played music off their laptops any day of the week, saying, “Watch people play records? That’s stupid. You couldn’t pay me to go. I don’t think it would be any fun without the drugs. It’s a drug party. There’s a lot of people who are in so much of a hurry to be, I guess to be famous, that they don’t want to take the time to learn to play and do all that.”
There are parts of that statement that do make Petty sound a little bit like a disgruntled uncle who was complaining about what the hippity-hop music sounds like these days, but it wasn’t a case of him trying to belittle a genre outright. All he wanted was music that involved some kind of effort, and if DJs were getting a pass as legitimate rock stars, it was only a matter of time before the industry started to allow even less effort years down the line.
The heart of all good rock and roll is about having a lot of soul behind the music, and even if Petty had grown a bit more comfortable in his own skin over the years, that didn’t mean that he took any of his skills for granted. He knew that it took a long time for him to reach the position he was in, and he wasn’t going to spend his life watching the genre that he loved erode over time.
