The artist Tom Petty said needed to remake his song: “Just waiting to explode”
Originality has never been mandatory in popular music. It might be fun to have a great song that no one has ever heard before, but the beauty of music is the idea of sharing music with fans around the world, whether that’s a blues riff that’s been passed down through generations or one perfect lift from someone else’s lyrics. There can be a grey area when people aren’t credited, but Tom Petty felt that people should be able to twist his music into different shapes over the years.
Then again, many classic rockers of Petty’s generation usually remix their songs themselves. The remaining Beatles helped transform their music into the Love album in the 2000s, and even when modern acts put spins on their classic hits, bands like Linkin Park were going to have the final say in who was spitting over their chugging guitars on albums like Reanimation.
But before the art of sampling, Petty was already pretty lax about how people used his music. His music is steeped in rock and roll history at this point, so when The Strokes followed his lead for ‘Last Nite’ or Red Hot Chili Peppers lifted pieces of work for ‘Dani California’, he practically took it as a compliment that people were using his music to create something entirely new.
If there’s one genre that was incredibly kind to classic rock, though, it was rap. There might be a handful of rock and roll purists thinking that anything remotely associated with hip-hop is the opposite of music, but everyone from Run-DMC to NWA knew how to take a good sample and flip it on its head, taking their cues from everyone from Billy Squier to Led Zeppelin when making their beats.
Most of them would ask for clearance before they sample someone else’s tune, Petty felt that ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’ needed to be made into a hip-hop song, saying, “The day that Dre does a version of ‘Mary Jane’s Last Dance’, he’s going to have a big hit with it. I told Jimmy [Iovine] ‘that song’s just waiting to explode.’” And for everyone getting a cold sweat even thinking of that team-up, there’s a lot more in common between them than you think.
Outside of Iovine being a musical throughline between them, Petty always came to respect what hip-hop was saying. Sure, it wasn’t as musically sophisticated by some people’s definition of the word, but listening to what Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg were doing back in the day wasn’t all that different from hearing the kind of rapid-fire tunes that Bob Dylan would have written during his prime.
Although getting Snoop on a track with a song that references ‘Mary Jane’ practically writes itself, it was a great move for them to get Jelly Roll on the song as well. He’s dangerously close to getting overexposed in the modern age, but given the grit in his voice and good graces in the country community, he’s the best kind of feature someone could ask for when getting Petty’s foot in the hip-hop world.
While there’s no telling what Petty would have made of the final product, his opinion on the final version is almost irrelevant given what he already said. He always knew the power of recycling hooks, and there’s nothing wrong with taking the pieces of a classic song and making a brand new toy out of it.
