The way some people are going on about it on Facebook, you'd think it was some true giant.
Then again, people born after about, well, when I was born, have little in the way of a frame of reference regarding popular music besides trios, quartets and quintets of stringy-haired guitar-twangers from which to assess such a figure. (Well, there's the frizzy-haired equivalent that dates from the advent of funk and continues through disco to hip-hop to gangsta rap.)
But please, "Free Fallin'", "You Don't Know How It Feels" and "You Don't Have to Live Like a Refugee" as great compositions or performances, even within the context of rock and roll?
He's been derivative and tiresome throughout his career. Early reviews took note of the inescapable nods to Roger McGuinn in a lot of the Heartbreakers work. Now, nods to dear influences are fine, as long as they don't come off like cover-band mimicry.
His sense of arrangement was always boneheadedly simple: vanilla chords, strung together in hackneyed progressions, strummed with an absence of flourish.
His reed-thin voice couldn't make many of the high notes he aimed for. I often got a charley-horse in my Adam's apple just listening to him try.
No, he was a typical middle-class jeans-tee shirt-and-tennis-shoes white product of a late-50s and 1960s upbringing who came of age just as the traditional show-business conventions were giving way to this new paradigm called the Rock Industry.
I know Bob Dylan and George Harrison found him a worthy collaborator, but by the time that happened, neither of them were more than shadows of their former selves.
That so many tonight are indulging in the feelings that their personal experience has made supreme among the criteria by which to judge an aesthetic contribution to our culture speaks volumes about the puddle-shallow state of our ability to access the humanity that ought to define us.
Just a rock star. Did he view himself as anything other? Popular lives and popular dies. Did he think that he was making anything on the level of anything other than a long haired hippy dude who wrote a pretty telling doobie anthem to the just say no crowd. Anyhow, RIP, Tom, wish I was an heir.
ReplyDeleteTom Petty will be missed here. Not always on the same note as the music, but it was certainly from the heart.
ReplyDeleteDeath presents itself to us all, whether it be our sense by experience, or our sense of history. Each one of us lives then dies by our personal form of experience of time. Then our contribution here among the living is assessed. That does not say much about the overall legacy of man and that future.
ReplyDeleteThat old man was born to rock, he just failed to beat the clock...
ReplyDeleteHell, he was a groundskeeper at UF watching the students (can't help but watch the chicks) come and go, and hey, he made an American dolla or two too. Probably kissed a girl or two. Isn't that the game? The American game?
ReplyDeleteAnd in his closing sentence of his critical eulogy, the venerable bloggie insults us all.
ReplyDeleteAt least he includes himself, referring to "our" ability to access the humanity that he of course understands, along with all the conservatively cogent "that ought to define us."
ReplyDeleteHe also worked briefly as a gravedigger. Petty also overcame a difficult relationship with his father, who found it hard to accept that his son was "a mild-mannered kid who was interested in the arts" and subjected him to verbal and physical abuse on a regular basis. Petty was extremely close to his mother, and remained close to his brother, Bruce, RIP you common man who rocked it out and people, especially chicks loved it. I'm thankful to be breathing this morning, off to race the day, and after the daily bread is made, to lie in the bed where I won't get laid, lol. Lighten up and have some illegal fun under our common sun....
So Tom's Big Daddy beat him because he was into the arts. That was the Greatest Generation before we became post/America, but the little faggot with the long blond hair went on to own a few jet airplanes....
ReplyDeleteMy main point is: Why do cover bands so routinely play Tom Petty songs? Because they are mind-numbingly easy to play. You can go from A minor to G in your sleep.
ReplyDeleteSongs have words too. In essence they are poetry of our day. Musicians are often deaf and dumb to that crucial aspect of a song when they listen. No?
ReplyDeleteI read your main point as hating Tom Petry, rock music along with the myriad of other people, places and things in your post-America and this rotten world. You even seem to make calls hotherto reaerved for the divine. I've seen you define evil in some very creative ways. Oh well, blogging here keeps me from showing my ass too much on face.
ReplyDeleteI don't hate anybody.
ReplyDeleteI just thought a lot of the accolades after TP's passing were overblown, as if he were in the top pantheon of rock figures, like he was Brian Wilson or Jeff beck or Aretha Franklin or something.
I do blow hot and cold as to whether rock and roll, on balance, has been good for Western civilization. Can you believe it? Mr. Absolutist posts that the jury is still out on something he has pursued as a scholar.