Oh, the BAND

So I was in the US Navy from 1986-1990. And served on a relatively small ship for most of that time. And what we listened to out to sea was a huge deal. The black dudes wanted to listen to R&B and the white dudes wanted to listen to classic rock. Tom Petty was the one artist that we invariably settled on as some kind of “middle ground” (even tho it really wasn’t)

To this day if you are at an outdoor event with a bunch of middle aged people Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits album is THE one to spin. Everybody knows all those songs. And with good reason. They are all fucking great.

I’m not taking this one well.

Do not tempt 2017.

All you need to know about Tom Petty is 74 artists commented on their personal favorite by him and NOT ONE picked “Breakdown” An absolutely fucking masterpiece of a song that virtually everybody knows. Simply amazing article.

For me the worst part of this is how numb I am to it. I want to be as shocked and outraged as anybody else but if I’m being honest I’m just dead to it. I open up Yahoo! read the absolutely staggering numbers of dead and injured and think “That’s just awful. Do the Sox start on weds or thurs?” I’m not being flippant, callous, or grandstanding here. I’m simply dead inside to even the most horrific atrocities at this point. And not being more upset by something this vile makes me question everything. About the world and myself. And I hate it.

Still one of the most underrated albums of the 2010s.

Tom Petty doesn’t get a lot of the gushing critical adoration Dylan or The Beatles get, possibly because he never seemed to care about recording a big concept album or writing lyrics that nodded to surrealism or ambiguous profundity, but, what he did do well, as well as anyone that picked up guitar, was write air tight songs that sounded like classics from the first minute you heard them. Songs that just seemed to always be there. I bet if you ask the guys, mentioned above, who are still alive, they’d tell you how impossible that trick is to pull off. Petty did that shit in his sleep. This day is testing my resolve. Gonna listen to You Got Lucky and remember I did.

WOW. This is impressive. Whoever made this did a pretty nice job.

Gun control now.

Ya know, 75% of gun homicide in the US is committed with handguns (ie. sidearms as you say) – not assault rifles – and the vast majority of gun related homicide occurs in inner cities, right?

But, but, but, nobody wants to focus on statistical reality – just sensational 24/7 cable news events that reinforce their skewed political biases and irrational fears.

Come on Annie… you can’t have it both ways.
Ok, abstract sterility of the cosmestic surgery as a metaphor for wants and desires out of control made art?
You’ve made the deals, cash flow projections are made before the ink dries and its being compressed and sold back to us? Or should this be consumed in the shadow of today’s 24 hour ‘Everything Now’ culture as not quite mindless fun, but you might as well wink knowingly while the cart is dragged to hell?? Give your fans more credit.

I think St Vincent is sold to you as “Great Art” in the same way Kanye West is the “Greatest Rapper”… More an ‘art as aesthetic’ compartmentalised claim than anything. Surely you as a surveyor of great art, you know it is in the eye of the beholder and the meaning we attach to it? That great art bursts through the context it is created through, rendering context just a means for surveyor to make some rational sense of this work that has struck them in some profound way?

I dont believe St Vincent’s presentation here, because Annie is becoming bigger than the St Vincent persona…. she was much braver in personal themes of the first albums rather than the brash larger themes of recent work.

Wait, Chris.

Aren’t you the guy who called Ben and Andrew “studio-rats” and their music “shit”?

Will never be able to take you seriously dude, and honestly, surprised you still have a job with such stale writing.

neither one of those albums came out in 95

The summer of ’95 was all about two albums: Petty’s Wildflowers and the Black Crowes Amorica. I had just graduated college and was working for a radio station on Long Island. I was in promotions and was supposed to, uh, promote the station everywhere I went. Instead, I’d drive all over the Northern State and LIE – back and forth, up and down – until I got bored. I’d often drive out to the Hamptons, pull that big ass ugly yellow vanimal up to the beach and blast Petty out of the back through the massive speakers held within. Once I got into a fight with the other big classic rock station by plastering their van with my station’s bumper stickers while at the Mattituck Strawberry Festival. That might be the whitest sentence ever. Man what a great summer that was. Haven’t really thought about it in quite some time. RIP Tom Petty.