Mr. Petty, who sadly passed away in 2017, is not widely known for writing songs that comment on social issues, much less near-dystopian fiction like “The Last DJ,” generally preferring brilliant, catchy cop confections like “Free Fallin’” and “Running Down a Dream.”
Released in 2002, what we might call the early days of digital media and an increasingly corporatist music industry, “The Last DJ” was the late, great Tom Petty’s last hit, reaching number 22 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Tracks and receiving significant airplay on rock stations. Ostensibly, the song is about an old-fashioned Disc Jockey, they who once upon a time crafted our playlists by spinning actual records, from Jackson, FL, who, in Mr. Petty’s own words, “became so frustrated with his inability to play what he wants that he moves to Mexico and gets his freedom back. The song is sung by a narrator who’s a fan of this D.J.” The radio stations themselves seem to have taken the story personally. Clear Channel Communications, the largest corporate owner of traditional radio, banned the song for being “anti-radio” in several markets. “I was elated when my song was banned,” Mr. Petty told Billboard at the time. “I remember when the radio meant something. We enjoyed the people who were on it, even if we hated them. They had personalities. They were people of taste, who we trusted. And I see that vanishing.” The song pulls no punches in this regard, calling the crop of DJ’s circa 2002 company men and whores, controlled entirely by the “boys upstairs” and the “top brass.” Mr. Petty’s usual easy-listening vocals render the lyrics more wistful and mournful than downright mean, but the language itself is undeniably sharp and like many would be classics, there are bigger ideas simmering beneath the surface, almost desperate to escape. As the song progresses, we learn that the brass aren’t controlling the DJ purely for commercial purposes, as in instructing him to play what makes them the most money from advertisers, but as a means to control the populace by extension. The DJ, in this view, is the “last human voice,” standing for “freedom of choice” against the idea that there are “some things you just can’t put in the minds of those kids.” Instead, he continually “plays what he wants to play, And says what he wants to say.” As a result, the corporation owning the station, and perhaps some nefarious others, need to “hang him so high ‘Cause you just can’t do what he did.” The culture as a whole, meanwhile, celebrates only “mediocrity” while figuring out how “much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free.” As Mr. Petty put it, “Radio was just a metaphor. ‘The Last DJ’ was really about losing our moral compass, our moral center.”
Mr. Petty, who sadly passed away in 2017, is not widely known for writing songs that comment on social issues, much less near-dystopian fiction, generally preferring brilliant, catchy cop confections like “Free Fallin’” and “Running Down a Dream.” Perhaps 1985’s Southern Accents is the lone exception before “The Last DJ,” where he struck back at critics and the broader intelligentsia for what he perceived as a bias against Southerners, believing that the urban centers on the East and West Coasts were the rightful centers of art and culture, others need adopt their attitudes or not apply at all. “There’s a Southern accent, where I come from, The young ‘uns call it country, The Yankees call it dumb,” he sang in what Rolling Stone described as “a fierce defense of his Southern roots and an ambitious fight for his creative honor.” At the same time, the album produced such memorable hits as “Even the Losers,” “Don’t Do Me Like That,” and “You Got Lucky,” suggesting Mr. Petty himself couldn’t resist the pop catchiness that made him famous in the first place. It also prompted Rolling Stone to note, rather unfairly in my opinion and which only served to demonstrate the underlying point, “It’s only when you dig down into Petty’s albums in search of a philosophy that you come up short. Petty’s records don’t tell us much about him except that he has found that it’s no picnic at the top. And they tell us even less about ourselves: unlike, say, Bruce Springsteen, another working-class hero with whom he is often paired, Petty doesn’t leave enough space between his lines for listeners to write their own dreams.” “The Last DJ,” however, is different, and especially with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard to think of a more prescient song in recent memory. At the time of its release, Napster, the early, free, and untracked peer-to-peer music service, had been discontinued and Apple’s breakthrough iPod wasn’t yet a year old. Radio stations were beginning to consolidate into larger media conglomerates like Clear Channel, but few, if any would have predicted how digital music in general would rapidly devolve into big businesses controlled by a handful of players – Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Google, and Amazon, either streaming as part of subscription or paying per song – or that DJ’s in general would effectively cease to exist in anything resembling the classic form. Social media, meanwhile, wasn’t even in its infancy (MySpace was founded in 2003) and the idea that the flow of information would largely be controlled by even fewer companies – Facebook, Twitter, and Google – in less than a decade would likely have been laughed at. Governments, of course, have sought to control the flow of information at least since Plato penned his classic Republic and embraced the idea of the noble lie, but few could have predicted the lengths even the once illustrious Federal Bureau of Investigations would go to in order to “protect” the populace from “misinformation,” much less that so many in the mainstream media would openly embrace the need to censor their own colleagues or at least remain silent when those colleagues have been censored. Mr. Petty couldn’t possibly have imagined the emergence of conversational Artificial Intelligence like Chat GTP, and yet it has become difficult these days to even identify when you’re hearing a human voice in the first place.
All of this and more has come to pass in barely two decades, leaving the future of traditional democratic values such as free speech, association, and expression perhaps more at risk than they have been since the rise of Nazi Germany and the spread of Communism in the aftermath of World War II, what Mr. Petty described as losing our “our moral compass, our moral center” and then some. Perhaps even worse, there is a sense, somewhat exaggerated but also frighteningly true, that large swaths of America and the free world in general are happy to abandon these values in the first place. For young people especially, it appears the speech that should be allowed in public – or perhaps even in private – is based on their own political preferences. Late last year, data guru Nate Silver published an analysis of the 2024 College Free Speech polling conducted by the College Pulse and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, concluding that “Free speech is in trouble” because “young liberals are abandoning it.” He wrote, “after seeing the latest polling on what college students think about free speech, I don’t [think] concern over ‘cancel culture’ or the erosion of free speech norms is just some moral panic. In fact, I think people are neglecting how quick and broad the shifts have been, especially on the left.” “College students,” he continued, “aren’t very enthusiastic about free speech. In particular, that’s true for liberal or left-wing students, who are at best inconsistent in their support of free speech and have very little tolerance for controversial speech they disagree with.” The results of the poll are concerning even in isolation. Only 29% of students would allow a speaker on campus who believed transgender was a mental disorder or who viewed “Black Lives Matter” as a hate group while well under half, 43%, would allow a anti-abortion advocate who sought to have the procedure banned. In comparison, 72% would permit speakers who believe structural racism causes White Privilege, 65% would permit those who called for the abolition of the Second Amendment, and 57% those who believed religious freedom was merely an excuse for discrimination. In addition, a mere 37% believe it is never appropriate to shut down a speaker and more than a quarter think violence is acceptable to stop speech entirely. Even The New York Times opined on the end of free speech, before this poll was conducted. “For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims,” they wrote in April 2022, “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”
The decline in support for free speech has been accompanied by a much more difficult to quantify trend that combines an unquestioned obedience to authority with an unending need to defend that authority. It’s a frequent refrain that authoritarianism is rapidly growing in conservative circles, but there is no more obvious case study of this phenomenon than the response to the pandemic. Whatever your personal feeling about how we should have responded or what measures were effective, there is no doubt that governments around the world recommended and forcibly implemented strategies that were never discussed, much less tried, from school closures to lockdowns to masking to vaccine mandates, and rather than respond with the healthy skepticism of a free people confronted with oppressive tactics they’d never heard of in their lives, a significant percentage of the population eagerly complied – and attacked anyone who questioned any of it. Even after learning the truth that many of these strategies were not effective, causing far more damage than any benefit to public health, and in some cases were even made up entirely, some would undoubtedly do it all over again, happy to live a life where they do what they’re told. As a conservative, I see echoes of this in the transgender debate, where a deep rooted American belief that everyone should have the right to dignity and privacy has been supplanted by the insistence against any observable evidence that a man can be a woman and vice versa in all aspects, magically transforming from one to another, and sometimes back and forth in the same person. Today, if you disagree that a person can literally transubstantiate themselves into a different person with a different genetic makeup and body, as opposed to supporting an individual’s choice and the general equality of all people, you are considered transphobic and fit to be canceled – despite the fact that, just as literally, no one outside a few handful believed anything like this a mere decade ago. Similarly from the conservative perspective, we’ve seen longstanding concerns about racial disparities and a deeply held belief in racial equality magically transform into the insistence the country is irredeemably racist and should you choose to disagree with that assumption, you are a racist yourself. I do not bring these points up for political purposes – surely, any readers on the left side of the spectrum would have similar gripes about conservatives – but the fact remains that much of this was created out of whole cloth as they say within the last couple of decades – perhaps since Tom Petty wrote “The Last DJ” – and rather than skepticism, it has become dogma for many.
Remarkable, for a single song to contain all this, but for better or worse, “The Last DJ” is not likely what Tom Petty will be remembered for, nor will his forays into social commentary on Southern Accents. Mr. Petty was primarily a hitmaker, the rare artist who could transform a relatively simple riff and straightforward lyrics into the kind of catchy songs that stick in your head, permanently, as if you’d heard them before even on the first listen and can’t imagine the world without them. The website rockandbluesmuse.com described him this way while ranking his top ten songs, “Petty was/is one of the all-time best rock singer-songwriters the universe has ever produced. He didn’t come out of the folk or country scenes playing quiet acoustic guitar tunes full of cryptic lyrics or mellow sentiments. Petty showed up in all of our speakers with a loud electric guitar and a cracking band that played the daylights out of his hook-laden songs. From his 70s beginnings, TP plugged his songwriting influences in an amp and turned them into music of substance and melody that touched everybody who heard it.” The top ten list includes some of my personal favorites, “Breakdown,” “American Girl,” “Refugee,” “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” and “The Waiting.” I’m certain others will have different rankings based on their own unique tastes, but regardless, you might say these different rankings and Tom Petty himself represents one of the things that makes music great in the first place. A song need not change the world. It need not aspire to poetry, tell a complex story, feature complex characters. It doesn’t even need to make sense. It simply needs to be good, to get your heart pumping and leave a little something with you afterwards. In that regard, Mr. Petty is among the best of all time and the prescience of the “The Last DJ” is simply a bonus reminding us that no matter what, we should all play what we want to play and say what we want to say, let the naysayers be damned.
THE LAST DJ
Well you can’t turn him into a company man
You can’t turn him into a whore
And the boys upstairs just don’t understand anymore
Well the top brass don’t like him talking so much,
And he won’t play what they say to play
And he don’t want to change what don’t need to change
There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say, hey hey hey?
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
There goes the last DJ
Well some folks say they’re gonna hang him so high
‘Cause you just can’t do what he did
There are some things you just can’t put in the minds of those kids
As we celebrate mediocrity all the boys upstairs want to see
How much you’ll pay for what you used to get for free
There goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say, hey hey hey?
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice
And there goes the last DJ
Well he got him a station down in Mexico
And sometimes it’ll kind of come in
And I’ll bust a move and remember how it was back then
And there goes the last DJ
Who plays what he wants to play
And says what he wants to say, hey hey hey?
And there goes your freedom of choice
There goes the last human voice.
And there goes the last DJ
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 