Tom Petty
Last week, during a family vacation, I sat on a beach in Longport, New Jersey, idly reading, scrolling through my various social media timelines and listening to the sun-sweetened gab of my parents and their friends.
A snatch of conversation made its way into my consciousness.
“I heard you have to write a paper about Tom Petty,” spurted one excited voice.
After explaining the finer differentials between a paper and an article (and the totally voluntary nature of this one), I listened as the handful of now-grown college friends chattered as if it were 1976 and Gainesville, Florida’s greatest had just released its eponymous first album and not its 13th, Hypnotic Eye, on Tuesday.
Each in attendance had seen Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers at least once. Brandishing a wrist, my mother’s friend Maria showed off a pale scar at least an inch long.
“I got this climbing a fence at a Petty concert,” she proudly proclaimed before launching into a backstory that made the craziest frat parties seem tame.
Not even five minutes later, a tweet caught my eye: “She was an American girl, raised on promises…”
There are increasingly fewer cultural phenomena that bridge generations. Though college life is still fundamentally college life — there aren’t really many properties of alcohol and studying that lend themselves to transformation — the millennial culture that we now find so familiar is a strange and foreign planet to the parents that spawned its creators.
Really, it’s not too hard to see how Tinder would disconcert even the most understanding of baby boomers. Though the world we grew up in is intrinsically different than the world our parents did, there is a magical mainstay upon which unity can be built: music.
One might say that music, though a constant, is possibly the most metamorphic aspect of culture between decades.
That might be true. Its changes are seismic and often unexpected. I, however, happen to be among the (what I hope to be large) population of millennials that regard our parents’ music as important, vital and — dare I say it — cool.
What does all this have to do with Tom Petty? The man and his band are living legends with multiple chart-topping hits and platinum albums. What proves it further, however, is that in the span of 10 minutes, both Maria’s scar from 1989 and a tweet from 2014 could have immediate relevance.
Though their brand of heartland rock fizzled out in the ‘90s, Petty and his Heartbreakers maintain popularity even now, playing sold-out shows and releasing records. The band’s greatest hits album, released in 1993, achieved the RIAA’s Diamond award in 2003 for selling more than 10 million units. Its music has spanned almost four decades and all the tumultuous shifts in between without losing significance.
Why? Petty’s music is defined by an unabashed American flair, a throaty, unpolished authenticity and a narrative style that lends itself to anthemic accord. In other words, there’s nothing highbrow about this music. There’s no need to avoid it for fear of complicated themes or snarky, elitist fans. It’s not controversial, nor is it boring. It’s simple, it’s heartfelt, and for the most part, it’s about chasing something that is almost — but not quite — within reach.
Sure, we don’t all live blue-collar lives or pine for nights in Indiana, but no matter what age or generation, there’s something to be said for runnin’ down a dream.
