Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers: The Last DJ

Watching the music business long enough will break even the most casual fan's heart. Formats get narrower and more repetitive, good acts get put out to pasture in their prime, all the best songs come back as car commercials, and nothing ever seems to get better. Throughout his career, Tom Petty has fought the industry over issues like album and ticket pricing, and he refused to take on the endorsement deals expected of a star of his stature. Now he's even gone to the trouble of recording The Last DJ, a loosely structured concept album about just how bad the job of making music has gotten. The titular opening track is classic Petty: Catchy, clever, and unmistakably from the heart, it uses the figure of the last DJ "who plays what he wants to play" as a symbol for everything that's gone wrong since the early, adventurous days of FM rock that coincided with Petty's formative years. A rebel to the end, his last DJ now works out of Mexico, and can only be heard shimmering between other stations on the dial. That's such an effective symbol for the current, industry-run monopoly—which decides who will become popular before listeners have a chance—that it has the unfortunate effect of making much of the rest of the album redundant. Whether singing about the corporate-indoctrinated rock star of "Money Becomes King" or the heartless CEO of "Joe," or assuming a defiant stance on "Can't Stop The Sun," Petty seldom finds the gracefulness of the title track, and even risks shrillness from time to time. Of course, even the weakest Petty albums include at least a handful of keepers, and The Last DJ finds them in its ballads, particularly "Blue Sunday" and the nostalgic "Dreamville," a vividly realized trip back to a moment of musical purity that may exist only in Petty's mind. A few more songs like that might have compensated for The Last DJ's clunkers. As it is, Petty's thesis is strong, but his argument falters too often.