New Music
Review by Bartley Kives
Winnipeg Free Press - October 26, 2002

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers | The Last DJ | (Warner) | ★★
Plenty of artists have written songs about the greed and bottom-line stupidity that spoils the music business. Not content to stop there, veteran rocker Tom Petty spends an entire album grinding his teeth over the subject.

Getting past the musical content -- semi-acoustic pop-rock accompanied by lots of strings -- The Last DJ is far too humourless to work as satire and too direct to be palatable as a diatribe.

While every passionate music lover on Earth probably agrees with Petty's assertion that today's record-company execs are a bunch of soulless bean-counters, you need to really love the man to endure his sophomoric prose.

For starters, take the chorus from the title track: "There goes the last DJ / Who says what he wants to say / And plays what he wants to play / Hey hey hey."

Dr. Seuss must be so proud.