That high-energy beginning makes it all-the-more striking when the verses largely dispense with guitar apart from scattered notes-at least at first. Regarding the song itself, where to begin? First, there’s the opening riff that achieves its effect entirely upon the breakneck rhythm-since it’s based primarily upon one chord. I should have gone around the fence and taken a good look at it.” In later years, Tom would say that, in hindsight, toting the Confederate flag to begin with was a “stupid” thing to do-especially once coming to see a Confederate flag on flagpoles akin to “how a swastika looks to a Jewish person.” Tom himself would reflect on the whole thing in the wake of the 2015 Confederate flag controversy, stating “When they wave that flag, they aren’t stopping to think how it looks to a black person. To that, he stopped playing mid-show and gave a long speech demonizing the flag and encouraging that no one bring a Confederate flag to a concert-while also taking down the on-stage flag. Then it backfired once audiences began toting Confederate flags in the crowd-one going so far as to toss one on the stage while Tom was playing. In 1985, Tom’s album Southern Accents was released-an album whose opening track “Rebels” is told from the viewpoint of a young ignorant southerner raised in the aftermath of the Civil War and believes in the credo of ‘the way it’s always been is the way it should stay.’ At the time (while on-tour promoting the album), Tom-being brought up not to think of the negative connotations of this (saying that growing up in Florida, he saw it as “the wallpaper of the South”)-thought it’d be a bright idea to display a Confederate flag on-stage whenever “Rebels” was played in order to demonstrate the character’s ignorance. Perhaps most the most telling example of Tom’s anti-racist stance comes from an occasion where he owned up to an error in judgement. Additionally, they were among a handful of old-school rock-&-rollers who opted to embrace the then-burgeoning format of MTV in the 80’s, a move which likely sustained his popularity well into the 1990’s. However, that traditionalist attitude shouldn’t be mistaken for artistic conservatism-Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers loved to color their rootsy style with tinges of other genres (such as psychedelic rock, Southern rock, and new-wave) while remaining true to themselves. Instead, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers offers the no-frills attitude of punk but with a celebration of tradition as opposed to the drastic break represented by punk rock. And that’s true stylistically-no one familiar with Tom Petty would expect him to sound anything like Blondie, the Sex Pistols, or the Talking Heads. Regarding the general musical climate of the times, the group’s hybrid of the jangly guitar of the Byrds and the lumbering grooves of the Rolling Stones made them outliers from the punk and new-wave scenes of the time.
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