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at a glance...
Hometown:
Detroit, MI
Formed: 1997
Personnel:
Jack White -- guitar, vocals, piano, songwriting
Meg White -- drums, vocals, songwriting
Doug Easley -- production
Related Artists :
2-Star Tabernacle, Goober and the Peas
Notes:
Oh my god. If you read another description of the ambiguous personal relationship between Jack and Meg White, you're totally going to just lose it. So we won't get into it here. Suffice it to say that they're in the mid-to-late-ish 20s, they are from Detroit, and that Jack's career in music (drumming stints in other bands, production work for other Motor City groups) predates Meg's. Suffice it to say that their three CDs for Sympathy for the Record Industry (1999's White Stripes, 2000's De Stijl, and 2001's White Blood Cells) are stunning minimal rock masterpieces. The Stripes prove that two nice people can make a hell of a lot of racket in the service of rock 'n' roll - Jack's tough, interesting, off-center songs combine Detroit grit-rock with every other musical genre in American history.
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White Stripes
White Blood Cells
Sypathy For the Record Industry, Released 2001
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My brother and I decide to go out on a Saturday night. He's turning thirty soon, so we definitely want to go rip it up. We jump into my dope ride (actually a 1998 Saturn with a crap stereo and two child car-seats in the backseat) and head out. But first, to the Exclusive Company for birthday tunes. This is a tradition running back many years for us - we are a family that takes this shit seriously, and a couple of us have actually gotten into fist-fights over musical disagreements - so I better not mess this one up. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure White Stripes is gonna do the trick.
We get back into the car, and I patiently allow him to take off the plastic and the little sticker thing at the top before he hands me the CD to put in my little portable player hooked up through the tape deck. I pop it in, notice the short running time (barely over 40 minutes, what's up with that?), and hit play.
We can't believe the guitar sound of this first track -- no guitar has sounded this nasty since Eddie Hazel died, or maybe Hendrix. It's not a difficult riff, and a child could play it, but only if that child was the reincarnation of Robert Johnson. And when the drums kick in, it really doesn't matter if they are studied-simple or ignorant-simple; they do the job, with quick sharp stabs, no show-off shit, just the facts, ma'am, shut up and listen to the voice: "Dead leaves and the dirty ground/and there's not another soul around/blah blah blah" It's a high voice, it's frequently off-key, and it cracks us up a couple of times. But we love it, just like we loved the first time we heard Tom Verlaine and Tom Waits and some of our other gods.
We're in silence the whole way downtown, as we are bathed in the intense ("I Think I Smell a Rat") and hilarious ("Hotel Yorba") and power-punky ("Fell in Love With a Girl") and bizarre ("Aluminum") stylings of this great funky band. He doesn't say that "I'm Finding It Hard to Be a Gentleman" is Jonathan Richman's lost hit single from 1976; I don't point out the Big Star/Archies influence in "We're Going to Be Friends"; and neither of us even wants to talk about all the possible implications of "Little Room," which is closer to haiku than any song ever. All we do is drive, blasting my tiny speakers into smithereens, to see where the night takes us. It doesn't matter -- we're already there.
If you like White Stripes, check out:
The White Stripes The White Stripes
The White Stripes De Stijl
Television Marquee Moon
Velvet Underground VU
The Clash Give 'Em Enough Rope
Funkadelic Maggot Brain
-- Matt Cibula
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