White Stripes: Elephant

This album, and its predecessor, was great music to be young with. It was frustrated, angry, heartbroken, hopeful and creative. It seemed to be about something even when it wasn't, because the chords and vocals and drums were so evocative. It was around this time I really started to think about the way songs are put together. It was impossible to talk about The White Stripes after White Blood Cells without referencing the fact that it was "just" two people, "just" one guitar and a drum set (even though that wasn't literally always the case.) I like the title of this album, because it seems to acknowledge the band has gotten somehow "bigger." It sounds bigger, harder, louder, and maybe a bit less personal. More uncontrollable and undeniable. Maybe that's a comment on the music itself or, as I was partly thinking in my last review, the band's fame and identity... well, for the purposes of this review, it's the former.

If Elephant was a bid to make a hit record, it was a strange way to go about it. Not that the music isn't great, but nothing about Jack White's songwriting has ever said "conventional, compromising hitmaker." "Seven Nation Army" hardly sounds like you'd imagine a hit single, yet to listen to it you can't see it as anything but a juggernaut. It has that swagger, that certainty, that mesmerizing appeal that "Satisfaction" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has. It builds a whole world around itself in less than four short minutes. It draws you in and ascends higher and higher. Instead of a chorus it (like many White Stripes songs before and after it) features a guitar break. This one is really just an expansion of the intro riff, as it gets bigger and bigger, stretches further and further until nearly snapping. ON the live version from Under The Great White Northern Lights it pretty much does snap, which was a point of contention between me and my co-workers: I liked it, they thought it was shit. It's hard to argue with the studio version, though.

The song sounds like a call to arms that rallies the rest of the album. In it's way, it still sounds measured and smoothed-over compared to most of the other songs. "Black Math," the second track, is too raucous to be contained (and provides a good baseline as to what "The White Stripes" really "sounds" like) and "There's No Home For You Here" finds Jack overdubbing his own voice until he sounds like a chorus or a Satanic rally. The later track, "Ball and Biscuit," is a puzzling mid-album moment: an over-7-minute blues rock workout reminiscent of Led Zeppelin, sitting right in the middle of the album. It's not one of my favourite White Stripes moments, probably due to its jammy nature, but it's a worthwhile oddity. Elsewhere, the album goes off the rails in a more manageable way. Late album tracks like "Hypnotize" and "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" exist on a continuum of exhaustion with and desire for the opposite sex. There's a lot to be said about the gender-politics in "No Faith in Medicine," about whether Jack's macho posturing wins over his love interest's fickle, unpleasable nature. Me, I'm just more interested in that crazyass vintage riff and the fact that he managed to create a plausible rhythm-and-rhyme context for "Acetaminophen."

The first half of the album is kind of a goldmine. Their take on the Bacharach/David standard "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" wrings every drop of lonely anguish out of it, remolding it into something akin to "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," but the ringing guitars seem to mock the narrator, rather than sympathize.

Then three of the best tracks on the album occur in a suite of very tonally-different ballads. The first is the slinking, seduction of "In The Cold, Cold Night" where Meg puts her kittenish vocals to it and beckons the listener on. The song is just stripped down enough (with its lanky guitar lines and subtle, subtle organ backing) and Meg's vocals just soft and warm enough to make you feel the need for companionship and want to go, but there's an element of mystery and danger that remains. "I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart" is a sweet, warm, heartening piano ballad about that most delicate subject: winning approval. Jack sings with such earnestness and desperation that you can't help but feel for the guy. "What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull / What kind of jokes should I lay out now? / I'd be glad to go finish high school / Just to make her notice that I'm around." I love a song like this because it shows sometimes love, that is, romantic love, isn't enough. The girl in the song probably loves Jack just fine, but her mother's disapproval, or plain lack of acknowledgment, is just plain vexing. At its core, it seems to be a song about winning over your toughest critics.

After this track, the album plays a cruel trick on the listener with "You've Got Her In Your Pocket," which uses the sympathy you've gained for Jack's voice on the last track. He switches from the piano to the acoustic guitar to play this soft, weeping ballad... of obsession, possessiveness and jealousy. It's a mean, bitter sort of tune wrapped up in a sweet, sad melody that hides its intentions. "Now she might leave like she's threatened before / Grab hold of her fast before her feet hit the floor / And she's out the door." That last verse, right before the narrator's voice turns from "You" to "I," is a heartbreaker, every time, every damn time.

So "Ball and Biscuit does provide a lengthy breather, and then it's back to the pulse-pounding rock, with "Seven Nation Army's" evil twin, "Hardest Button to Button," which rather than rolling up and down the scale, hits percussively on a few chords (or some such guitar talk, I really don't know all the terminology.) I like this song a lot, I see it as being about the difficulty of finding your place, a theme that somewhat runs through the album, although not explicitly. It's creepy and cool and bristling with stifled irritation. "We're a family, and we're all right now," he says in the bitterest way possible. "Hardest Button" was an even less likely "hit single" than "Seven Nation Army," but still deserving of attention.

My opinion on "Little Acorns" is a bit of a tossup: I think I like the song better knowing its origin, rather than itself. Legend goes that Jack was fiddling around with some piano chords on some random tape he'd acquired, but when he played it back he discovered he'd overdubbed the chords to a recording of this anecdote by Detroit radio personality Mort Crim. So he decided to take the anecdote and write lyrics about it, wrapped around the chords he'd been using. The song itself isn't brilliant, but it's nice enough, and fits the same "found art" niche occupied by "The Union Forever."

I do love "The Air Near My Fingers," which manages to transcend the "boring / snoring" opening line and create a great wordpicture of a man undergoing an anxiety attack. That charging, jumpy rhythm helps, and all throughout the album, in fact all throughout his career, Jack has managed to match up his musical compositions with his lyrics in a way that enhances, rather than playing "mix and match." Most of his songs feel complete in that way. This particular song has that breathless, rambling, circular lyric and the awesomely simple "I get nervous when she comes around" refrain wrapped around this zombie merry-go-round rhythm.

The album ends with the bright, sunny "It's True That We Love One Another," which I think concludes the attempt by White & Co. to hit some kind of record for "average words in title." It's a duet between three people -- a triet? -- Jack, Meg and guest vocalist Holly Golightly. I like that it's not just Jack and Meg singing to one another, because it adds a cute complication to the simplicity of it being "true that we love one another." If it's not the greatest song ever written, it must've been fun to record and it is a bit of a kick to listen to after the weight of the rest of the album.

Anyway, the meanings of the songs as I interpret them aren't as inherent to their enjoyability as I might think. In fact, my own interpretation might differ from day to day, but the songs remain the same. It's a odd bunch of songs that are hard to encapsulate, yet hang together very well. It isn't that it's bleedingly personal or especially deep, it's just that it's deep enough for the music, and the music's powerful enough for the words: all I really know is that chill I get up my spine when the guitar starts to let loose on "Seven Nation Army."

Out of all the Stripes albums I've got, this is the one that I keep coming back to, so there's value in that. Even the tracks I don't really like, I really do like. It's my idea of good, even great, if not utterly transcendent, life-changing music. Lyrically it hits on a good number of contradictions in life without trying too hard to resolve any of them (as no pop rock musician should.) You want something simple, like a woman's love or rock and roll -- and she wants to love you, and rock wants you to play, and you'll fight any army to get with it -- but there are mothers and critics to please, and unforeseen shit you've gotta put up with, and disagreements and joy and obsessions and pain and loss and frustration and failure and just generally irritating difficulties, but in the end it's true that we love one another. And if you can't see the greatness in a record like this, you need to have more faith in the music itself as medicine.

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