It's also given me a timely reason to do something I was going to do anyway, which is go back through the White Stripes' discography and do a retrospective review on the four discs of theirs I've got. I was not planning on doing it so soon, but this week feels like a good time.
When I bought my copy of White Blood Cells, I did not believe there was any future for rock music. I was 15 years old and already sick of the crap on the radio, and starting to look backwards. Then somehow, my generally-ignorant-of-new-music self happened upon a few tracks off this album. By the time I walked out of MusicWorld and popped it in my discman, I could already sing along to "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and "We're Going To Be Friends.""Dead Leaves" is as bold an opening track as I've ever heard, with its guitar squealing painfully into tune, screaming unpolishedness and authenticity. It begins with a tough swagger despite its lyrics, but by the end of it you feel the loneliness implicit in the words as the drums and guitars and repeating lyrics drop out and all that's left is Jack's wailing. The third track, "I'm Finding It Harder To Be a Gentleman" goes the opposite route, building in a welcoming riff around a lyric that has White wondering what role the modern man is supposed to play. It's one of the many occasions here where Jack the lyricist and Jack the gutiarist fuse to create a blockbuster. In between is the country-stomper "Hotel Yorba," which has never been one of my favourites, although I get it. It's a bit more unassuming and basic of an exercise than the tracks that surround it.
Probably where the album comes together most explosively is "Fell In Love With a Girl," the song that pretty much alerted the world to the band's existence. It sounds a little basic in a "Seinfeld Is Unfunny" way, but all the ingredients were there at the right time to make a surprise hit out of this otherwise unknown band. Undeniable at its blistering pace, brimming with life and "ahh-ahh" in-love lyrics, a lot of people probably expected the band to sound that way forever, but they don't even really sound that way elsewhere on the record. Contrast that with the charging, thumping "Expecting" or the sunny pop of "Now Mary," and you've got a good indication that the band, despite its limited tools, wasn't going to let itself be distilled so easily. I've always found attempts to classify their music ineffective and reductive, but then again, I get that way with a lot of stuff.
Anyway, it's that convergence of pop-rock sensibility and indie-experimentalism that made The Stripes a hit (and subsequently made everyone feel really awkward about their follow-up records until Icky Thump.) The band that did "We're Going To Be Friends" also did the ominous "The Union Forever," which is written from a patchwork of pullquotes from Citizen Kane, and "Aluminum," which uses the mechanical nature of the guitar and drums, along with the liquid metal of Jack's voice, to imitate the sound of aluminum being produced. When I was taking a pop music course at University (occasionally I'll refer back to it but I don't mean to get all scholarly) the Prof told us rock is essentially a reaction to the very mechanized world that allows it to exist. Or did I just blow your mind?
"We're Going to Be Friends" is the other worthy hit from the album, of course, and shows just how well the band does gentle sentimentalism. Other groups, when they dare to let themselves get vulnerable, might come off as contrived, whipping up an effective but unspectacular ode to love or lost love or losing love. Jack takes his (apparently very sincere) interest in childhood and crafts a singable melody that doesn't sound the least bit trite or melodramatic. I love the way its lyrics focus on smaller moments. That last verse, "Tonight I'll dream when I'm in bed / Where silly thoughts run through my head / About the bugs and the alphabet / And when I wake tomorrow I'll bet / That you and I will walk together again. / I can tell that we are gonna be friends" just about says it all.
That song is sandwiched between two of my favourite, usually-unnoticed cuts on the album. Leading into it is "The Same Boy You've Always Known," which I've always thought was a bit darker and should not have been used as the set-up. It's a ballad, but a much more complicated, uncertain one about how difficult it is to grow beyond one's past and mend relationships. "The same boy you've always known / Well I guess I haven't grown" is a thought I seemed to keep coming back to as a teenager. The track after "Friends" is a tougher, rock track called "Offend In Every Way," where White feels like he can do nothing but wrong. Like "Expected" and to some degree "Little Room" (more on that later) it's about performing one's duties and living up to expectations. I don't know whether Jack White knew he had a record this size in him when he was recording it, but he seemed at least to be thinking of the consequences if it all went according to plan (which it evidently did.) There's a sense of reflectiveness to this record that from this perspective seems like he's anticipating getting world-weary after his impending stardom, but that could just be hindsight.
After that is where the album starts to get a bit minor. "I Think I Smell a Rat" wraps a spidery riff with some powerful chords and venomous lyrics, and acts as the last guitar showpiece for the album. "I Can't Wait" and "Now Mary" are perfectly good but not nearly as memorable as the first half of the album: the former in fact would sound way too much like mainstream radio rock of the time if it weren't for the fact that nobody was doing those halting riffs and the "yeah-yeah" refrain. "I Can Learn" provides some whispery blues, and "This Protector" is so mysterious that even after 9 years or so, I'm still not sure what I'm hearing when I hear it. Is it a farewell to the garage rock revival that brought the Stripes to the forefront? An abandonment of their post as "Protector" of some kind of movement, ascribed to him by rock journalists before he got big? Or is it a pledge of devotion? Or is it just a weird echoey piano song about a vigilante hero? I don't know.
I haven't mentioned Meg much. She doesn't get a vocal spot on this album beyond dueting on "This Protector" and occasionally cropping up in the background on tracks like "Expecting." I think there's a tendency to malign her basic drumming style but that's kind of the point. No matter how they use it, there's a purity to The White Stripes' sound that comes from being unadorned and never straying too far from their starting point, and it starts with Meg's drumming keeping Jack's feet on the ground. This might be why I haven't bought a Dead Weather CD yet, because I like Jack and Meg together as a band. She keeps him honest.
"Little Room" is the track that runs 50 seconds and features only Jack's vocals and Meg's marching drumbeat. Its lyrics preordain the next decade of Jack's existence: "When you're in your little room / And you're working on something good / But if it's really good / you're gonna need a bigger room / And when you're in the bigger room / You might not know what to do / You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room." This album was the last time Jack White would be allowed to work in the little room, and depending who you ask, some might say he lost track of how he got started. I do think the remainder of the Stripes' story was definitely an attempt to work with that, and that it's hard to dismiss any of their output.
But hey, they only just broke up today. I'm not here to sum up their entire career, I'll leave that to others. I just think it's a great excuse to pull this record out again and sit in that room and think.
Buy this album from iTunes now!
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