Random Sunday – Jack White is a Genius

There are very few musicians I truly idolize anymore. Sure, I’ve had my moments, as detailed in this blog, with Adam Duritz, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson and others I have yet to detail, but these days there’s less of an urgency about my musical obsessions. I follow careers, but I don’t cry at concerts anymore (true story!).

Having said that, Jack White makes me weak in the knees. He is a one-man entertainment machine, churning out hits with his main band The White Stripes and his side project the Raconteurs, while acting in movies (like Cold Mountain and a hilarious turn as Elvis in last winter’s Walk Hard), performing onstage with Bob Dylan, and producing that Loretta Lynn album, Van Lear Rose, previously mentioned here. It is rumored he did the vocals or possibly the backing vocals for a bunch of Electric 6 hits (like “Gay Bar”). He pops up on other records as well, often credited with a pseudonym, and he’s made a hell of a lot of money. He often plays his electric guitar like a slide guitar in the White Stripes, which produces a very distinct sound, and is, I think, going to be one of the things that rock and roll remembers him for. So, who else do you know that can hang with Loretta Lynn, make music to thrash to, make sweet country ballads, caught Renee Zellweger’s eye and can play the guitar like that? Yeah, it’s official. Jack White is dreamy.

Pop culture these days doesn’t get a lot of true musical geniuses. My theory is that our attention span has become too short and people who are or could be truly great are either relegated to the indie circuit, heard by a few fans but not the public at large, or never picked up at all because they won’t “sell,” but Jack White is one exception. Commercial success and true artistic innovation are hard to come by, and despite his eccentricities (of which he has many), his talent overshadows his strange personality, which is a very good thing in rock and roll.

I’m going to talk a bit more about the White Stripes than about his other projects, because I like them best. I love that WS are constantly reinventing their sound, but because of that distinctive way Jack plays guitars, and because his guitars are accompanied only by Meg’s drums, they always sound like themselves and never like anyone else. From their first album and the hit “Fell in Love With a Girl,” they were taking on a sound decades older than them and combined loud, fierce, electric guitars with American roots music and blues, to create a genre-defying first album White Blood Cells (they say they play “folk music”). That album got them the label of a “garage” band, and their success went hand in hand with the success of bands like The Strokes and The Hives. Remember that moment in 2001 when you thought “rock is back, baby!”? Sadly, it was over too quickly, though The Strokes are still around, it is clear that they are a garage band while the White Stripes are another – more expansive – creature entirely. I think that this was hinted at on that first album on the track “Hotel Yeroba,” which features acoustic guitars and a familiar, country-stomper sound. And yet White’s vocals somehow channel an old blues musician.

That kind of country/blues influence was largely absent from their subsequent albums, but the sense of wild, crazy fun was not, and I think that’s what I like best about both the White Stripes and the Raconteurs. They are playing good, fun rock music. The White Stripes’s most recent album, Icky Thump, revisits an Appalachian influence in a couple of weird – but undeniably awesome – ways. There is “Rag & Bone,” a spoken-verse song that casts Meg and Jack as junk collectors/con men. This is probably one of my favorite tracks of theirs of all time, mostly because of Jack’s confident, braggging, swaggering vocals and guitars, and the sheer fact that it’s just such a strange little song that I doubt any other band would have the chuzpah to include, especially on an album that also includes faux-Scottish folk and electric bagpipes (“St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)”). This is range, people.

Download Rag & Bone

I think it’s possible Icky Thump is one of the great albums of the post-modern age of rock & roll, with its self-conscious efforts to recreate a – for lack of a better way to describe it – White Stripesian version of practically every influence rock ever had. Each song on the album is a tribute, and yet each song is also its own magical creation.

For that alone, despite the fact he’s not washed up and old yet, Jack White should be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame immediately. Of course, that is usually what happens at the end of careers, and I hope Jack White will be around for a very, very long time, creating more weird, awesome music with any band he chooses in any way he chooses.