It is without a doubt the most badass song about the classroom since “School’s Out.” There’s something thrilling about witnessing a small amount of people making a huge, gnarled racket, like when Nirvana combined for the annihilation of “Milk It.” There’s just a primal thrill about the imbalance. “Black Math,” while not full of rage, is a snotty diatribe attacking our schools’ perceived failure to foster actual learning. That’s the secret of this band - one song can lead to hours charting out their pedigree, but you’ll still never quite figure out the gestalt of it all, how they became this singular, delightful mutt.Įven on their boisterous songs, Jack and Meg rarely exuded actual anger (“The Big Three Killed My Baby” being one of the exceptions). On “Screwdriver,” the quiet/loud dynamic is there, sure, but it’s also manifested in this song’s balance of abrasiveness and groove, Jack’s rambling Black Francis whine, and Meg’s full-bodied thuds (willed out of her without the help of one Steve Albini, mind you). Son House, The Sonics, Led Zeppelin, those landmarks were immediately apparent, but the Pixies influence on this band doesn’t get mentioned enough. And “Screwdriver” mainlined that shit, all raucous boogie and panting id. While some of The White Stripes delved into gothic Americana, mostly it combined steroidal blues and adenoidal garage rock.

“Screwdriver” (from The White Stripes, 1999) I hope these 10 songs encapsulate all that. They’ve left behind a thrilling legacy, and because of the misleadingly simple identity, the White Stripes were one of the most unpredictable bands of the past 20 years. So many motifs! So many blues! So many excellent singles! I’m partial to the bombastic, frenzied version of the band, but no matter how you carve up their output, you’ll find sincerity do-si-doing with cheekiness and intensity dueling with restraint, delivered via goddamn brilliant songcraft. Precisely because of their carefree zig-zagging across rock territory, this was a daunting task. So, with Jack seemingly prepping his second solo album, a Dead Weather record on the way, and guitars slowly crawling their way back into the pop conversation, it feels like an appropriate time to revisit the White Stripes’ catalog, now that the box around it has deteriorated. And while it didn’t always work (ahem, “Who’s A Big Baby?”), it was perfectly suited for the Internet generation, conceived before that was even a concept, which may be exactly how they made blues rock relevant after it had been decimated by laptops and butt-rock. They were an embodiment of quantum theory’s parallel realities idea, hopping across eras and genres, between songs and within them, rock history in real time. Thus, more than revivalists, they were postmodernists, combining Jack’s genuine reverence for the roots of his music with a chameleonic need to don new skin.

Soon they brought in decidedly non-blues instruments - an electric violin on De Stijl first, then synthesizers and bagpipes by 2007’s Icky Thump - while avoiding accusations of “trying to find their identity” or “transitioning” because of that handy label originally affixed to the box.

Jack and Meg White violated the terms of their initial conceit almost immediately, recording with a third musician and often sounding more like Nuggets revivalists on their self-titled debut. You have to give it to them, it was beautifully simple.Īs long as those superficial parameters were intact - red, white, and black-clad siblings playing “real” rock - they had the freedom to be whatever the fuck they wanted to be under the surface. Everything about their presentation was specifically designed to sidestep these pitfalls, so they could demonstrate that the only thing that was real was the music. Thematically, it laments the plight of the introvert, as Jack addresses authenticity (“There’s somebody there who doesn’t think they are true”), anxiety (Meg’s, presumably), and the risks of speaking (misinterpretation, overexposure). The blueprint was there all along, hidden on the unassuming debut album track “Do,” which I’d argue is the most overtly autobiographical song in this otherwise opaque catalog. People like categorizing things, we like putting stuff into tidy little boxes - it explains the tyranny of the subgenre - and the Detroit band prodded at that tendency by laying out their plan for all to see (guitar-and-drums blues revivalists with a strict color palette) specifically so that they could subvert it. Underneath the misdirection and mythology, it was just two people, wearing three colors, obsessed with one musical concept: the beauty of simplicity. The White Stripes were Occam’s razor manifested as rock.

White stripes band