At some award ceremony Beck introduced the band thusly:
The sound of dead cell phones and oil rigs, the sound of empty parking lots and school buses, we love to live, and live to love, ladies and gentlemen, Jesus’ children of America, The White Stripes!
I don't know about what Beck is saying there. Pace Beck, Lester Bangs notes that what is constitutive of punk rock (and for him punk rock started with the Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground) is that when you listen to it you are absolutely convinced that you can rock out just as much. And maybe you can!
Last week, The White Stripes broke up. It bummed me out; they were the best thing going since the the year Kurt Cobain killed himself (listen to the albums from that year by Hole, Soundgarden, and the Smashing Pumpkins).
One thing that infuriates me is how much snarking there is on-line about Meg White's contribution to the band. (1) Meg White is a fantastic drummer. Try to imagine the dude who plays wanky stuff for Rush trying to carry these songs. He couldn't, because he has no idea what these songs call for. And this band has no bass player! Meg White is providing the bottom to everything they do. And it's beautiful. (2) Anyone who has written music for a decent band (or who has read enough good biographies of bands with great song writers), knows that the other members exert extreme selective pressure on the music, even if you are the one writing it. You write for them, rewrite based on their input, and get rid of songs they don't like or songs that don't work well with them.
In any case I think history will regard their last album, Icky Thump, as showing evidence of creative exhaustion to the point of not being able to hear the muse very clearly. There are only two songs with decent melodies on the whole thing, a stark contrast to all the other White Stripes albums. So I'm happy they are taking a break, and celebrate their noble service in the Army of Rock.
Anyhow, here's "The Big Three Killed My Baby," a great song for the second greatest band from Michigan (somewhere on-line there is a really moving Detroit Times article by Jack White on how important the Stooges are to him).
I love how the final "I'm about to have another blowout" recycles the melody from Black Flag's "Nervous Breakdown" and also the employment of many musical tropes made famous in Black Sabbath "War Pigs." But the way the ascending chords builds up to the line, "And I found out my baby's dead!" is a moment of singular rock perfection, one of many that Jack and Meg created for the ages.
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