Weekly Records – The White Stripes
As mentioned in October’s 8, I’m trying to listen to more music I already own. I want to go through at least one album every week.
Album: White Stripes
Artist: The White Stripes
Released: 1999
Obtained: 2002, purchased on CD
Do You Want An Explosion Now?
Like thousands of other people, I got into the White Stripes after seeing the Michel Gondry-directed “Fell In Love With a Girl” video. I bought White Blood Cells–the album FILWAG is on–shortly after and I’d suddenly found my new favorite band (despite whatever claims the Hives made later that year).
When I decided to dig into the band’s back-catalog, I started at the beginning. The White Stripes’ eponymous debut is a powerhouse. It was clearly made by the same duo behind White Blood Cells, but the Jack White at the helm in 1999 is a high-voiced madman on the verge of a total meltdown and not the reticent, 1930s-throwback rambler of WBC, Elephant or Get Behind Me Satan.
The energy on this record is astounding. It starts off with Meg. Her soon-to-be-trademark primitive drumming combined with the lo-fi recording makes it clear that something new and strange is happening in Detroit. The track continues with a lazy guitar line that picks up steam just before the whole song turns into loud, noisy, blues/punk sludge. The chorus, if you can call it that, is Jack shouting “Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo Hoo.” It’s a more organized version of the impromptu shouts that pop up all over the album whenever the music picks up.
And that brings me to what I love about this album. It almost sounds like the band is making it up as they go along. The songs are organized, but the record feels like it’s going to fall apart at any second. The wheels are too loose and everything is rattling. I like studio mastery and all, but there’s something special about how everything comes together on this one. It captures the sounds of the low-budget punk and power-pop recordings that were coming out everywhere but this time with a weirdness and abandon that’s hard to replicate.
Wasting My Time
White Stripes is 17 tracks long. A few of the songs are about romance, etc, and a few are vignettes about visiting construction sites, walking to pawn shops and people in Detroit. There are three notable covers: Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” done with a fierceness the Rolling Stones didn’t quite reach when they did it on Exile On Main Street; Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee,” which comes off as more forlorn than the original; and “St. James Infirmary” Blues, which is a standard, but done here as a bizarre type of stomp.
There are slow songs and biblical references abound. The post-apocalyptic “Cannon”–which lapses into “John the Revelator”–is my favorite track, and “The Big Three Killed My Baby” is one of two White Stripes songs with a political message. Jack shouting the end of “I found out my baby is dead” in that song is the rawest the album gets.
Now I realize I’m praising and not revisiting. I could get into this album and the roots of the band’s falsified history, or the way the record I think the sounds dingy and aged, like the wares in the pawn shops Jack sings about. I could, but I won’t.
There are a few artists with several albums I enjoy, and the one I like most is the one I’ve most recently heard. I really like this album, and I’ll leave it at that until I listen to something that came later.