“Jack told me more than once not to make it sound too good."
- Stuart Sikes, recording engineer on White Blood Cells,
“A
definitive oral history: Revealing the White Stripes”
Punk tends to favor personality over talent. For a genre
that treats any form of instrumental virtuosity beyond playing three chords and
yelling with suspicion at best and outright hostility at worst (The Clash were
pushing it with “Complete Control” already, and were essentially cast out of
the clan when they released London Calling), the charisma of the
performers tended to be the most important factor in the overall band’s
success. Those who broke from that idea were either called The Ramones (who
relied on playing great, simple pop songs really, really fast) or became the
core of the New Wave and, later, New Romantic genres.
The power of personality that John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten)
and Joe Strummer personified had its root in the pre-Beatles pop music era.
Back in the day, bands rarely had anyone capable of writing their own material,
let alone at the rate needed to match the then-thriving industry of Tin Pan
Alley. Buddy Holly & The Crickets were one of the first groups to manage
the feat, and the British Invasion broke the industry wide open a few years
later, but the 40s and 50s were dominated by songwriters who approached pop
music in the same manner as blues, classical, and musical theatre: as something
to be performed.
With such a glut of material, as well as a lack of stigma
toward covering someone else’s work, the majority of singers and bands in every
genre of music (with the partial exception of jazz, which still incorporated
plenty of old standards along with relentless innovation) relied on old
standards and purchased sheets for material. As such, the charisma of their
performers, particularly the singers, became paramount. Frank Sinatra, Jimmy
Dorsey, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, Bobby Darin… the list goes on and on, and
that doesn’t even touch on the jazz bands who were similarly centered on
charismatic band-leaders.
The British Invasion, as well as the rise of the modern
prototype for the singer-songwriter model, Bob Dylan, and the rise of
passionate R&B musicians like Ray Charles and Little Richard destroyed the
Tin Pan Alley model by exploiting their own rules. Dylan, Charles, and English
musicians like The Beatles were able to put more personality into their songs
by virtue of writing the things in the first place, allowing them to trump even
the more inventive song interpreters like Sinatra and Elvis. Even Motown, who
had some of the best production and songwriters in the industry, were unable to
take things back to industry’s tin-plated glory days.
Punk followed the template that the British Invasion had
established by combining originality with such ferocious charisma that their
utter lack of virtuosity was made irrelevant. Provoked by CBGB’s “no covers”
policy, New York musicians were encouraged to throw things at the wall until
something stuck, forging amateurs into polished, albeit eclectic performers. On
the other side of the bond, young rebels struck out against the rule of
progressive rock and Clapton-imitators by emulating the noise of heavy traffic.
That same rebellion keeps happening, over and over, every
time popular music reaches a certain level of polish. As R&B began to reach
its current, gleaming polish in the late-90s thanks to producers like
Timbaland, Jack White asked his ex-wife if she could play drums. When she said
no, he said, “Perfect, let’s start a band.”
This is not to say that Meg White is a bad drummer; it’s
virtually impossible for her to be considering the entirety of The White
Stripes, White Blood Cells in particular, is built around her drumming.
It provides grounding for Jack White’s often chaotic guitar solos, a feat that Blunderbuss
could match only by making everything else in the songs just as eclectic.
For a band as overtly back-to-the-basics as White Blood
Cells, Meg White’s percussion becomes absolutely central. “Fell In Love
With A Girl” is probably the most accomplished form of that idea, with both the
guitar and vocals becoming slaves to Meg’s rhythm, but the same concept repeats
itself on virtually every song other than “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground”,
the only real bluesy song on the record.
The percussion focus becomes most obvious on “Little Room”,
which features nothing but drums and Jack White’s voice. That song can also be
seen as a virtual mission-statement for the album:
“Well, 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 is one of the only songs on the album where Jack White
sounds like he’s trying to make a point, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence
that he’s doing so on the simplest song on the album. White is spelling out his
own methodology of coming up with big, impressive songs and then jamming them
into the locked-beat of his drummer/sister/ex-wife.
That song is followed by “The Union Forever”, which spells
out Jack White’s other, arguably more unfortunate characteristic: an inability
to take himself too seriously. The overtly political, “Eat The Rich” lyrics of
the song are jarringly juxtaposed with an interlude of “Charlie Kane” (better
known as “There Is A Man”) from Citizen Kane. One could argue that the
musical quote (and it is that; the lyrics are taken directly from the original
song) has some meaning or traction due to its ironic use, but I think it’s more
a sign of how uncomfortable Jack White is with the idea of a serious song.
That tendency extends to most of the albums Jack White has
worked on as well, especially those that contain some of his best material.
It’s why Elephant features what is essentially a rap-album-style skit
(“Little Acorns”) along with songs like “Seven Nation Army” and “Ball &
Biscuit”, why Consolers Of The Lonely starts with a child asking for
“the story with the chicken” before launching into the excellent title track,
and why Sea Of Cowards ends with the sub-filler joke track “Old Mary”,
which, not coincidentally, is also the only song on the album that White took
full songwriting credit for. White Blood Cells mostly avoids having
odious millstones like those, but it does contain the deliberately childlike
“We’re Going To Be Friends”, one of the few acoustic songs White’s put on an
album. It’s a lovely song, but it’s completely out of place.
Jack White’s inability to take himself too seriously may be
all over The White Stripes output, but the conflict between that, his
considerable musical talent, and his bitterness about relationships and modern
day are what fuel his songs. No matter how much the horrific idea of
adult-children becomes mainstream, cutesy-twee music like She & Him or
Justin Bieber is about as essential and interesting as cotton candy. White has
put out his fair share of twee-leaning songs (“We’re Going To Be Friends” being
the most obvious), but they’re generally grounded in experiences he can’t quite
escape and expressed through talent he’s never even bothered to try and
suppress, which keeps them fresh and interesting.
That sense of fun and joy is also, fundamentally, what rock
and blues music is all about. Rock took from its progenitor the idea of
celebration; the blues started out as a way for people to find peace in the
fact that their problems were shared by someone else, and it quickly became a
way for people to escape the daily grind by losing themselves to the experience
of raw, primal music. Rock may have added a layer of virtuosity to the mix, but
it’s still about making people move in unison.
In order to do that well, the band needs to have a
personality. It’s no coincidence that rock music only really took off as a
popular genre when songwriters started singing their own material; if you
really want to cheer people up you need to present them with someone to do it.
The more you obscure a band’s frontman, the more anonymous and vacuous the
music becomes, becoming more like a geisha, a living piece of sculpture, an
Andromeda, than an actual person.
The dwindling of rock music as a genre is obvious, but I
don’t think it’s permanent. Plasticized, dietary pop music may function as an
effective distraction, but fans are only able to make a connection to the
band/artist because Twitter, Facebook, and the Internet in general have created
an illusion of availability. Even then, fans tend to feed off each other to
achieve that sense of an intimate connection; at a concert, I suspect, Justin
Bieber is little more than a convenient idol, with the real energy and passion
coming from the crowd’s self-sustaining collective effervescence. Why do you
think artists like Lady Gaga have gone so far as to give their fans their own
name?
Rock is different in that it’s more personal. Whether or not
it’s a real personality of an assumed persona is irrelevant; the fact remains
that rock music is a fundamentally superior medium for creating and projecting
a raw personality. Once a band is able to tap into that advantage by bringing
post-production massaging to a bare minimum pop will eat itself once more. The
cycle always repeats, thankfully.
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