[Previous entry: "Weird Music"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "The Inessential Clash"]
04/21/2003 Entry: "White Stripes"
White Stripes
At last, a review.
The White Stripes
Elephant
V2
“This album is dedicated to, and is for, and about the death of the sweetheart,” Jack White declares in the liner notes to the White Stripes new album Elephant. Which is another way of saying that the record is about pain, regret, anger, and most of all, distance. It isn’t about love, per se, but love betrayed, or perhaps love thwarted, love that isn’t allowed to declare itself.
The Stripes are to be commended for creating a record that lives up to all those ideas, both lyrically and musically, but that doesn’t mean it’s a great record, and it certainly doesn’t have to mean that it’s an attractive one, or a friendly one. White doesn’t wallow in his pain, he spits out his anger and regret in huge chunks. The record comes at you in sections, all of which no doubt fit together somehow, but yet never quite seem to come together.
Partly that’s because White isn’t directing his rage at any one target. There’s no single woman who has betrayed him or rejected him. No, he’s been betrayed by an entire culture, by a whole world. The sweetheart is dead because all of us, all us girls and boys, refuse to be sweethearts, and refuse to accept what being a sweetheart can be. We have, as one song puts it, no faith in medicine. But whether that medicine is acetaminophen, or love, or snake oil, or some of that sweet, sweet medicine the blues singers used to promise to deliver is hard to say. Maybe it’s all of that, or maybe it’s something else entirely.
You’d be hard pressed to guess, because White keeps such a distance between himself and the audience, which is to say between himself and the music, that it’s hard to tell just how he means what he says. This is a carefully calculated and created record, the music designed not so much to give pleasure as to prove a point. The sound is rough, but very clean, pristinely recorded to capture every nuance of voice and instrument. Everything is refined down to its essence, so that even an homage to the plaintive sloppiness of early Rod Stewart sounds calculated in its messiness. The band’s minimalist instrumentation only adds to the distance. There’s something about not having a bass in the mix that dehumanizes the music. You need that warm depth of tone to convey real emotion, but guitars and drums are just fine to get at the intellectual side of a love affair, and that’s probably really all that White wants.
Elephant is a work of art, all right, but it’s a narrow one, and I worry that White may be hemming himself in. Now that he’s basically announced his opposition to the audience and culture for and from which he creates, he may find himself falling prey to a bitterness that could be difficult to escape. And he’ll convince no one. Maybe he should try writing some songs about how wonderful it is to be a sweetheart. You know, love songs. Then we might be able to take his warning a little more to heart.
Replies: 1 Comment
online casinos
play online casinos
best online casinos
list of online casinos
online casinos on the web
tops online casinos
ranked online casinos
post online casinos
online gambling
online casino
new online casinos
online gambling
internet casinos
online casino
casinos
online casino
free online casinos
all online casinos
new casinos
Posted by online casinos @ 03/18/2005 02:01 PM PST
