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Preemptive Greatest Hits: The White Stripes

The White Stripes have officially closed up shop. And so ends a 12 year reign of rock’s most vital band. While I was pretty lukewarm about their last record, I will certainly miss the opportunity to hear any new music from Jack and Meg. Even though I thought they fell off a bit toward the end, I always got the sense that they probably had plenty of great records left in them: a stripped down acoustic affair, a dusty country album, a late career blues punk revival. There was still a lot that I wanted from this band, but it looks like that’s never going to happen now. In a way, that’s fine because what they’ve left us with is an unparalleled string of albums that remind even the most jaded listeners that an amplified guitar and thumping bass drum can, even after all these years, move mountains.

By the time that The Stripes showed up in the late 90s, I think most serious people agreed that rock was pretty much dead as a commercial art form. Radiohead’s OK Computer sounded like a totalizing endgame for all guitar-based music (who has the balls to ring a single note on a Rickenbacker after listening to that record?), and the artistic fiasco of Woodstock ’99 (Limp Bizkit, Korn, Buckcherry, Oleander, The Offspring) seemed like the template for all forthcoming rock. Rock also wasn’t helped by the fact that poptimism, the idea that pop music is as relevant of critic inspection as rock, had replaced rockism as the dominant critical paradigm. While Rolling Stone continued to operate as an editorial anomoly, most serious critical outlets were ignoring mainstream rock in favor of unheralded corners of the music world: German minimal techno, New York freak folk, British dubstep, underground hip hop, stateless online musical entities. By then, the internet had democratized music to such an extent that listening exclusively to rock music seemed naive and socially limiting. Who wants to seriously talk about a new Green Day record when there’s a producer in Bristol who is making sounds that only existed in your nightmares? The world into which The White Stripes released their first couple of albums was a world where rock sounded silly and antiquated. And against all odds, the band made silly and antiquated sound like a thunderous lightning crack of primal honky-tonk-white-boy-soul-blues.

And here fer yer listenin’ pleasure is the meanest of the mean, brokenhearted blues that a white boy ever layed to analog tape.

Caveat Emptor: Look, this list could have gone a thousand different ways because this band has, like, dozens of really great songs. Anything that’s missing can probably be chalked up to a minimal amount of preference (i.e. I prefer “The Denial Twist” to “My Doorbell”). There’s a lot of songs that I had to leave on the cutting room floor that I would have loved to put in here: ”Forever for Her (is Over for Me),” “The Union Forever,” “Instinct Blues,” “The Same Boy You’ve Always Known,” “Why Can’t You Be Nicer to Me,” “Sister, Do You Know My Name?” That said, I would more than welcome comments on omissions and oversights, grave and otherwise.

1. Rag and Bone