Tegan and Sara - Various

★★★★★ Tracks:
My Number
Walking With a Ghost

Soon after college I ended up with a desk job for a large accounting firm. It was a low-level department filled with tons of recent college graduates like myself, making for the most fun and fucked up work environment I will most likely ever be a part of. Endless hours of goofing off in the mail room ensued, and in that mail room we would blare our favorite tunes; anything from Wu-Tang to Garth Brooks on the domestic front and 3 Canal to Ninet Tayeb from the international scene. When management realized shit was getting out of hand, we were dispersed about the office like disciplined first graders in order to settle things down, but that didn’t stop us from using the inter-office instant messaging system to send mp3 files back and forth to one another. It was at this time that one of my closest musical counterparts introduced me to the first Tegan and Sara track I would ever hear. “My Number” has a new wavish, folksy sound hearkening to those singles from the 90’s femme movement (Fiona Apple, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, etc). If I make out the lyrics correctly it sounds like Tegan is recounting her issues with identity and sexuality, which makes the song even more interesting knowing what we now know of her.

When I told my friend I had played the shit out of that track, she sent me "Walking With a Ghost" next. In this song, it was obvious the duo had evolved, borrowing heavily from those punk and garage records they must've been collecting over the past few years. Instead of leaning entirely on acoustics and string accompaniments they were blaring electric guitars with distortion while pushing the pitch of their voices to newly grating levels. They began to harness their originality though, and “Walking With a Ghost” became the blueprint for a lot of the group’s later work. Not long afterwards the White Stripes would cover it for an EP. Tegan and Sara are often branded as The Jonas Brothers for the indie teen, and the nod by such a respected rock'n'roll group gave the duo some much needed musical credibility. And as I listen to both tracks back to back a few times over, Jack White’s version can’t touch the original.

White Stripes - White Blood Cells

Release Date: July 3, 2001

★★★★★ Tracks:

Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground

Hotel Yorba

Even for as mild of a White Stripes fan as myself, White Blood Cells is a pretty damned good record. Jack and Co. tinkered with the production style they had become accustomed to; turning the volume to 11 on the guitar while sometimes adding two to three layers of them to make the songs even louder. They also get Meg White to bang aimlessly on the drums a little harder than she had in the past. The album is abrasive, with a helluva lot of attitude. White Blood Cells also has the best collection of tracks the White Stripes have ever recorded, starting with one of my favorites of theirs, “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”

“Well any man with a microphone
Can tell you what he loves the most
And you know why you love at all
If you're thinking of the holy ghost”

“Hotel Yorba” follows with what has become the most used and simple three chord progression in pop history. But somehow Jack, with his attitude, his lyrics, and his voice, makes the whole thing sound wholly original.

One of the best records of the decade as so many have suggested? Perhaps by influence but certainly not by content for my money. As with all of the White Stripes records I take it in limited doses. But even though it tapers off similarly to the rest of their albums, Side A has a collection of tracks so fantastic it makes up for it. And as many complaints as I have for the elementary percussion and all the critical acclaim they’ve received over the years, I must admit I have infinite appreciation for what the White Stripes did by crafting White Blood Cells at a time when the likes of Kid Rock and Creed were the names associated with rock’n’roll.

White Stripes - De Stijl

Release Date: June 20, 2000

★★★★★ Tracks:

Hello Operator

I just recently watched It Might Get Loud, a documentary featuring three influential guitarists covering three generations: Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin, the Edge from U2, and Jack White of the White Stripes. There's a scene where White is showing a young boy (who is supposed to represent White as a kid) some of that great, ear-piercing feedback you can get from an electric guitar and an amplifier; he lays the guitar on the ground and tells the kid to stomp on it with his foot, beat it up, "get in a fight with it, and win that fight." I'm not sure what the hell he means, but I think it has something to do with his belief that music should be a struggle, the theme to most of the scenes he's featured in on the documentary. While I find most of what he says throughout the documentary to be cliché, I do agree with him to a point. Writing and playing music is a struggle.

What I don't understand is how the same argument isn't applied to the other half of his band. Sure, Meg White definitely struggles to play the drums with any sort of skill, but she isn't struggling to hone her craft, and she doesn't add much extra creativity in to the music Jack White creates. I'm not sure most of us would accept the same from a peer in most any other profession, artistically related or otherwise. This is pulled from wiki: "Meg White's minimalistic drumming style is a prominent part of the band's sound. Meg has never taken a lesson. [She] says her pre-show warm-up consists of 'whiskey and Red Bull.'" Being self-taught is great and all, if you actually try and teach yourself. Almost any one of us with just the slightest sense of rhythm could play the drum part to nearly any White Stripes song ever made, within a few minutes of trying.

I disliked the White Stripes for the longest time because of this attention I payed to the drumming; I couldn't get past it. Further fueling my disdain was all the critical appraisal they were receiving. Not only did I not understand how everyone could take a band with such bad drumming so seriously, I couldn't understand why everyone liked music with such simple and familiar song structures.

As the White Stripes have become further ingrained in to rock'n'roll history over the past decade, I've further tried to understand the phenomenon. After countless years and hours spending time with the likes of De Stijl, White Blood Cells, and Elephant I have warmed up to the them. Although I found the small bit of Jack White I got to know through It Might Get Loud to be somewhat irritating, it was revealing to hear him talk about all that classic blues he loves so much. His intentions are to always invoke those simple but powerful emotions good blues artists invoke in a listener. On Jack's best tracks, I think he succeeds admirably in doing so, and that angry rock'n'roll attitude he wears so well can be contagious. While I still think it wouldn't hurt the White Stripes cause to have some improved percussion, I do understand how overly complex drumming would take away from what the White Stripes sound.

The best song for my money still resides on De Stijl. "Hello Operator" is a culmination of everything great about the White Stripes: bluesy guitar work, rock'n'roll solos, catchy lyrics sung with a lot of attitude and infectious inflection, and just enough percussion to add an additional element to Jack's songwriting:

There are a couple of other great tracks like the slide guitar driven "Death Letter" and the ballady "Sister, Do You Know My Name," but all the songs begin to blend together the deeper I get in to the album. I appreciate Jack White's simplistic and refined approach to music, even more so after seeing It Might Get Loud, but the very basic and all-too-familiar chord progressions and the overly-simplistic percussion make it so I lost interest quickly. White Stripes in small doses is quite enough for me. Although I do admit I misunderstood them somewhat at first, and I have grown to like a lot of Jack's tracks, I still think they are one of the most overrated bands of the past decade.