The White Stripes Retrospective (Part 1)

As previously mentioned, The White Stripes have announced that they are ending as a band, and this makes me very sad. To cheer myself up, I'm reminiscing the good times of one of my favorite bands of all time by going over what made each of their albums so great. Today I'm reviewing the first three of their albums: The White Stripes, De Stijl, and White Blood Cells. Please enjoy The White Stripes' career with me and check back soon for the rest of their illustrious career.

The White Stripes 

The band’s self-titled debut album is in many ways its purest effort. Most of the songs are unapologetic blues-infused garage rock with powerful guitars offset by Jack White’s wailing vocals. The opening track Jimmy the Exploder could not be more aptly titled, plowing its way through all resistance with Jack’s signature explosive guitar riffs. The band wears its influences on its sleeve, doing covers of Robert Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Louis Armstrong, but the album really shines in their original efforts on songs like The Big Three Killed My Baby, which is about Preston Tucker being squeezed out of the auto industry by the Big Three auto companies – GM, Ford and Chrysler. Being from Detroit, this was probably an important issue to Jack White, and you can hear the resultant anger in his voice as he sings “Better ideas are stuck in the mud / The motor’s running on Tucker’s blood / Don’t let them tell you the future’s electric / ‘Cause gasoline’s not measured in metric”.

Another track that stands out to me – probably because I’m a sucker for a well done bluesy slide guitar – is I Fought Piranhas, which lumbers around like a man coming back from the dead. If the song isn’t about the resurrection of Jesus, (as might be indicated by the lyrics “Well it’s Easter morning now / And there’s no one around / So I unroll the cement / And walk into the town”) then it’s about man’s struggle against death in all forms. I love this song, and it’s a fantastic ender to a blistering first-album.

De Stijl

The second album from the White Stripes is significantly more playful, featuring funny songs like You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl) and Why Can’t You Be Nicer to Me. For obvious reasons, Hello Operator has been the default ringtone on my phone for as long as I can remember. The band proves it can still blow things up with rocking tracks like Let’s Build a Home and Jumble Jumble, but overall De Stijl feels like a more well-rounded, sophisticated effort. Acoustic guitar is used much more often to wonderfully dramatic effect. For instance, Apple Blossom is one of the first of a long line of atypical, arguably one-sided love songs. I’m Bound to Pack It Up reminds me of White Album-era Beatles with  soothing acoustic guitar, lovely accenting violin, and a noticeable lack of drums.

The bluesy side of the band is still there, of course, with the cover of Son House’s Death Letter, again translated into that unmistakable White Stripes style. The slower songs also shine (with liberal use of slide guitar again) in Sister, Do You Know My Name? and A Boy’s Best Friend, both of which introduce Jack White’s schoolboy motif that becomes a signature in his later lyrics. Overall, De Stijl feels like the band is beginning to flesh out its limits; beginning to experiment; beginning to try out new styles like the rest of us try on clothes. It’s another winner so early in the White Stripes’ career, and yet it’s only prelude to what is to come.


White Blood Cells
I'll be honest, this is actually the first album I ever heard of the White Stripes. I fell in love with Fell in Love With A Girl, and asked for this album, along with several others, for Christmas. I got The Vines' Highly Evolved (to this day Get Free is the only song I like by them) The Strokes' Is this It (a good album that I liked a lot, but not life changing), and White Blood Cells. I'll let you figure out which ended up being my favorite.

White Blood Cells is arguably the White Stripes finest album, providing classic song after classic song. From the more well known Fell in Love With A Girl and We're Going to Be Friends (which was played in my wedding ceremony) to deeper cuts like Offend in Every Way and The Union Forever, every song drips with gravitas and songwriting craftsmanship. Probably my favorite song on the album, however, is I'm Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman, which is as funny as it is well written. I can't even discuss this song coherently, so just listen to it with special attention to the lyrics, and enjoy yourself.

Once again, the White Stripes move forward with this album, really finding their sound and owning it. There really aren't any bad songs on the record, and Jack and Meg produced one of the best albums of the decade. I can't say enough about White Blood Cells, or how it impacted my life, so I won't try. It's just an amazing, transcendent album that shaped my taste in music and holds up as much today as the first day I heard it.