Jack and Meg White violated the terms of their initial conceit almost immediately, recording with a third musician and often sounding more like Nuggets revivalists on their self-titled debut. You have to give it to them, it was beautifully simple.Īs long as those superficial parameters were intact - red, white, and black-clad siblings playing “real” rock - they had the freedom to be whatever the fuck they wanted to be under the surface. Everything about their presentation was specifically designed to sidestep these pitfalls, so they could demonstrate that the only thing that was real was the music. Thematically, it laments the plight of the introvert, as Jack addresses authenticity (“There’s somebody there who doesn’t think they are true”), anxiety (Meg’s, presumably), and the risks of speaking (misinterpretation, overexposure). The blueprint was there all along, hidden on the unassuming debut album track “Do,” which I’d argue is the most overtly autobiographical song in this otherwise opaque catalog. People like categorizing things, we like putting stuff into tidy little boxes - it explains the tyranny of the subgenre - and the Detroit band prodded at that tendency by laying out their plan for all to see (guitar-and-drums blues revivalists with a strict color palette) specifically so that they could subvert it. Underneath the misdirection and mythology, it was just two people, wearing three colors, obsessed with one musical concept: the beauty of simplicity. The White Stripes were Occam’s razor manifested as rock.
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