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The comedy movie event of the year.
Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice.
Coming only to Hulu and Disney Plus this Friday.
Time to party.
That's a great attitude.
It's a time-traveling, ass-kicking movie event.
You sound insane.
Starring Vince Vaughn, James Marston, and Asa Gonzalez.
I thought you were a clone.
Well, clones aren't real, dummy.
And time machines are super grounded in reality.
Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice.
Rated R. Written and directed by Ben David Grabinski.
Only on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers.
It just doesn't feel like a song that one person wrote.
You know, it doesn't feel like a melody.
It doesn't feel like a modest series of repeated musical notes that one person can take credit for, in the sense that one day one person came up with that melody and now the melody exists because of that one person.
Are we sure about that?
No way.
This melody has always existed.
This melody is too thoroughly ingrained in the fabric of human existence to have ever not existed.
This melody has existed for exactly as long as the land and the sea and the light have existed.
And the Lord said, let there be light, and the melody exists.
Right?
Right.
Adam and or Eve hummed this melody together as he and or she bit into an apple from the tree of knowledge.
Right right, you get me, but i guess i'm wrong.
Grudgingly skeptically, i am professionally obligated to tell you that apparently, for years adverbs, for centuries of human existence, for eons of planetary existence, this melody did not exist.
And then one day this melody just popped out of this one dude's mouth.
What you just heard is a man named Solomon Linda singing slash, writing slash creating, in the biblical sense, the melody to the song The Lion Sleeps.
Tonight in the year 1939 in a recording studio in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Solomon Linda, Zulu tribesman and singer and songwriter and leader of the super popular acapella group Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds.
In that photo that Solomon on the far left there he also gets top billing in this group because he's the tallest.
We just heard solomon linda and the evening birds singing a song of theirs called imbue spelled m-b-u-b-e.
Mbue is the zulu word for lion.
This song is less than three minutes long and the whole song's lovely, but yeah wow, in the last 20 seconds as the song's fading out as an afterthought you might say Solomon Linda says let there be light, and he just fires off the melody that we've all heard a billion times apiece because it's always existed.
He just tweets it out.
Solomon improvises that melody.
Off the dome.
Get out of town.
So I read this article in Rolling Stone magazine. in the year 2000.
And this article has stuck with me now for 26 years.
The May 25th, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone.
Britney Spears on the cover.
Oops, I did it again era.
Brittany's posing in front of the American flag.
There she is.
I read this incredibly long wild captivating convoluted, intensely reported and quite disheartening Rolling Stone article about the history, the grim genealogy of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
An article written by the South African author and journalist Rian Milan.
The first paragraph of this article has been banging around in my skull for a quarter century now.
Quote Once upon a time a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda.
It was 1939 and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in black africa, sub-saharan africa.
When it happened he hadn't composed the melody or written it down or anything.
He just opened his mouth and out it came a haunting skein of 15 notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to england and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa.
End quote.
Now, of course, this long wild captivating convoluted, intensely reported and quite disheartening Rolling Stone article is about how we get from Solomon Linda singing that melody in 1939 to a dude from Brooklyn singing this melody in 1961.
Yeah, here we have a Brooklyn doo-wop group called The Tokens with their gargantuan bonkers.
Blockbuster 1961 number one pop hit The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
That's Jay Siegel of The Tokens singing lead there.
Sorry, I don't know which one of these guys is Jay Siegel.
Jay might be the shortest guy this time, just to mix things up.
The leader of the band is always either the tallest person or the shortest.
You're either Abraham Lincoln or you're Napoleon.
This Rolling Stone article on the history of The Lion Sleeps Tonight is like 11,000 words long.
Short version Mbue.
The song by Solomon, Linda and the Evening Birds sells around 100000 copies in Africa.
But Solomon Linda had sold the publishing rights...
For 10 shillings.
Pete Seeger, the legendary New York City folk singer.
Pete Seeger hears Mbuwe, and Pete's band, the Weavers, cut their own blockbuster version of this song in the early 50s.
And the Weavers call their song Wimuwe, because that's what Pete Seeger thinks Solomon, Linda and the Evening Birds are singing.
The tokens cover Weem Away and Add Some Words and an opera singer etc.
And they put out The Lion Sleeps Tonight in 1961 and it tops the charts and becomes a song and a melody that has literally always existed.
Shorter version.
A whole bunch of white people, most of them record executives, make tens of millions of dollars off the melody of a black singer who gets practically nothing.
Sorry to be blunt and or cringe, but that's the size of it.
That's the cold, hard, realist takeaway from this Rolling Stone article.
But there is also a warm, fuzzy idealist takeaway from the saga behind The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Someone wrote that melody.
Someone sang that melody for the first time.
A real-life human being saw the face of God and translated the sight of the face of God into a modest series of repeated musical notes.
It's the second half of that opening Rolling Stone paragraph that first struck me and has never stopped striking me.
Right?
He just opened his mouth and out it came.
A haunting skein of 15 notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, etc.
The awestruck physical description of that act of creation, the radical and frankly, unbelievable idea that that melody did not exist.
And then suddenly it existed thanks to a guy named Solomon Linda.
In the Rolling Stone article.
It says, quote it is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa.
A tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say here is a song the whole world knows.
End quote.
Especially as a little kid.
I knew so many songs that I just assumed the whole world had always known.
Yeah, I am not convinced that this hook has not always existed.
I am pretty sure that when Adam and or Eve bit into an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and got themselves expelled from the Garden of Eden as they were leaving, God himself taunted them by singing na-na-na-na na-na-na-na hey-hey-hey, goodbye.
Not so.
Apparently.
Allegedly.
Apparently, this is the chorus to the 1969 hit Na Na Hey Hey, Kiss Him Goodbye by a New York City rock band called Steam.
Here we have Steam on the cover of their self-titled 1970 album, Steam.
I'll be honest, I could have lived with a less literal album cover depiction of the band Steam.
If you're not looking at this, don't.
No thank you.
Thanks for wearing towels, fellas.
I guess.
You're telling me na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na hey hey, hey.
Goodbye is a melody one person came up with less than a decade before I was born.
Absolutely not.
And I bet this one's even older.
Wilson Pickett.
Land of a Thousand Dances, 1966.
Now, this is definitely the version of this song I'd heard a billion times before I entered grade school, but with all due respect to Wilson Pickett, that eternal melody did not first emerge from his mouth.
All right, we got a slowly evolving Lion Sleeps Tonight type situation here.
Land of a Thousand Dances is written and first recorded in 1962 by Chris Kenner, who is from New Orleans, and I am delighted to say that you can totally tell he's from New Orleans.
Twist Twister Like Your Sister.
Great song, but Chris Kenner's original does not have the crucial and eternal na-na-na-na-na part.
That particular haunting skein of notes apparently popped out of the mouth of Frankie Cannibal Garcia, lead singer of the Los Angeles-based Mexican-American rock band Cannibal and the Headhunters, when they released their cover of Land of a Thousand Dances in in 1966.
Apparently Frankie improvised this melody when he forgot the actual words to this song, which kind of sounds made up that story.
But it sounds made up in the cool essential rock and roll mythology sort of way.
Yes?
And then Wilson Pickett covers the cannibal and the headhunters cover.
And yeah, that's the version I've heard a billion times before I learned to speak.
And the version that existed back when mastodons still roamed the earth.
That was too much context.
Let's do one with way less context.
Gary Glitter, Rock and Roll Part II, 1972.
Gary Glitter, the less you know, the better.
You simply do not have to hand it to him.
Let's you and me agree to think of Rock and Roll, Part II, as a divine prelapsarian, authorless specter of the public domain, which it basically is.
The insidious primacy of that riff, that hook, That blunt force melody, the palpable sense that doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, hey just bubbled up like lava out of the core and onto the surface of an earth that had not yet fully cooled.
Brontosauruses and velociraptors and whatnot, stomping around going doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
Hey yeah, let's go with that.
That is the official origin of Rock and Roll Part 2.
Lyrically, we could further widen the scope here beyond the words na-na-na-na and hey-hey-hey.
You know, give me one solid woo-hoo.
Logically, I know that this is cool in the gang.
Cool with a K. The coolest with a K band to ever emerge from New Jersey.
Logically, I know that this song is called Celebration, and it came out in 1980.
And thus, grudgingly, I have to acknowledge that this song is younger than I am.
I am older than the Kool and the Gang song Celebration.
I personally have lived in a world without do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-woo-hoo in it.
But also obviously no, I haven't the first fish or whatever that crawled up on land 375 million years ago.
The first fish celebrated his or her or its accomplishment by going do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
Woo-hoo, obviously.
What do all these songs have in common?
All these songs other than The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
By the time I'm 10 years old.
All these songs, all these hooks, all these melodies— feel like timeless authorless, natural-born occurrences.
They feel like crucial elements on the periodic table.
And I ain't never memorized the periodic table, but you bet I got all these songs memorized internalized, personally canonized.
I will remember and love and cherish all of these songs for the rest of my life.
And that's because, as a wide-eyed little kid, I heard them all constantly at baseball games.
Logically, I know that this is the outrageously tasty saxophone riff to The Heat Is On an almighty 1984 jam by Glenn Frey.
He of the Eagles, 1984.
Shit.
Logically, I understand that I am once again older than this song.
And probably most people know The Heat Is On as that one song from Beverly Hills Cop, right?
Not me, though.
This is a baseball song to me.
Specifically, it is a 1980s St.
Louis Cardinals song. to me.
I spent most of my first 10 years of existence in most of the 80s living in the suburbs of St.
Louis, Missouri, and my first love, sports-wise, was the mid to late 80s St.
Louis Cardinals.
John Tudor, Tony Pena, Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Kurt Ford, Jose Oquendo off the bench.
That's the Cardinals' starting lineup in 87.
As immortalized by RBI baseball for the NES.
Sorry about that.
Just remembering some guys.
As a kid, we'd go to Cardinals games. right?
My parents would take me to Cardinals games at Bush Stadium downtown and I'd have the cliched wide-eyed, absurdly nostalgia-oversaturated experience of walking through the stadium tunnel and emerging into the sunlight or the majestic stadium lights, the bright green grass of the outfield, the inexplicably bright brown dirt of the infield, the ecstatic roar of the crowd, the peanuts and Cracker Jack, the whole Cornball glory days experience, right.
How Cornball was this experience precisely?
Every Cardinals game, when the Cardinals defense first takes the field, Ozzie Smith shortstop Hall of Fame shortstop Ozzie Smith runs out and he does a backflip to start every game.
This perfect expression of of exuberance and athleticism and American exceptionalism.
And my young heart grows three sizes every time watching Ozzie Smith do a backflip.
And soon my young heart grows larger than Bush Stadium itself.
Ozzie Smith ready for the flip and we're ready to start the season.
Here we go.
The 40-year-old shortstop.
Ozzie Smith was still at it in 1995 when he was 40 years old.
He was so much older then, he's younger than that now.
But despite all that other sensory overload the lights, the crowd, the grass, the wafting, omnipresent bush beer aroma even as a little kid, this real overwhelming, life-affirming sensory overload at Cardinals games is all musical for me.
Right.
Just this unrelenting, joyous blitz of mostly wordless, ecstatic primordial riffs and hooks and melodies.
So immediately central to the core of my being that I just assume, and I still assume, that all these melodies have always existed.
The heat is on starts playing over the Bush Stadium loudspeakers.
And I imagine a Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing sunglasses and rocking a saxophone, going do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
The Cardinals scored 10 runs in the first inning.
And the loser visiting team pulls their loser starting pitcher.
And everyone in the stadium goes na-na-na-na.
Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.
Which is also what a stegosaurus says before it stomps and or spikes you to death.
Seventh inning stretch, we do Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
That song's old as hell.
And then we get a bit of John Fogerty's Centerfield, right?
That's from 1985.
But it's also the rare guitar-based Old Testament-ass melodies.
Games tied in the bottom of the ninth.
Two outs.
The Cardinals got the bases loaded.
And here comes pinch hitter Jose Oquendo.
An over-the-bush stadium loudspeaker you hear.
That's right.
It's The Final Countdown by Europe, the band, 1986.
Except also that's the song that started playing when all the dinosaurs looked up and saw the meteor hurtling toward Earth and all the brontosaurs were like ah shit do-do-do-do do-do-do-do-do-do, et cetera.
The St.
Louis Cardinals lose in the World Series in 1985.
Fuck the Kansas City Royals in 1987.
Fuck the Minnesota Twins.
But I get over it.
You know, I grow up.
I move away.
I fall in love with other baseball teams.
I emerge idyllically through the tunnel and into the radiant sunlight of other baseball stadiums.
And I encounter new eternal primordial, Mount Olympus-type melodies that are clearly younger than me, except obviously no, they're not.
Give me another solid woo-hoo.
Woo-hoo!
Blur.
Song two, 1997.
Ooh, it's satire.
Ooh, it's mocking grunge and bro-ish, laddish, lowest common denominator jock jam culture.
Ooh, you will hear this song at every sporting event you attend for the rest of your life.
And other people heard this song At every sporting event that took place before you were born.
Greek dudes throwing javelins and shit at the first Olympic Games and going, woohoo.
Yeah, it's the mid-90s and we call these jock jams now.
They got a whole bunch of jock jams CDs.
The meteor hits Earth and goes, y'all ready for this?
And the dinosaurs weren't ready for that.
I moved to Oakland in the mid-2000s.
I get heavy into the Oakland A's.
Fuck the Red Sox and the Yankees.
Fuck everybody, pretty much.
Or really, honestly, fuck the owners.
And the A's got all kinds of rad, mystifying, new, ancient jock jams.
Let me ask you something.
What's this song that you've heard the most in your life?
You recognize this song instantly and yet you have no idea what it's called or who did it, or when it came out, or anything.
What's the song that you've heard the most but you know the least about?
Does that make sense?
Anyway, this is mine.
¶¶
I have heard this song one billion times at baseball games and yet I got no idea who or what or when this is.
I picture a woolly mammoth downloading a pirated copy of GarageBand and whipping up this song in half an hour.
I tried to use the Google Voice Shazam feature where you sing a melody and it tells you the song.
And so I pick up my laptop and I sing into it.
I go, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do.
And Google AI goes, do-do often refers to childish slang for feces.
And I'm like, ah, shut up, Google AI.
I'll tell you what's doo-doo.
That was the German group Zombie Nation with their 1999 hit Kernkraft 400.
And I found that out the old-fashioned way by texting my dear friend and retired A's fan Garrett.
And I sent him a voice note of me going doo-doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
And he told me who it was.
And then he sent me the link to an old episode of Married with Children where Al Bundy's got a song in his head but he can't remember the name of it.
Kernkraft 400 from Germany.
This is the oldest song of them all, somehow.
Picture Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship as it sails past the sirens, and the sirens have got a giant sound system going do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do.
I think it's beautiful.
It's implausible.
It's unbelievable, honestly, in the sense that I still literally do not believe it.
But yeah, fine.
I think it's beautiful that all these melodies, all these riffs, all these chants, all these jock jams came from somewhere, came from someone.
These melodies only feel immortal and naturally occurring.
But in truth, each and every eternal stadium chant is the product of plain old human ingenuity.
The melody emerges, humbly, from a single, humble, frail, mortal human.
And then that tune penetrates so deep into the human consciousness, over so many generations, that one can truly say here is a song the whole world knows.
And so once upon a time, a long time ago, A small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Jack White.
My name is Rob Harvilla.
This is the 38th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, colon the 2000s.
And this week we are discussing Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes from their 2003 album Elephant.
Right now you could care less about me, but soon enough you will care by the time I'm done.
Ad break.
Dude, I got like 500 White Stripes songs I gotta play for you right now.
We ain't got time for digressions and frivolities.
We ain't got time for digressions and frivolities starting now.
The White Stripes are a bizarrely intriguingly, suspiciously heavily stylized blues rock duo from Detroit Michigan, consisting of Jack White on vocals and guitar and his sister scare quotes, Meg White on drums and vocals occasionally.
Adverbs.
This is the White Stripes debut single, released in 1998 and called Let's Shake Hands.
Get a load of the way this band somehow gets even louder when the drums drop out for a second.
I just love it in White Stripes songs when the drums drop out, when the whole bottom drops out, when everything stops musically and it's just Jack White's ranting yelping, temper tantrum, ass voice.
I first saw the White Stripes live in the year 2000, opening for the immortal punk rock band Slater Kinney.
I saw the White Stripes at this rad club in Columbus, Ohio called Little Brothers, R.I.P.
And I was just mesmerized.
Whenever a White Stripes song stopped dead in its tracks, so Jack White could go ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.
At one point in this song, Let's Shake Hands, Jack sings the words.
He yelps the words garbage can.
And he sounds like he's literally sitting in a garbage can like Oscar the Grouch.
And I love it very much.
Jack Gillis is born in Detroit in 1975 and grows up in the city's Mexican town neighborhood.
He is one of 10 children.
He is the seventh son.
That bums me out somehow that Jack White is actually the seventh son.
That's too bad.
Growing up.
Jack plays in a bunch of local garage blues, country punk type bands, and Often he's playing drums.
He starts an upholstery business.
He also reads poetry at open mic nights.
At one such open mic night at a Detroit bar called Memphis Smoke, he meets a waitress named Meg White.
Meg White is born in Grosse Pointe Farms in the suburbs just east of Detroit in 1974.
Meg has an older sister, which makes Meg the second daughter.
Meg is, and publicly Meg remains, very quiet, very shy, and preposterously cool.
Jack and Meg start dating.
In 1996, Jack and Meg get married.
Jack takes Meg's name.
He's Jack White now.
In 1997, our lovebirds start a band called the White Stripes.
Talking to the New Yorker 20 years later, in 2017, Jack says, quote We were in the attic and I was recording something and I asked would you mind playing a simple beat for me?
I didn't tell her what to do.
Maybe I said a couple things.
She sat down and did it.
End quote.
The New Yorker also says what she did struck him as childlike and unaffected by the wish to impress.
End quote.
And then they start a band where they pretend to be brother and sister the whole time.
And this dynamic, Jack the cool, howling super extrovert, Meg the even cooler, near-silent super introvert, and both of them pretty childlike, if you want the truth.
The Meg and Jack dynamic is splendidly intensified by the Detroit of it all.
The White Stripes have an extraordinary sense of place.
They sound like they came from somewhere.
Now, musically, there is no shortage of regional precedent for the White Stripes.
John Lee Hooker was based in Detroit, if you're drawn to the blues.
The MC5 and the Stooges both started nearby, if you're drawn to the origins of punk.
Here at the turn of the century, Detroit's got a fantastic and vibrant and hyper-local punk scene.
The Gorys, the Dirt Bombs, the Detroit Cobras, the Demolition Doll Rods, etc.
Most of those bands will cross paths with the White Stripes and some of those bands will enjoy doing that.
But the one super famous song from Detroit that best encapsulates the White Stripes for me is actually Sharivari from 1981 by the electronic music duo A Number of Names.
Sharivari, the foundational Detroit techno classic.
Weird, cool male voice.
Eerie, ethereal, even cooler female voice.
I can't explain it, but this basically sounds nothing like the White Stripes, and yet to me it explains everything about the White Stripes.
Sarah, buddy.
Sarah, buddy.
It's just a thought.
All right.
In 1998, the White Stripes make their recording debut with two singles.
Let's Shake Hands is the first and Lafayette Blues is the second.
Lafayette Blues has words and stuff.
Some words in French, which is fun to hear Jack White going in French.
But my favorite part of Lafayette Blues is just Meg's absurdly colossal kick drum right here.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah, I still hear it.
Yeah, I can hear, I can feel the floor bending, the floor collapsing under Meg White's feet on the Lafayette Blues, a song that notably sounds like everybody got thrown in the garbage.
Can including you, the listener.
The White Stripes will never leave the garbage can.
The garbage can will simply expand to encompass the whole world.
The White Stripes are going to be an ungodly huge international sensation type band very soon.
But this band sounds huge even back when they're tiny.
And even after they get huge, Jack and Meg retain their essential childlike innocence, their not-so-humble trashiness, their overwhelming, palpable sense of two human beings in a tiny room making a noise somehow louder than the baffled, booming voice of God.
All that stuff in Rolling Stone about the divine and yet merely mortal creation of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.
Haunting notes that flow down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax.
You hear all that stuff in every White Stripes song.
The awestruck physicality.
The wires, the trembling stylists, the grooves cut into a spinning block of beeswax or whatever.
The white stripes are defiantly corporeal and paradoxically invulnerable.
The cover of this Lafayette blues single.
Also, the red and white peppermint swirl.
Heavily stylized.
Tremendously important.
What do we all learn about the white stripes immediately?
The White Stripes are a brother and sister duo, scare quotes.
The White Stripes only use and only wear the colors red, white, and black.
The White Stripes conceive of everything in threes.
Everything revolves around the number three.
Red, white and black guitar, bass and drums.
Song structure is often built around three chords, three verses, three choruses, etc.
Generally.
The rule of three rule is a little screwier and more abstract than the other rules, but the only where red, white and black rule is not abstract at all.
This is a band with a code, a credo, a style, a lore, a whole heavily stylized ethos.
Also, they're definitely from Detroit.
The first full-length White Stripes album is released in 1999 and is called The White Stripes.
Note the album cover, the red, the white, the black, the peppermint, the nothing else.
This song is called The Big Three Killed My Baby.
The Big Three being Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, Detroit's three dominant automobile manufacturers.
The Big Three Killed My Baby.
This song, I think, is about corporate power crushing lone wolf, human ingenuity, the man crushing the little guy, so on and so forth.
But man, this song, once again, for me, it's all about when the drums drop out.
It's about all of Jack's briefly unaccompanied ba-ba-ba-ba ranting and yelping.
The floor beneath their feet bends and collapses.
But time bends, too.
The rhythm is not metronomic.
Yes, we are not perfectly on beat.
Lyrically, Jack is cramming in as many words as possible.
It's chaos.
It's absurdly rough.
It's enormously volatile.
Holy crap, it's fantastic.
Why don't you take the day off and try to repair?
A billion others don't seem to care.
Better ideas are stuck in the mud.
The load is running on Tucker's blood.
Just Jack White's frantic scramble there.
Why don't you take the day off and try to repair?
I love the sense that he's constantly trying to keep up with this song, or the song is constantly trying to keep up with him.
Meanwhile, much discourse there will be about the primal, the feral, the deliberately rudimentary nature of Meg White's drumming.
Me, I love discourse, but we ain't got time for discourse.
All that matters here is...
I really dig the guitar chords changing semi-arbitrarily here.
The frantic semi-melodic ascent.
Even by hallowed classic garbage can garage rock standards, this is barely a song anymore.
There is barely a discernible rhythm anymore.
We're just vibing.
Rapturously.
Ultraviolently.
It's a question of glorious infinite musical space.
The freedom musical and spiritual that Meg White creates via the bashing rudimentary discourse-free primordial, eternal nature of Meg White's drumming.
And when the big three kills my baby, kicks back into gear and resumes sounding like a conventional rock and roll song on the line.
And I found out my baby is dead.
If you were cool enough to be paying attention to the White Stripes in 1999.
This is the exact moment when you realize the whole world is going to be paying attention to the White Stripes real soon.
The yeah, yeah, yeah is incredibly important there as well.
Every great rock and roll band needs plenty of yeah, yeah, yeahs, right?
Ideally, a whole lot of woes also.
This song is called When I Hear My Name, but only the word whoa really matters.
Only the womp, womp, womp, womp, womp matters.
The feral microbursts of Jack White's guitar are crucial also.
Jack White's guitar riffs and solos and whatnot will get rowdier and raunchier and less micro as we go along.
But even that's enough.
Jack White guitar god action to identify Jack White's signature guitar style as slippery.
I've settled on the word slippery.
There's a rubbery panic-stricken, sliding-down-the-steep-rain-slicked roof of a very tall skyscraper feel to Jack White's guitar playing.
One might describe Jack White's guitar playing as red-hot or white-hot or, if you're nasty, perhaps even shit-hot.
On this first White Stripes album, I also really dig this song called Screwdriver.
Wherein Jack White yelps, I got a little feeling going now, 11 times in a row.
And he does.
On their debut album, the White Stripes cover Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson.
They cover the blues standard St.
James Infirmary Blues, made famous by Louis Armstrong and Betty Boop.
The White Stripes song Cannon quotes from the Sun House song John the Revelator.
Just for fun, here's a photo of blues legend Sun House wearing red, white and black.
A lot of flagrantly doodly energy on this first record.
Yes, but even if you don't get much of Meg White's singing voice at first, her presence is felt.
The harmoniousness and the dissonance of her connection with Jack White is felt.
And that connection is essential, irreplaceable, non-negotiable.
Post-White Stripes.
Jack has started a handful of other cool bands with flashier and more conventional drummers, and he's enjoyed a robust solo career as well.
But the White Stripes stand alone.
The White Stripes tower over everyone, and they wouldn't be half as impressive were it not for Meg White not trying to impress anyone at all.
Also, I don't want to be obnoxious and say that you had to experience the White Stripes live to truly get it, but it still really, really helps to even hear clips from the White Stripes live now.
Here we have the White Stripes on their 2004 concert-length live DVD Under Blackpool Lights recorded indeed, in the English seaside town of Blackpool.
The White Stripes are doing a robust little seven-minute shit-hot micro-medley of the Sun House songs Death Letter and Grinnin' in Your Face.
You have to strain your ears to hear Meg singing here, and that's how she likes it.
Jack White on stage has two microphones.
He can sing facing the crowd like a normal singer in a normal rock band, or he can sing into a microphone planted right next to Meg's drum kit so he can sing right into Meg's face and she can sing right into his.
It's such a simple idea, this second microphone, but if the white stripes hit you just right, they can be a life-altering experience live.
Watching these two, quote unquote siblings sing.
No matter how you try to live, they're gonna talk about you.
Still, directly at each other.
This conspiracy of two.
But just like that garbage can they live in.
It's a conspiracy of two that encompasses the whole world.
So don't you mind people grinning in your face.
Don't you mind people grinning in your face.
All right, so look, Meg and Jack White get married in 1996.
They debut live as the White Stripes in 1997.
They released two singles in 1998.
They put out their first album in 1999.
They get divorced officially, legally, in the year 2000.
They become super bonkers, famous rock stars very soon thereafter.
And all that time...
They publicly insist that they're brother and sister.
And there are three possible ways this could have gone in terms of the listening public.
One, we buy it.
We all believe they're brother and sister.
That ain't happening.
Two, we don't buy it.
We emphatically reject the idea that they're brother and sister because that's, you know, objectively false.
But that ain't happening either.
What happens is three.
We all know they're a divorced married couple, but we all, at least subconsciously, pretend to continue to believe that they're brother and sister.
So long as they keep pretending to be brother and sister.
We join the White Stripes in their conspiracy against us because the lies appeal to us in a cool, essential rock and roll mythology sort of way.
And our reward for pretending to believe them is six straight monster rock and roll albums.
The lie is immensely profitable for everybody.
The second White Stripes album comes out in 2000 and is called DeStyle.
This song is called You're Pretty Good Looking, parenthesis, for a girl, close parenthesis.
And yeah, that's a perfect pop song hook right there.
This will still be a perfect pop song long after the year 2525.
Yeah, this album is called The Style, named for the Dutch abstract art movement that started in 1917.
D-E-S-T-I-J-L.
The album cover red, white and black, of course is once again excellent, especially because it looks like Jack is photobombing Meg.
Meg looks like she's in a rock band and Jack looks like a janitor skulking around behind a rock band.
This is the first White Stripes album I ever heard.
I remember it weirdly vividly.
I'm driving around Columbus Ohio with a girl I was dating at the time and her cool younger brother is in the back seat and he puts on this album and I spend the whole drive super conscious of his reaction to my reaction.
You ever have this experience?
Someone cooler than you watching you listen to something cool and you're worried you don't look cool enough while you absorb the record's coolness.
We get to track two called Hello Operator, and we get to Meg's micro drum solo.
And here in the car.
None of us know what to make of it, but each one of us is very curious what the other two people in the car are making of it.
The White Stripes are deceptively childlike masters of dynamics.
The reveling in and the strategic withholding of noise.
These often super tiny little pockets of near silence.
The split second caught breath before the garbage can cacophony resumes.
You know the first White Stripes song I ever truly loved?
And I truly loved this song the very first time I heard it.
In that car with those two people, Little Bird.
And my reaction, my series of reactions to the song Little Bird in real time.
Let's see.
I think this is a phenomenal slide guitar riff that sounds like it's 80 years old.
And then I hear the snorting in the car at the childlike rhyming of if you give me a look, I'm going to get the book.
And I want to preach the words I'm going to preach to birds.
And I am conscious, as I hear this snorting in the car, that some of the snorting is mine.
And then we get to this next part.
The split second caught breath transition between the verse and the instrumental break.
The slide guitar just hangs there for just an instant.
Like somebody threw a water balloon straight up and we all watched it arc through the sky and hang in the air and then fall back to earth.
And then Jack and Meg both crash back in.
And as ludicrous as this song Little Bird immediately sounds to me In its pure knuckle-headed simplicity, it sounds absolutely magical too.
And then Jack White sings the line, when I get you home, this is how it goes.
And I immediately think, holy shit.
That is the raunchiest line I have ever heard in a rock and roll song in my whole entire life.
When I get you home.
This is how it goes.
I got nothing to lose.
I'll never let you go.
The split second caught breath there when the slide guitar hangs in the air right before the drums crash back in.
It's even cooler when Jack White goes, ah, right when the drums crash back in.
This record.
DeStyle has other excellent songs, including one called Your Southern Can Is Mine, where Meg sings a little bit.
But the first three songs are a mini symphony to me, and Little Bird is an all-timer.
Maybe partly because of the brother and sister thing, Because the White Stripes are so brazenly playing characters, they're more or less pretending to be children.
They're playing make-believe.
All that artifice might make it hard to connect with Jack White lyrically.
You don't know if what he's saying means anything.
And that's fine.
You don't have to believe a rock star to worship them.
But for the record, the White Stripes put out Hello Operator, the Meg White mini drum solo song as a single.
And the B-side is a cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene.
And the White Stripes do Jolene a lot live.
And this is as sincere and impassioned and convincing as Jack White has ever sounded in his life.
That's the White Stripes live on the Under Black Pool Lights DVD.
What does it mean?
That Jack White sounds the most sincere and impassioned and convincing when he's singing.
I'm begging of you, please don't take my man into a special microphone pointed directly at his ex-wife, slash sister.
Slash drummer.
It means these people are super bonkers famous rock stars now.
You know my single favorite line in a White Stripes song?
This one's awfully convincing, too.
If you can hear a piano fall, you can hear me coming down the hall.
The third White Stripes album comes out in 2001 and is called White Blood Cells.
On the cover, Meg and Jack wearing red and white are accosted by menacing paparazzi type figures dressed head to toe in black.
It's a metaphor.
It's barely a metaphor.
That song is called Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.
Really fantastic dynamics in this song as well.
The line, and every breath that is in your lungs is a tiny little gift to me.
And then the little squeal of feedback.
And then the drums kick in.
And then the guitar goes, that's the good shit.
Incredible.
The White Blood Cells album comes out in July 2001.
The same month Is This It by The Strokes comes out in Australia.
The garage rock revival is afoot.
Rock is back, according to Rolling Stone.
The Hives and the Vines and Yeah Yeah Yeahs are all about to get huge as well.
And yeah, despite being emphatically singular and hyper-local and weird as hell, the White Stripes have inadvertently stumbled into a globe-spanning, era-defining cultural rock and roll zeitgeist.
And that's nice.
Also young wacky, genius.
Film auteurs like Michelle Gondry are making high-concept music videos now and later compiling those videos onto cool DVDs.
And that zeitgeist is going to pay off for the White Stripes as well.
Does it bother me at all that Michelle Gondry's Lego-based rad video for Fell in Love with a Girl also has the colors yellow, black and blue in it?
Not really.
The only red, white, and black deal is not my deal.
Fell in Love with a Girl features Jack White's voice at its squeakiest.
Fell in Love with a Girl sounds like it's being played for you over the phone from a foreign country.
Fell in Love with the Girl sounds like you, and the White Stripes are all crammed inside a regular-sized garbage can.
This band rules, man.
And what the White Blood Cells album emphasizes is that this band's got range.
Musical range and also tremendous emotional range.
If you regard the White Stripes as a band that feels and conveys normal human emotions numbers letters, learn to spell, nouns and books and show and tell playtime, we will throw the ball back to class through the hall.
Teacher marks our height against the wall.
Teacher marks our height against the wall.
Here we have We're Going to Be Friends.
The apotheosis of the impossibly tender, usually acoustic, disarmingly sweet and extra, extra childlike facet of the White Stripes, featuring a video in which Meg White just sleeps on a couch.
It turns out rock stardom is not that complicated.
Shout out Napoleon Dynamite.
It's the repeated line, teacher marks our height against the wall. that really gets me here.
The implication that you are watching the white stripes grow up before your eyes.
I'll tell you flat out though, that my favorite song on white blood cells is called I'm Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman.
Because I love that title.
And also my second favorite moment in the whole White Stripes canon is the pause.
Right here, midway between the line, have a doctor come and visit us and tell us which one is sane.
The caught breath here.
The intensified snarl in Jack White's voice that you can feel before you hear it.
The exasperated foot tapping of Meg's kick drum.
This single line is a small masterpiece of dramatic tension.
These 10 seconds are all the White Stripes really needed to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
But that's only my second favorite span of 10 seconds in a White Stripes song.
My all-time favorite span of 10 seconds in a White Stripes song appears on their fourth album, which is released in 2003 and is called Elephant, and features a song called Ball and Biscuit.
It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl.
But it's a fact that I'm the seventh son.
This isn't my favorite part yet.
Ball and Biscuit is a seven-minute bonkers garage blues song that starts with Jack White declaring that he's the seventh son.
And yeah, is it weird if I'm bummed out to learn that Jack White is actually the seventh son in his family?
It really disappoints me that he's not lying in this song.
I liked this song just slightly better when I thought he was lying.
Is that weird?
Half of Ball and Biscuit consists of these chill yet sassy 12-bar blues verses, and the other half is Jack White playing guitar solos that I would characterize as red-hot, white-hot and shit-hot slippery.
I will also continue to characterize Jack White's guitar style as slippery.
I love the way Jack White says, yeah, right before he plays a lot of slippery, shit-hot guitar.
Okay, those are the two parts in Ball and Biscuit.
There's the relatively quiet verses to this song where Jack White calmly says stuff like Read it in the newspapers.
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know.
I love that line.
And then there's the parts where Jack White plays insanely loud braying, ultra distorted shit, hot guitar.
And my all time favorite, 10 seconds in the whole White Stripes catalog is a transition between those two parts.
You play me just this part of Ball and Biscuit and I can bench press a car.
It's the way Jack mumbles.
Yeah, I can think of one or two things to say about it, slightly off mic as the guitar revs up like and then the explosion.
That's as good as it gets.
I listen to Ball and Biscuit, and I feel like I can juggle five Ford Tauruses.
One time I interviewed for a job at Google, the Google, googlecom.
I forgot what the job was, but i was not remotely qualified and thusly i was in no danger of getting this job.
I read all this stuff beforehand about how scary and intimidating interviews at google are Like.
They ask you all kinds of abstract genius programmer, galaxy brain questions like why are manhole covers round?
And how many quarters can you fit into an army helicopter and whatnot?
So I do my research and I show up for my Google interview in a shirt and tie.
That's how solid my Google Intel was.
That's how well I read the room.
Everyone around me is a genius wearing footie pajamas.
And it turns out the only question they ask me is, why are you wearing a tie?
And I'm like, I don't.
All right.
See you later.
End of interview.
But I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you my one triumphant moment from this whole experience.
I fly into Northern California, into the San Francisco airport.
I get a rental car.
I get into my rental car.
I light the third floor of an airport parking garage and I turn the ignition and the car radio is set to a rock and roll station with the volume way up.
And the second the car turns on, there it is.
And dude, I could have bench pressed my rental car while I was driving it.
I felt invincible.
I felt like I had summoned this song with the awesome power of my mind.
Shout out Live 105 out of San Francisco.
I'm pretty sure that was the radio station.
And I said out loud, I'm going to fucking nail this.
And I threw my rental car into gear and I drove it straight off the third floor of the parking garage.
And I flew all the way to Google's campus, like back to the future.
And I put on a tie and I biffed the bejesus out of that interview.
Have we ever figured out what it is exactly about this riff, this specific haunting skein of notes?
Of all the rad crazy, white-hot shit, Jack White has ever played on his guitar.
Why is his rightful triumphant, eternal legacy?
You want to hear it again?
Okay, let's hear it again, but add Meg White's kick drums.
Let's add Meg White exasperatedly tapping her foot.
Crucial detail.
You don't hear enough about Meg's part of Seven Nation Army.
And you don't hear enough about Meg's part of Seven Nation Army, because nowadays you don't really hear any part of Seven Nation Army other than except now it goes and it sounds like this
That's from a Michigan Notre Dame college football game in 2011.
I live in Columbus Ohio, and some Ohio State fans hate Michigan so much that they will kill you for even using the letter M in written correspondence.
But I'm pretty sure Michigan did this first.
So there's thousands of videos like this.
Every stadium does this now.
Every sport.
Oh, There was a brief period a brief period that I do believe lasted years when Seven Nation Army was just another great White Stripes song, a modest hit White Stripes song.
This is the first White Stripes song that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and it peaked at number 76.
That's it.
Seven Nation Army was not always ginormous, ubiquitous, inevitable.
But here in 2026, Seven Nation Army has 21 billion Spotify plays, which is nearly 18 billion more plays than the next most played White Stripes song Fell in Love with a Girl with 318 million.
And it's tempting at first to react by attempting to honor, by attempting to rescue the rest of Seven Nation Army, meaning the rest of the song after the first eight seconds.
I respect the central lyrical image here.
The petulant and yes, very childlike declaration a Seven Nation Army couldn't hold me back.
But my personal favorite line is a tie.
Here, you pick.
You got two choices.
That's your first choice.
I'm going to Wichita.
Why is he going there?
What's he doing there?
I got no idea.
It's way too late in the game for me to actually figure out what this song is about.
You know, here's your other choice for the best line.
That ain't what you want to hear, but that's what I'll do.
What's he doing?
What's he gonna do?
Why don't you want to hear it?
It doesn't matter.
It's a great line regardless.
Let's preserve the mystique, shall we?
In interviews now Jack White gets asked a lot about Seven Nation Army, about how he feels about the complete global stadium chant takeover of Seven Nation Army.
The way you hear oh, at every sporting event anywhere in the world now, even if usually that's the only part of the song you hear.
And Jack inevitably responds to these questions with a remarkably non-rock star level of humility.
It's not mine anymore.
I mean, it becomes folk music.
When things like that happen, becomes something that The more people don't know where it came from, the happier I am, you know, the more it just becomes ubiquitous.
And I'm sure many people are chanting the melody have no idea what the song is, or where it came from, or why, or whatever.
It doesn't matter anymore.
And that's just amazing.
That's Jack White on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2022.
I don't know why Jack's hair is the color of berry blue Kool-Aid in this clip.
What is that, turquoise?
It's nice.
The dude wore nothing but red, white, or black for like 15 years.
Let's let him cook.
This is what Jack says all the time now.
Seven Nation Army is a folk song now.
It's public domain.
It's not his song anymore.
And incredibly, it's mostly not a song with words anymore.
Talking to the Texas music publication Buddy Magazine in 2025.
Jack says quote What's interesting to me about it is when people sing Queens, We Will Rock You at a stadium.
They're chanting the words We Will Rock You in English, but they're chanting the melody of Seven Nation Army.
They're chanting a melody.
When do you hear people chanting a melody?
That's very strange to me.
So there's something magical that I have nothing to do with, end quote.
And yeah, sure it's magical, but it's also absolutely confounding if you happen to live through the White Stripes phenomenon in real time.
I read hundreds of thousands of words about Jack and Meg in music magazines and on the Internet in the 2000s.
The White Stripes were colossal. and fascinating, and utterly baffling.
Why are they still pretending to be brother and sister?
Why am I still pretending to believe it?
And most importantly, tell me what is going on here exactly.
Photo social is the word, and the word is the bird.
Okay, after the Elephant album, the White Stripes put out two more rad and increasingly weird records.
Get Behind Me, Satan in 2005.
Icky Thump in 2007.
In 2009, the White Stripes starred in a full-length documentary called Under Great White Northern Lights, directed by Emmett Molloy and chronicling the band's whimsical and delightful 2007 tour of Canada.
The movie's in black and white, obviously.
This is how the movie ends.
Meg and Jack sitting at a piano.
Jack's singing a White Stripes song called White Moon.
He's still rhyming bird with word.
I respect it.
And Meg just sits next to Jack, silently crying.
End of movie.
Also end of band, pretty much.
Shortly after this footage is shot, the White Stripes cancel the rest of their tour, publicly announcing quote Meg White is suffering from acute anxiety and is unable to travel at this time.
End quote.
They finally announced their breakup in 2011 with a statement reading in part.
It is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way.
End quote.
Jack goes on to make a bunch of records with a bunch of different people.
Meg disappears.
In 2025, the White Stripes are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Jack gives a lovely, gracious speech.
Meg ain't there.
Jack thanks his sister and reads her a poem he wrote.
And it trips me out to think about how much time I spent not so long ago trying to figure out why Meg was crying in that scene.
Trying to decipher the precise personal dynamic between these two people.
And of course, I really don't want to know the truth, and I never did.
I've always preferred the lie. the mythology.
Sometimes I worry that Seven Nation Army is eventually going to crowd out everything else the White Stripes ever did that.
One day we'll all completely forget where and who Seven Nation Army came from.
But maybe that is amazing and beautiful and ideal.
Maybe that's the goal.
Maybe that's the highest compliment a piece of music can ever receive that one day you wake up And it just doesn't feel like a song that one person wrote.
We are so blessed to be joined once again by Chuck Klosterman the best to ever do it, in my opinion.
Chuck's latest book is called Football.
Chuck, thank you so much for being here.
Well, thanks for having me on.
I don't know if I would say you're blessed, but OK.
I think that is a compliment to me.
I guess we'll find out.
Yes.
Okay.
So when you first heard the White Stripes, you know, in the late 90s or the early 2000s, did they make sense in the context of, like the new rock revolution?
You know, the Strokes and the Hives, you know, the yeah, yeah, yeahs, all of that going on.
Did the White Stripes sort of fit into that for you, or were they always their own singular, weird thing?
I didn't connect those two sort of worlds until i started working at spin, when i first heard the white stripes.
That seemed very different from what was happening with like say, the strokes or the hives, as you say, like those bands to me more i mean it's weird to say this about the strokes but like, in some ways more polished, like is it like what was the?
The white stripes seemed?
They were obviously Midwestern but also kind of skronkier and just a different thing.
I mean it makes sense now to put them all kind of together under the same umbrella.
But that's not what I thought at first.
I would have never really connected them until sort of the world kind of jammed them together.
Sure.
And you, of course, wrote...
A cover story for Spin, you know, I think in 2002.
And I'm just sort of wondering like, what is it like to be in a room with these two people in a tape recorder?
Are they really easy to interview?
Are they very difficult?
Are they intimidating?
Are they more laid back than you expect?
Like, what is just the vibe being in a room with these two people?
Well, I wouldn't put them on the easy end. of the spectrum.
I mean, because, I mean, well, men doesn't really talk at all.
I mean, even if you ask him a question, he tries to answer them as briefly as possible.
And Jack, you know really interesting and you know was intelligent, but you know he had this, or at least at the time he had this sort of interesting.
I don't know if quirk is the word.
I suppose some people might say the same thing about me, which is that if you ever ask him a question, his first reaction is to always start by saying not really.
No matter what the question is like, right.
I was asking him about the song little bird.
Okay.
The song that was, you know, yeah.
And and I sort of said like, well you know, it really sounds like Led Zeppelin, almost like a Jimmy Page type reference.
His immediate thing was to say like, oh no, that had nothing to do with it.
I wasn't really influenced by Led Zeppelin at all.
In fact, I was consciously trying to go against what Led Zeppelin had done.
And I'm almost that if I had asked the question differently, If I had said like oh you know, it kind of reminds me of Led Zeppelin.
But of course, that's not possible.
You know, he would have been like, absolutely.
It was that was.
You know, his?
His sense of the journalist is always that the guy is trying to fuck his life up.
He's really he's very defensive or, you know, because this was 20 years ago.
He might be totally different now.
But he just he seemed to naturally want to disagree with any assertion about his group.
He does seem – he always seemed to me very combative.
Just reading the interviews, just the back and forth, it just seemed very strained and very difficult.
Like do you personally enjoy that kind of interview like a combative, like trying to get something out of somebody who doesn't want to give it to you?
Is that like a challenge that you enjoy just as an interviewer?
Well, when I was younger, I think I did.
I don't think I would now.
I mean it's just –
I think of these things differently, where I used to really believe that it was important to have like creative tension with the person you were interviewing with.
And because I kind of come out of a newspaper background where that's normal.
Now, I don't know if I agree with that as much.
I feel like you have to be more responsive to kind of the uh persona or vibe or energy that the other person is bringing um, all of that and that maybe would have been with them particularly.
That may have been better, but i uh, i i mean, i you know it was it was still.
That was still during the period where sort of like the mythology they had created, created was kind of falling apart.
Now i mean they were or at least falling apart a like a weird way to say it.
Cause it almost makes it sound like, like, you know, they're there.
It was kind of collapsing on itself.
It was just like they had, I think what had happened, like a lot of bands that they had sort of began with this idea that we can kind of create this little lie, or that that we're being brother and sister or whatever.
And we're really weird and all these things.
And it will be able to exist sort of in its own world because the world is going to stay small.
And then it was rapidly getting bigger and I think you know when, when I did the cover story it was it was the first time they'd done a cover story for like, a like a major magazine.
I mean they'd done the cover of the theater, I guess, if you count that um, but like this was the kind of first time that was going on.
So I think that was maybe to them also, like it was meaningful for them.
I remember there being like a small controversy after the issue came out, for reasons that are completely unknown.
I don't know why we did this.
The cover of the magazine there's a monkey on Jack White's shoulder which, of course, justifiably.
I didn't know they were doing this, but justifiably, I think that he thought that we were implying that he was on heroin and that this was the monkey on his back or whatever.
Oh, my God.
Well, I can't think of any other reason why there would be a monkey there.
Although, at the same time, he must have recognized there was a monkey there during the shoot.
But I do recall that being an issue after it came out.
So they were doing a photo shoot, and the photographer was like, hey, we got this monkey.
Do you mind posing with the monkey?
And he did it, but then –
After we realized the connotation.
It left me completely misremembering this.
There was like a monkey on the cover, you know?
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
I'm going to have to investigate that.
I do not remember the monkey at all, though it has been a very long time, as you say.
That's very bizarre.
There is a very funny part of that interview where you are like you're trying to get him to answer the question like, why are you pretending to be brother and sister?
And there's just this very entertaining back and forth and, as you say, like he's very combative and dismissive of the question.
But like, as you're asking them, why are you pretending to be brother and sister?
Do you know the answer?
Do you sort of understand that this is like a fairly ingenious sort of backstory lie that's going to create a lot of interest in them?
Like, are you asking a question there that you already know the answer?
Well i, I think everyone knew what's happening.
Plus, it was strange in the sense that the way magazines used to work you know I was doing this interview and you know it was it would it'd be like over a month before it would come out anyways.
So like, but you're always dealing with the past. in the present.
But the very first time that the White Strikes were in spin, to my knowledge, was prior to this, when I was still living in Akron.
And it was like a small story, like just kind of a front of the magazine story about them.
And I think that directly said like they were brother and sister, because at the time it was like well, if the press release says it, just put it in there.
I don't think that there was certainly any sense that this band end was going to become famous enough that something like that would somehow come back to be.
I don't want to haunt them.
I'm not sure it really haunted them.
I think people did find it somewhat charming.
But there was all these, You know it almost immediately is replaced by like, a like a different question.
So, oh, they're not brother and sister, but they're divorced and they're working together.
And he took her name and they were just like, you know, they were.
So it wasn't as though the the that the first question is gone and there's like six more new questions in place of it.
Exactly, yeah.
And as you've mentioned, Meg does not talk.
She does not really answer even direct questions.
Being so close to them.
Did that give you any insight into the Jack and Meg dynamic, both offstage and on?
I think that their dynamic is pretty mysterious still.
Of course.
There was no sense that she really enjoyed man.
I'm not saying it was no sense of it, though like she didn't seem, but she didn't use, didn't take advantage of it in any way, like she didn't become any sort of celebrity because of it.
She seemed to to to like a almost like, recede more.
I know, at one point i remember there was like a weird like i guess it was like in the early there was just a woman who looked like her, that was sort of in this weird sex tape and that went around and it wasn't her, but it was the.
I've been going on, you know, and it was.
I think she's like what did I get into?
It was also like a complete sense that it's like, this is his band.
And like, he taught her to play drums to do this.
And these are his ideas.
And it didn't really seem like she had like her role in this band was incredibly critical.
And yet she, she didn't seem to have a lot of agency in it either.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like like she's really important, but I don't think there was ever any kind of belief that well.
I bet they're doing this now because Meg wants it.
Like that's not how, that's not really how it works.
You know, like when she would play live, she seemed relatively happy.
She looked very cool when she was playing live and there's only people up there.
So of course that's going to move the drummer into a higher profile position than normal.
And the way the stage was aligned, you kind of saw her in profile.
As far as the dynamic between them, I would say, no, hanging out with them did not give me a sense.
Like Oh, like I, like I if, if someone had come up to me and said like do you think they're closer than people perceive?
Or do you think that there's more distance?
I would be like, I don't know.
I, they, they, they did not give that indication.
I would have maybe liked to interview them separately sure, but they were not really willing to do that, they didn't want to do that, you know, and um, and it was uh, you couldn't really force them, like they're not a band you could force to do something.
You couldn't, you?
You know, I've read plenty of Jack interviews where he talks about how important—and keeping in mind that he disagrees with the premise of any question he's asked.
Like, he says over and over again, like, Meg is incredibly important.
Her ideas, her taste, she's very exacting.
She's not going to do just anything in terms of, like, songwriting, in terms of, like, the decisions— band makes like jack is always very careful to say like no meg is absolutely crucial you know her personality is driving this band every bit as much as i am i mean that's what i mean i don't know if he believes that i totally understand why he would say that it doesn't really seem like that could be possible to be honest it doesn't seem like that's how it could work but if it but you know it is interesting that he has made a lot of good music since being with the white stripes none of it is as good as the white stripes material for an entire record you'll be hearing bits and pieces like he if you put a single singles collection of like the work he has done it's very very good but the white stripes records or they're for a whole variety of reasons um or like kind of more compelling there's just something really you know people use words like chemistry and But that is, there's real chemistry there, you know, and the way they interact was, you know, the fact that you knew nothing about what their relationship, their interior relationship actually was like, it sort of made every small little detail when they would look at each other a bigger deal.
Right, right.
You're trying to, you're trying to read them, close read them for clues, right?
You know, just getting something that might not be there, but maybe it is there.
But yeah, you're just you're trying so hard to figure out the deal with these people.
Like that always colored the way that I heard the music.
You know, it was always even the simplest song, you know, lyrically or musically or just directly.
Like there's something mysterious about it just because it's these two incredibly mysterious people who are making it like we're going to be friends.
You know it's not a song that needs to be decoded, but you can't help or I can't help but like, try and view it through the prism of what this might say about the Meg and Jack relationship.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I guess, But I guess I always assumed that I was never going to learn anything about their actual relationship through their music, because the only people the White Stripes seem to be interested in are small children and the elderly.
Everything that they do is like, it's like wild. kids are real and true and authentic.
And then old people, they lived through what was, what mattered most.
It's like, they just don't care.
The people they cared about least were like people their age, the people of the age, listening to their music.
I, you know so.
So I never like.
There's I I?
I'm trying to think of a situation where, like I listened to a white stripes song like say like say, like the hardest button to button.
I think that in a lot of bands you would be like oh, I wonder if he's talking about Meg.
I never thought that.
We're a family.
I don't think there was ever a time where I heard something and I was like this is the skeleton key to unlock this relationship.
They didn't really operate in that way.
In a lot of ways, it was like they were a low drama band.
Like they – that they did – like anything that was sort of like controversial about them was kind of projected upon them.
It didn't seem like a lot of things were coming from them that created this sense of sort of like a – like I'm trying to – I mean, can you think of anything where it was like you suspected that –.
Something that came like from the White Stripes camp was like this is like a strategic play or something, or this is a way to move them into a higher profile position.
I didn't think that.
I didn't think that either.
Like the thing I thought of immediately is when he beat the crap out of the Von Bondi's guy.
Right.
You know like, apart from being sort of generally pugnacious in interviews and sort of feuding with the Black Keys and all this kind of thing, I do think they were relatively low drama, with the noted exception of like a visceral ugly bar fight.
That was him.
That really was.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess yes, I suppose beating a guy up in public does not really qualify as a low drama event, but you know, it wasn't.
It wasn't as though like that happened because the guy had a weird relationship with Meg.
It wasn't like, it wasn't though.
Like when the idea that the white stripes were going to stop playing together and I don't think people, I didn't think it was like oh, I guess this relationship has just gotten too difficult to sustain, or whatever.
It's like they just sort of made the decision to do it, you know?
And it's like, so I guess that you're right.
I mean, I can see when I said that we're kind of low drama, you kind of looked at me weird.
I guess he is sort of a dramatic person, but the band is not.
Yes.
No, I agree completely with that.
I know we'll put that in the Jack White solo category.
The bar fight is canonically a Jack White solo situation.
So, yeah, I agree with that.
This sort of brings us to Seven Nation Army, right?
I wonder, first of all, the first time you heard this song, the first time you heard that riff, did you have any inkling that this was going to be the one like this was going to be?
You know far and away now their biggest song like this is their legacy.
Did you have any sense coming off seven nation army in real time?
Oh, no, no.
I mean, at the time the thing was, Oh, he's playing bass guitar, which that's what it sounded like.
Right.
It was like you're implementing.
So the initial thinking was Was that well either, he is playing bass.
Is there going to be a third member of the band now?
Or it also.
Then it was sort of like okay, so now.
So there was kind of this interesting coolness of just having these three.
Okay.
Now they've made a conventional move to add a bass, you know, a bassist or a bass plan.
Well, it turns out it's not.
It's not bass, it's guitar and he's playing it through this special way sounds like a bass, but he wanted to prove you don't need a bass to do it.
Well, those are the main things i remember thinking about that song when it came out.
It was just like you know it was.
It was, i thought, you know pretty, you're a good riff.
It was kind of a heavier song and i think that there were a lot of people who all you know the white stripes materials kind of split between like they're kind of heavy rocking material and things that seemed like really fragile and like sort of kind of drifting into almost country music and stuff like that.
So i think people were.
I was happy when there was like a hard rocking song like that, you know, even though the tempo was not that fast, but yeah.
Right.
Well, now that you've got a whole book called Football, you know about the larger culture and the future of football.
And Seven Nation Army is a football song.
It's a sports culture song broadly.
It's a jock jam, as we used to say.
And I'm curious like, how do you think it changes the song?
You know now that it's been absorbed into the football monolith.
Changes the song?
I mean, I don't know if it does.
I think it just kind of just distances the song from its sort of original existence or whatever.
Now it's this other thing, obviously.
It means this other thing, um and but again, you know it's not the song that has been adopted by like, all these soccer programs, it's just this riff, okay.
So it's like it's kind of like the smoke on the water riff or whatever like and riff.
It's like these things are familiar but those even are kind of divorced from the song.
Um, you know, it's like obviously lyrically, there's no connection between what the song is about and why people like to chant it at, you know, Penn State football games or whatever.
It's the ability to sort of replicate the riff verbally, and it's real familiar and simple.
And so, I mean, I think it would be interesting, of course, for, like, Jack White.
It must be a very interesting thing, you know.
But I don't know if, like, it's, I mean, it can only be good for the song.
I mean like it's hard to look at that and be like You know it would be one thing if someone wrote, you know, a real say, a real personal song about something that had happened to them in their life.
That was a transformative event.
And it has like sort of maybe a personal meaning and a political meaning and all these things.
And then it was suddenly became like you know the theme song, like for the, you know for the NBA, or whatever.
Then it would be like, well, let's maybe have cheapened the message.
But this isn't like that.
I mean like, so I love.
The song is his, like when he was seven years old, misinterpreting the phrase Salvation Army.
So the very core of the meaning.
You can't really deconstruct a song whose premise is that we once didn't understand what this phrase meant, or whatever.
Yeah, because when Jack White is interviewed about it now, he says it feels like folk music now.
It doesn't feel like our song anymore.
And I'm cognizant of the fact that when people hear it, lots of people don't know it's our song.
Lots of people don't know it's a song at all.
There's just a humility and a letting go of control that I did not associate with Jack White in the era when he was being interviewed by Spin Magazine.
You know what I'm saying?
He always seemed...
He's let go of this song in a way that is uncharacteristic of him or my understanding of him.
Just the idea of having control of everything, having control of your image, really caring about how you're being written about and being talked about.
There's a cool dissonance for me in this song he wrote, being condensed to a seven second riff and just being spread out into a world that may not even know it's a white stripe song at all.
It's just like it's an odd sort of journey for the song to take where it's not really his song anymore, in his view.
But in a way that might reflect just his maturation process, because I think it's not just for him or just for musicians.
I think it's almost for all artistic people that when you are younger you do sort of want to control not just the music you make or the art you make, but you want to control the reception of it too.
And that changes over time.
One time I was interviewing Stephen King. he was being like inducted.
And so there's a weird thing.
It was in Canada.
It was like, he was being honored by like the Canadian booksellers association.
Somehow.
He's not Canadian, but yeah.
So close.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
So, you know, I'm kind of interviewing him on stage or whatever.
I don't know how I got picked to do this, but I'm doing it.
And at one point I asked him a question like You know if, if you could have like one aspect of something you wrote, sort of live on or whatever, if it's like if in the future there was only be one understanding of your work, you know what would it be?
And what he said was something that has really stuck with me, which is that he starts talking about, you know, the urban legend of like the guy with the hook hand, and that the couple is out driving their car and, like they, like they find out.
Yes, yes.
Like no one knows who wrote that story.
No one knows where that came from.
And he said that his sort of dream would be to have something he writes become that kind of story.
That in some future world, that there is like something that he came up with is now something that has no author, in a way.
It's just sort of understood by everyone.
Like my favorite short story is like the lady and the tiger.
Okay. which is something that you may have read like in eighth or ninth grade.
I'm sure many people listening to this podcast are like oh, I remember reading that story in school.
Nobody remembers the guy who wrote that.
It was a guy named Frank Stockton, right?
But like it's this short little story that this guy did, that will kind of just sort of almost as like a placeholder for unclear endings to stories.
And he is removed from it now.
He came up with it, and now it just exists to everyone.
And that has kind of happened with this song or songs of this nature.
And maybe a young person, you know, I remember Prince, for example.
Prince hated when people covered his songs.
That always seemed strange to me.
He would give them the rights, but he hated it.
I wonder if he had grown older, if he might have changed his view on this.
I think that maybe there was a time in his life when Jack White would have somehow been annoyed that his song was being like, reappropriated for this other thing, culture that he doesn't relate to, or whatever.
But it's different now.
Now, I think he probably has a more mature understanding of how these things work.
Yeah.
You've talked about the idea of songs that will endure beyond the artist you know, and that it's a short list, you know, like Stairway to Heaven, All I Want for Christmas is You, and like Seven Nation Army is in that category.
Are there any other songs you can think of that are in that category, that are contemporary or after the White Stripes?
Like what does a song have to do to endure beyond the artist?
And like, how rare is that?
I mean, I think it is pretty rare.
I mean, there are a lot of canonical artists who don't have that.
Like like it is, it is hard to imagine say in the future that there will ever be a Madonna song that is remembered more than Madonna herself.
Like she has huge songs but they will always be.
Or Taylor Swift, for example, is a great, maybe the clearest example right now where it's impossible to imagine her having any of her songs in be more meaningful than her existence.
You know.
When you say contemporary, do you really mean contemporary, like within the last five or ten years?
Because that's becoming more and more difficult, I think.
I mean, the chances of that happening are actually probably going down.
Oh, of course they are, yes.
I met anybody after the White Stripes or during the White Stripes.
Obviously, the Strokes don't have a song like that.
Anything in the 21st century – let's say well, i mean a song like call me maybe possibly, because it could be.
What always has to happen with this is the song has to end up being taking on the meaning of a second thing like okay, this white stripes example, now it's this other thing okay it's, it's uh, or like you know that, that?
That there it's.
It's very easy to imagine a young person who is familiar with that and it's a song that was on the rock song.
Or he just thinks it's a chant.
You know it's in from the past, but a musical chant.
It's like a.
I mean maybe in a sense that's why when you say like you're surprised that that he seems kind of open to this.
I mean, maybe he recognizes the chant that you know he sees that kind of the way the world is changing and that it is increasingly unlikely that this will happen, that that that you can have a song that will uh, will like, will like matter more than the person who, who creates it which, if you really get down to it, probably is the fundamental goal right to you know, i mean, for anyone making anything, it's like, like you're you.
You You could create something and hope that it brings attention to yourself, but I think if you're really an artist, you're hoping the thing you create is greater than yourself.
A life of its own.
It has more value than just your celebrity.
Right.
Just to wrap up, you sort of said, all of this is good for the White Stripes.
All of this is good for the song.
I had a reaction just to seeing and this metric doesn't work for everybody, but just looking at Spotify plays like Seven Nation Army has like two billion plus, you know, and the next one down, you know, I think Fell in Love with a Girl has like 300 million.
Like there's just such a huge gap now between Seven Nation Army and everything else.
And I just wonder is it even slightly destabilizing to the rest of the White Stripes catalog when one song gets so big?
Is there like a zero, something where we don't pay enough attention, we don't appreciate enough audience.
All the other White Stripes songs, all the records.
You know everything else they've done as Seven Nation Army gets bigger and bigger.
Or is it just a rising tide, lifts all boats kind of thing?
I mean, you're completely right.
I mean, destabilizing is a great word to use for it.
You know, as the years go by and if someone brings up, say, Thin Lizzy.
The likelihood that they will bring up anything outside of the boys are back in town gets smaller and smaller and smaller, to the point where it would be – I think, that it will become difficult for people to even sort of imagine them having other songs.
But they'll know that there are other songs.
They won't know what they are.
For the White Stripes, I mean, OK, this is true.
But, like you mentioned – you know you mentioned earlier, like the strokes, we use that as sort of the example of a hives.
What have they done?
What have they created that will put them in this position?
You know where, where this conversation can even happen, where someone's like well, will this song change the way the strokes are remembered?
Or will this song change the way the hives are remembered?
I don't know if they have any songs that can do that.
Like they have like the strokes have a sound that could do that.
Like the sound of the book.
Yeah, but that's different.
But if you're talking about a look, then you're really talking about things outside of music.
Right, right.
You know.
So it is like if it were to happen that this song, that Seven Nation Army, becomes like the totality of the White Stripes memory, that will still probably put them ahead of 999 of their peers.
You know that they will actually nothing that that, that if somebody is just interested enough in the song to reinvestigate what they do, you know or you know, so I like I don't.
I mean, there was, you know, if if it was in the past of this, if we were still like in the 90s, I do think that there would be this idea that maybe like, well, this is a problem, though, right? it's a problem it's a sellout thing kind of but it's like a sellout against your will like you didn't even do it exactly and it was like you were your you know you're this thing that you did is now um sort of uh being taken from you co-opted yes um and i i i think that as as like culture sort of has been just splintered so much i don't i don't think that fear exists in the same way i also don't think that um it is you know because we're sort of albums matter less now and singles matter more i mean if if if the entire elephant record had become this thing like you know like That people just kept – like the whole thing mattered to people going forward or whatever.
That might be a little different, but I think that in some ways, this is obviously like the best possible outcome.
Sure.
Also, the money is probably pretty good, so that will soothe any legacy issues.
I don't think – you don't get a royalty if people chant it in a soccer stadium, do you?
Yeah, I don't know how that works, but I'm sure he's doing all right for himself.
Oh, I'm sure they are, yes.
However, that's being one at a time.
Do you know how?
– like are the songwriting credits on White Stripes record?
Are they 50-50 or just he?
– get them all.
That's a very good question.
That's a very good question.
I don't know that offhand.
I don't, I don't know that offhand.
I mean certainly lyrically, I don't think.
I think at a bare minimum it would say music Jack and Meg lyrics Jack, for the vast majority at least.
But that's I'm going to.
I need to look this up now, but I'm going to guess it's just him.
I think it's possibly just him.
And certainly lyrically, it's just him.
But I don't know that for a fact.
It's also, you know, the royalties on stuff like this is always confusing.
Like, you know, you'll you'll see something.
It'll be like like all music by Van Halen.
And then you'll find out that contractually that's not how it is at all.
Of course.
Right.
So it could be like all music by White Stripes.
And then like, the details of this are confusing, very different, you know, but i mean she obviously like, if she needed money, it would be extremely easy for her and jack to play coachella or do any of these things, you know, and she doesn't seem to need that right, she doesn't seem to have any uh like.
Uh they're, there's only two of them but like, neither one of them ever expresses a desire to like reform this idea.
I mean, i'm sure it will probably happen at some point, but it's never like this thing hanging around the way it is with say, like the Smiths, or like when it was with replacement.
My understanding of it is he sort of made it clear, without throwing her under the bus, that it's her, that she doesn't want to do it anymore and he respects that.
Like, I thought they would have reunited by now.
I thought the Coachella thing would have happened.
They were inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know?
And that's like a corny thing, maybe.
Did they play there?
Did they play there on their own?
He showed up.
I don't know if he played, but he showed up, gave an acceptance speech.
Thank meg.
She went nowhere near it.
She did not go.
I don't.
I think if they were going to reform they would have done it by now and i think it's her decision ultimately to not do it.
And he's basically.
I've always gotten the vibe from him that he would have kept the band going, you know, and he would have reunited by now if she wanted to.
But it's her decision and she won't.
Well, it would have been, you know it's, I hear again.
I don't know the answer to this, but it's easy to imagine the early stages of this where it's like we should do this.
I think it's interesting the way the two of us are together.
I know we're not married, but it's like you know, this kind of this simple drumming, this riffing, that I'm doing these lyrics, these you know.
And then she'd be like well okay, it's like you know, we'll play these small clubs here and there and i just don't want it to be like a hassle.
And he'd be like oh no no no, it won't be a hassle, don't worry.
It's just like would have it just increasingly become a hassle over time.
Pretty big hassle.
Yeah yeah, i get it.
But what else was interesting is it would be like, you know, i i always wonder what would happen if jack white you know, because he has these different incarnations you know we'll be with the rock on tours and i'll do all this like What if he came out with just a drummer, but it wasn't her?
I wonder what the reaction would be.
Yeah, I don't know if people I think people would be kind of into that and kind of revulsed by that.
Like there's a huge warm feeling toward Meg, I think, especially now.
I think the longer that she's out of the spotlight, the more we come to appreciate it.
Like, as we're saying, he's had a great solo career, other projects.
Nothing approaches the white stripes.
That dynamic is crucial.
And I don't think you replicate that dynamic just by putting another drummer on stage doing what she did.
That would be.
I'm saying, like, make new records.
And what would be more troubling?
If he gets a guy drummer or a different female drummer?
Ooh, God.
What would upset people more?
Or what would, you know?
He got this guy drummer, which would seem to some people suggest that, oh, she couldn't do it.
He had to get this, you know, he had to get Stuart Copeland.
And if it was another female drummer, then the perception would be like he somehow replaced her.
That would be worse.
The reaction to another female would be worse.
The reaction to Stuart Copeland would be just total confusion.
I mean, not specifically.
Yeah, but I get you.
I get you.
Yeah.
Okay.
But what if it was?
What if it was a female drummer, but with like the skill set of like Sheila E or something?
Like not, again, not Sheila E specifically.
I know.
Right.
Yeah.
Can he just never again be in a two-person band?
Would it be literally impossible for him to do that?
I think it would be not impossible, but improbable and probably unwise.
There's no way.
Even if people accepted that and didn't run him out of town, everything that bands hypothetically did would be viewed in direct relationship to the White Stripes.
It would be compared... to the point where this band would be meaningless.
It would just be held up to the old thing and just not be of any use to him as like a new project.
That's my sense of it.
But it was really complicated.
It was Pat Carney.
Wow.
Yeah, sure, sure.
I'll go for that.
That's horrible.
Would that be kind of like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement touring together?
That's exactly what that would be.
They only play crypto events.
They only play corporate events, Jack White and Pat Carney.
I wouldn't go see them, but I would follow their careers, their new project avidly.
That would be fascinating and terrible. but fascinating.
Yes.
Chuck, it's wonderful to talk to you as always.
Chuck's new book is called Football.
It's incredible.
Thank you so much for being here, dude.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks so much to our guest this week, Chuck Klosterman.
Thanks to our producers, Chris Sutton, Justin Sales, and Olivia Creary.
Additional production by Kevin Pooler.
Animations and graphics by Chris Calliton.
Additional art by Matt James.
Special thanks to Cole Kushner.
And thanks so much to you for listening.
And now let's all go listen to Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes.
See you next week.
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