4/25/2023 0 Comments White stripes blue orchid albumThe whole LP explores that gap, making for an artistically meditative album that ponders what’s next for Jack, an album that today’s listeners benefit from knowing that what’s next is a career away from the Stripes.Īccording to Jack, every White Stripes album follows a central theme, and Get Behind Me Satan was built around truth. In hindsight, it shows the tension within Jack between continuing to work with Meg or going to places he couldn’t creatively go with her. At the time of release, it was just the hotly anticipated follow up to a series of classics. There’s also the old cliché of artists being at the crossroads, but what’s interesting about Get Behind Me Satan is that statement is only true retrospectively. It’s the album that showed the importance of Meg, a contributor whose crucial input was only underscored by her absence in Jack’s solo and side projects. It’s the collection of songs where the Stooges and the MC5 stopped being a dominant influence, instead giving away to Appalachian twang (“Little Ghost”), folky guitar (“As Ugly As I Seem”), while still finding space for a classic White Stripes stomper like “Blue Orchid.” Get Behind Me Satan doesn’t live up to the “divergent sounds make the best album” theory, but it does certainly craft the most interesting record the White Stripes, or Jack for that matter, ever made. It’s the album where Jack put down his electric, walked away from his riffs and stood behind a marimba, one of the least punk instruments ever invented. For many fans, it is the disappointing follow up to a string of masterpieces in De Stijl, White Blood Cells and Elephant. Yet somehow, these hot takes seem to have eluded Get Behind Me Satan. Everyone has the contrarian friend who holds opinions like this. There’s this recurring school of thought that a band’s least characteristic work is their greatest achievement, and that it is superior to whatever is their most characteristic. So it is strange, though not surprising, that they would release their most divisive album, Get Behind Me Satan, during the height of their power. The band were a genuine pop-culture phenomenon for their “are they siblings or lovers” shtick, their red, white and black aesthetic, and most importantly, their blues-garage punk sound. The song was even parodied on SNL, with Jimmy Fallon as Jack and Drew Barrymore as a near-mute Meg. To some, they singlehandedly killed nu-metal and stopped post-grunge from being completely overtaken by modern rock. In 2003, with the release of Elephant and more importantly, “Seven Nation Army,” Jack created a riff so iconic, it seemed to be ingrained in the DNA of all people and is, statistically speaking, currently being sung by a couple thousand people at some sporting event. John Peel said they were the most exciting music he’d heard since Hendrix, while The New York Times compared them to Nirvana. He and erstwhile partner Meg White were the country’s weirdest popular rock band, inspiring countless boys and girls to pick up strings or sticks. He was hailed as an actual savior, using his guitar as a weapon and unleashing 1:50 of non-stop hellfire in “Fell In Love With A Girl” to awaken apathetic minds. Stalwarts like the Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs were beginning to show cracks (or boredom) with their sound and would later strive to reinvent themselves to varying degrees of success.Īnd over in Detroit, it seemed like Jack White was moving away from everything that made the White Stripes successful.Įarly-’00s Jack White was one of the wunderkinds of the recently revitalized rock scene. The New York City scene was in the midst of being overtaken by Brooklyn DJs who would help to shape the sounds of the rest of the 2000s before dominating the early 2010s. This helped to create a scene that seemed primed to dominate definitions of “cool” but just as it went mainstream, the decade shifted into the home stretch, and ’80s pop revivals and electronic dance took over. For rock in the first half of the 2000s, looking to the past meant deifying classic garage rock and adding dashes of punk energy. We’re still caught in that trap-a sea of new twists on old sounds and revivals of ’90s TV. The post-Y2K zeitgeist created a reflective musical culture that continually looked backwards to forge forwards. 2005 was the last gasp of the early-‘00s rock revival.
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