Of all of the clichés and tenets associated with adolescence and Growing Up, “Be yourself” is the one that is the most preached and least practiced. It is actually very hard to be yourself around others, especially around people you do not know.
When applied to the music industry (or the entertainment industry in general), it is really hard to be yourself. The history of rock is littered with artists who have either outright faltered or second-guessed themselves into oblivion upon meeting with a healthy dose of success (see: Jefferson Airplane). The artists themselves and the producers and the critics and the fans all wind up being thrown into a vacuum perfectly built for overthinking and/or being consumed with attaining a new sound. The most admirable thing about The White Stripes is they appear to be absolutely comfortable with who they are. All Jack White does is play the guitar phenomenally while Meg White beats the drums in a most simplistic way. There is no flash, no explosions, no theatrics. No lyrics in which a night stand is a metaphor for the frailty of a relationship between co-dependents.
The White Stripes were already making a name for themselves before “Seven Nation Army” was released but this is the song that garnered them national attention on a much wider level. (They even became Conan O’Brien’s house band of sorts, being the sole musical guest for an entire week on Late Night after the release of Elephant.)
For a band that does not use a bass guitar in any of their songs “Seven Nation Army” starts out with what sounds like a bass guitar but it is in actuality an acoustic guitar run through a low octave pedal. But the star of the song is Jack’s electric riffs: highly-charged bursts that compliment perfectly Meg’s smashing cymbals. The song perfectly blends the feelings associated with garage rock and arena rock. It is a song about fighting back without ever hitting you over the head with anything. And the fuzzy solo that emanates from Jack’s guitar during the middle of the song is nothing less than stripped-down bliss; a reminder in the vain of Eddie Van Halen or Jimi Hendrix that one can perform a guitar solo without adhering to the same old tired script of “if you’re going to go for the higher chords, it has to be over the top.”
One would be hard-pressed not to include The White Stripes in the discussion of which bands are the definitive face of this decade. “Seven Nation Army,” with its addictive breaks and riffs and Jack White’s nicely flowing syllabic delivery of lyrics like “I’m going to Wichita/Far from this opera forevermore,” is not only a fantastically crafted rock song but it—perhaps unintentionally—also acts as a perfect apotheosis for this decade which, perversely, makes it a kind of perfect microcosm of this decade.
What I mean is that this decade can probably best be described as one in which we were, collectively, never ourselves. For whatever reason(s), we believed that the stock market would reach 30,000. That “day trader” was a title worth achieving. That spending $100 on dog costumes could be rationalized. That debt is sometimes better than liquidity. That houses never lose value. We bought into a lot of things that were fundamentally at odds to what we believed in beforehand and tried to pass it off as a new way of doing things (I am very much guilty of this as well).
Jack and Meg White could have fully bought in to the awesomeness that all of the critics heaped on to them after the release of White Blood Cells. They could have fallen hook, line, and sinker for an unearned genius label. Instead, they continued to just be themselves (“Don’t want to hear about it/Every single one’s got a story to tell”).
They made an album that played to their strengths, and a song that is arguably one of the best of the ’00′s.
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