defend the indefensible: jack white

no...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c24Wp4N34oA

i got nothing

Well he made get behind me satan

he made incest cool again

some of the early White Stripes songs were quite reasonable until he turned into Blind Willy White

FUCK YOU JACK

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzWBUtnqJ4I

Fairly hard to defend him as a person but the stripes are far from indefensible

He was a good role player in Meg White's project The White Stripe

s

some of the early White Stripes songs were quite reasonable until he turned into Blind Willy White

OTM. In the early-00s he was pretty much alone among retro rock revivalist frontmen as the guy who got the importance of stardom, of a distinctive image, of having a voice that's unmistakably yours from the moment you sing the first syllable. Now he's pretty much the most boring Mojo-friendly third-on-the-bill-at-Glastonbury artist imaginable.

a good role player? what, he was larping the whole time?

i think the White Stripes albums run the gamut from very good to completely classic but then again they've been finished for ten-plus years. i like a couple of Dead Weather songs. the video for Treat Me Like Your Mother is peak Jonathan Glazer and *might* not get made today. that's not really a Jack White thing exactly, though. I haven't heard his solo stuff.

but wow, does the cover of the new album look really cheap

it was cool when he punched that dude from the von bondies and it became the one thing the von bondies are remembered for in 2018

his parts in 'it might get loud' doc are ludicrous and not in a good way

From Billy Childish to Childish Gambino: The Jack White Story

The Von Bondies singer told police that White had tried to speak with him in the club, which was hosting a record release party for alt-country rockers Blanche, and that when he refused, the Stripes frontman angrily threw him to the ground and punched him seven times in his right eye.

if Jack White never went to prison it's because a jury didn't believe that the lead singer of the Von Bondies would be too cool to talk to the lead singer of the White Stripes.

Matt you should maybe listen to the linked track because it's so much worse than "Mojo-friendly third-on-the-bill-at-Glastonbury"

i stand with UMS

I'm told he has a sense of humor (difficult though that may be to believe).

Also, I find a certain value in characters like White and Billy Corgan - these ludicrous rock guys who are fun to talk about, roll your eyes at, etc.

he's just boring and lame, he's not even weird celeb lame like corgan

Yeah but he releases stuff like this, which is non-boring and makes for fun "o_O"s:

Here's the complete list of features on the Ultra LP, which the Third Man website says will be the standard version of the vinyl format of Lazaretto:

- 180 gram vinyl
- 2 vinyl-only hidden tracks hidden beneath the center labels
- 1 hidden track plays at 78 RPM, one plays at 45 RPM, making this a 3-speed record
- Side A plays from the inside out
- Dual-groove technology: plays an electric or acoustic intro for "Just One Drink" depending on where needle is dropped. The grooves meet for the body of the song.
- Matte finish on Side B, giving the appearance of an un-played 78 RPM record
- Both sides end with locked grooves
- Vinyl pressed in seldom-used flat-edged format
- Dead wax area on Side A contains a hand-etched hologram by Tristan Duke of Infinity Light Science, the first of its kind on a vinyl record
- Absolutely zero compression used during recording, mixing and mastering
- Different running order from the CD/digital version
- LP utilizes some mixes different from those used on CD and digital version

(NB - I have zero interest in his actual music)

why do you hate this song scott there's some cool triplets and a theremin i thought you would like that

it's funny to me that both Jack White and Julian Casablancas, garage rock revival darlings, are now having proggy excess phases in their solo careers

The White Stripes were great at least up through Elephant, he's done good to not-so-good work since, and he was awful cute back in the day.

More defensible than most, tbh.

his personal low point for me is still when he defended compressing icky thump to hell despite being an avowed analog fetishist

I'm told he has a sense of humor (difficult though that may be to believe).

He produced an album and a Netflix special for comedian Rory Scovel, and you can see him in an interstitial bit in the trailer here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uftuhKxMxhY

"but wow, does the cover of the new album look really cheap"

yeah no fuck, that is the worst cover art I've seen since YYY's "mosquito".

I still like the White Stripes albums but everything he's done solo has been terrible at best to god-fucking-awful, meaning Meg was clearly the genius in the band.

hey that Silkworm song is pretty rad!

jw produced/promoted that loretta lynn record

He’s keeping the porkpie hat industry afloat.

He opened a pressing plant.

xpost glad you like it niels they are a great super underrated band imo

He really needs to become more mysterious and fucking just disappear

someone on this thread must have bought a har mar superstar album at some point in the past. every generation gets the dorks it deserves.

Still love the first 3 White Stripes albums, plus a bunch of songs from the next 3.

Show in 2001 was an all-time experience.

I'm sure they're in my top 20 Bands.

It's 2018 now.

oops, my last post on here was actually supposed to be for that hobo johnson thread. my apologies to mr. white.

okay, my last sentence in that post can actually stay...

I like the latest cover art - bit unexpected and intriguing for him.

It always bummed me out that the feverishly creative talents of Michel Gondry were wasted on this "back to basics rawk" doofus.

im mostly annoyed with the gimmick of making everything blue. wake me up after his next band has everything in yellow and he's covered all three primary colors.

at any rate it definitely seems like he spends more time comparing swatches than he does writing songs

He put out a good Wolf Eyes record

http://variety.com/2018/music/news/jack-white-to-auction-off-bizarre-items-from-his-career-on-discogs-com-video-1202736754/

Classic up thru Elephant in 2003. Classic for "Black Math" alone. That record is really great. I like the ones before it a lot too. Everything since = DUD

Just got the RS with him on the cover in the mail today.

idk why beyonce felt lemonade needed an appearance from him, but if *she* likes him, then

gave holly golightly her biggest exposure

tbh I think every white stripes album is at least fine. they were a cool band.

haven't found any of the solo records or other projects at all interesting until the over-the-top horribleness of that new album

Icky Thump is a remarkably weird album for what was, at the time, a pretty damn huge band

i think get behind me satan is the best white stripes record, the arrangements are occasionally v inventive in their attempt to expand beyond the rim of the v narrow concept of "the white stripes." some of the raconteurs singles are pretty good. i love "don't hurt yourself" but beyoncé really sells everything about it. his liner notes have always been super obnoxious. but i think this guy is obv very talented but as soon as the white stripes dissolved his songwriting got aimless probably bc it wasn't shadowed by the parentheses of a concept

Would have loved to have been in the room for the Stripes' Peel sessions -- they're great. (Speaking of John Peel, I always thought it was fitting when Liverpool supporters sang Javier Mascherano's name to the "Seven Nation Army" bassline...)

If I remember right, Berman was palling around with one of the Black Keys and that was his nickname for White.

Good zing Berman

Great zing, but I would take one middling Jack White song over the entire Black Keys catalog.

The worst White Stripes song over the entire Black Keys catalog maybe but the Raconteurs and solo White aren't even sports bar jukebox-worthy.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never heard anything after the Reconteurs’ debut single. Thanks for the warning.

the second raconteurs album is really really good. great rhythm section in that band too

WTF
The dude dropped a great record out of nowhere

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgNdTRU5xLbJZXvhYjSfFovo0MS1sOga2&si=bPnG4T_aiztaNgqx

not a JW fan normally, but i am really enjoying this.
suspect it's easy to grab now, but i can drop a link to my google drive for it in 320 if anyone is interested ..

Official release soon
https://www.reddit.com/r/jackwhite/s/nxNuNpzTAH

I hope they wont ruin the raw, compressed mix that bnefir the songs a lot

I’m halfway through this album and fuck me if it’s not the best thing I’ve heard from him since Elephant… though I actually haven’t bothered with his solo albums after the first one.

I'll have to give this a good listen. Love the White Stripes and love his first solo album, Blunderbuss, but I've had mixed feelings about everything he's put out since - outside of what he'll play at a show, haven't really returned to any of them.

It's better than anything WS everdid imo.
Yes, it is THAT good.

about a minute into the first song after his vocals kicked i tuned out. the guitar work was great otherwise.

jack white may be a billy corgan.

need to immediately create the corgan standard as a person musically you can respect, but vocally/lyrically you have to turn a blind eye one, two, way too many blind eyes.

*shrug* same deal as White Stripes vocally. The guitar work rips and the songs are pretty wild-eyed, which is all I ask of JW III.

This is on Spotify now

Definitely feels like his most inspired solo album.

This is ao much better than the Stripes (and of course the rest of his solo output):
sharp, loud from beginning to end, no unnecessary ballads, not trying too hard and notcommercialized. A masterpiece.

Damn it, you guys are going to make me try this out.

You know how with some bands/musicians, you need a lot of data points before you can start to wrap your head around them? Like, you can’t hear one Ween album and really appreciate Ween.

Jack White and his music are the opposite. The more data points, the less I appreciate it and even the earlier stuff that I liked a lot starts to fall apart. So much of it is posturing and play acting, but I guess a lot of music is like that.

I was listening to an old mix cd yesterday that had Ball and Biscuit on it. Initially I was excited, then I started noticing how slight the song is, and then some sweet gnarly solos shut me up.

does anyone still listen to jon spencer anymore? seems like another case of "the more you hear the less you want to hear". and obviously they are similar artists.

though i will say that jack white has some memorable songs and outside of pussy galore jon spencer does not.

as someone who has been watching the friggin' olympics for 8 days "memorable" is putting it mildly.

I agree that JW is probably a better songwriter than JS, but I would much rather listen to JS. I still like the White Stripes and have held on to my CDs/LPs, but I'm much more likely to listen to the Blues Explosion, or Royal Trux.

All of those guys deal in artifice and projecting grimy Stones vibes to some extent, but White doesn't seem to do as much with it. He comes across as more sincere than those other bands, but he doesn't have anything more to say so he feels slighter.

I dunno, he's still got a lot of good jams. I haven't heard Seven Nation Army in a while but if it came on I'd turn it up.

does anyone still listen to jon spencer anymore? seems like another case of "the more you hear the less you want to hear". and obviously they are similar artists.

I still listen to Pussy Galore all the time — Dial 'M' For Motherfucker is a masterpiece — but the Blues Explosion never seemed to have any songs, it all sounded like rehearsal tapes of three dudes throwing ideas around hoping something would congeal.

i don't really listen to pussy galore anymore but i loved them at the time. i bought all the records. i love trash can rock. i got rid of anything i bought after PG that was PG-related. boss hogg. JSBE. i don't think i ever bought a Bewitched record. i was never a royal trux fan. much to the chagrin of 95% of the indie people i know. i think PG just tapped into something groovy and by themselves they were never as strong. i might enjoy Orange if i heard it. that had the most real songs on it i think.

i was a huge gun club fan. and i probably always compared jack white and WS unfavorably (and probably unfairly) to gun club. jack white to me was the pale ghost of gun club, pixies, flat duo jets. but he outsold all of them by 59585853% so good for him. good going fella!

i'll listen to some of the new one on my big speakers though. i'm open-minded!

does anyone still listen to jon spencer anymore? seems like another case of "the more you hear the less you want to hear". and obviously they are similar artists.

i just listened to my first jon spencer album last week (cleaning out some cd's left behind 20 years ago by an ex), and the irony has not aged well. at least jack white committed fully to the bit, and didn't have to keep reassuring you that he was in on the joke.

based on the early reviews here, i'm actually excited to listen to the new one, which hasn't been true since elephant.

Big fan of RTX and JSBE, but I've never heard Pussy Galore. I should probably rectify that. Where's the best place to start?

They have two full-length albums, Right Now! and Dial 'M' for Motherfucker, that are great. Both are on Spotify, but not on Tidal for some reason. They also recorded a track-by-track cover of the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main St. which is more entertaining to contemplate than to listen to (they clearly lose interest in the project pretty quickly but slog it out all the way to the end). That's streaming, too.

O

whoops

pussy galore’s music is pretty terrible but they looked cool as hell!

imagine releasing that yuck yuck blues explosion shit in 2024!

i love the sugarshitsharp EP. one side is just an einsturzende neubaten cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL4nPZWKlHU

"neubauten"

their last album is kinda the beginning of royal trux.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clkj8P3X6Po

i came on board in a big way in 1986 with the Groovy Hate Fuck release. what can i say, i was a fan of the jesus & mary chain and richard kern and sonic youth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK_ICQhRaeE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKNHEU6OCy4

but the two albums that unperson highlighted are their most sustained efforts. album as album experiences. they're a lot of fun. if you like noise rock with kitchen utensil percussion.

jack white should cover this one for a b-side.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IK9pBpOFpk

Still taking this one in.

I love all 6 white stripes albums, and the ratio of stripes songs I like to all the other projects' songs I like is probably 2 to 1.

"Bless Yourself" could have easily fit on Elephant or Icky Thump. It's the kind of stomp I enjoy most from White.

My least favorite White stuff is where he's trying to figure out failed relationships. We're all just fumbling about, Jack.

Since we’ve sidetracked into talking about Pussy Galore I’d say Groovy Hate Fuck and Right Now are absolute must listens…two of my alltime favorites…but pretty much everything they did was great including the live album. Agree that JSBE is mostly skippable though.

The Blues Explosion live album, Controversial Negro, is OK. It feels like one long song, which captures their jabbering, string-a-bunch-of-shit-together-for-an-hour thing pretty well.

The 18 seconds Blues Hammer plays in Ghost World pretty much destroyed JSBE for me, what with the pretty frontman and the plausible legacy opening act. I know that's not really where Spencer was coming from, but it made the silliness of the Explosion seem somehow less fun than the absurdist misanthropy of PG.

i'd rather just listen to 90s noise-rock. jesus lizard. the cows? i don't really listen to the cows. but amrep/T&G has always been my standard for lo-fi scuzz. i'm not a big retro/nu-garage/nu-rockabilly band kinda person. i've never had a pompadour. the hives were fun for a minute. same with rocket from the crypt. i'm so glad ILM turned me on to A Frames. maybe Matos? that's the stuff! goth doom garage goodness. or just any crazy kid indie punk band from australia. they make a new one every week down there! and they always sound cool! i don't know how they do it.

A Frames were so great

I don't listen to JSBX on the regular but I'm fond of them and goddamn at their peak they could absolutely destroy a club, one of the great live bands

also I mean, it was meant to be a bit silly and funny is how I always took it

stuff like this is fun to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O_E_siN2rU

there was definitely a time and moment in the zeitgeist for JSBX for sure.

i really did love pussy galore so i don't want to diss the guy too much. he just went in a direction that wasn't really my bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeW-mOXdkvU

^ always puts me in a good mood

i'm not a big retro/nu-garage/nu-rockabilly band kinda person. i've never had a pompadour.

The A-Bones were a fucking blast live. I was at their "farewell" show at Maxwell's and it was just a preposterously drunken rock 'n' roll party. I saw Reverend Horton Heat pretty early on, too, maybe on the tour for his second album. That was a good show.

I’ve still never really heard anything like Rocket From The Crypt’s Circa Now, it’s like if Wire worked at Boll Weevil and ate a bunch of glue

wire/pixies idk weird album

A Frames rule, yes

I'm really surprised at how much I love this record. Now I'm suddenly a Jack White fan again.