thoughts?
- It’s not just Jack White's music that I hate. I hate everything about him. I hate him for making Eric Clapton look like Son House. I hate his stupid hats. I hate his “Look at me, I'm so obscurely retro!”–shaped guitars. I hate that his entire career is built on matching outfits and twee appropriations of what is actually good music. I hate him because Brochella is filled with guys in bucket hats and koi sleeves who know every White Stripes song but have never heard The Mooney Suzuki, The Oblivians, The Delta 72 or the approximately 50,000 other bands who did the same thing Jack White tries to do but way, way better.
This guy sounds like he's got penis envy. I don't like most of Jack White's stuff, but I definitely appreciate what he does/who he is. He is the type of artist that music needs these days, he writes music, plays music, produces music,creates instruments, and he is awesome with his kid. He's definitely a fucking weirdo , but who gives a shit? The only thing that bothers me about him sometimes is he seems like kind of a snobby hipster douchebag, but some of the best musicians are. If that was a reason to say someone's music is bad then we wouldn't have Van Halen or U2, etc.
Gotta disagree with the author here. Jack White isn't a favorite of mine, though I do admit to liking the early White Stripes albums. But if the complaint is that guys like White (I'm thinking Dave Grohl, the Black Keys, etc) are the "standard bearers" for rock music, my response is hey- it could be a hell of a lot worse. Compared to the days when fucking Axl Roses were the standard bearers? Or Steven Tyler? Or Dave fucking Matthews? I think we're better off. Your Whites and Grohls may have matured into navel-gazing or blandness (respectively), but they aren't ruining the genre.
Dave Grohl does some cool stuff still. Them Crooked Vultures was awesome (I hope they do a follow up album). The Sound Cities thing was a cool project (I didn't like the latest Foo Fighters album though. As you said, bland). He also let Gary Clark Jr. open for the Foo Fighters a bunch, which is great because Clark is a beast and needs more exposure.
This made me remember that Jack White is objectively the worst thing to happen to rock & roll ever. He’s both an avatar and a catalyst of everything wrong with the kitschy, ironic, self-aware and self-referential rock & roll bands that have cropped up since the turn of the century. My wife owns a clothing store in our town. She opened it in large part so she could wear and listen to whatever she wants to without having to ask permission. She played this exact album in her store and had to leave it on steady rotation for about 4 weeks because the stream of people walking in and asking what it was and absolutely loving it was fucking endless. From young girls to women in their 60's. Easily one of, if not the most appreciated albums that people hadn't heard before. I think this author is actually more concerned about style and pretense than the person he's defining himself in opposition to.The short answer is that it sounded like it was recorded in a phone booth. I glanced at the album artwork and Neil Young did, in fact, appear to be standing in a phone booth. Some quick research showed that Neil Young actually recorded an album in what is effectively a phone booth at Jack White’s studio in Nashville.
I loved the White Stripes first album, played it over and over one summer. I have never fallen in love with another, liked some tracks but felt like much of it was overworked when it was original sounding and sometimes overly derivative. There is no way they are the worst thing to happen to Rock and Roll. I think they were a good thing. When they came out Rock was fettered by a a bunch of shitty bands. Third Eye Blind, Sublime, Green Day and Pearl Jam were touch stones for a generation and they were just fucking horrible. The Stripes shook that shit up a lot. Way better to have crunch aggressive blues rock than what ever it is that you call the generation of rock that was out before them.
I like them inasmuch as I like can listen to certain songs I liked twenty years ago. Sacrilegious as it may be I like their cover of Trenchtown Rock more than the original, if only due to Bob Marley's low quality production. This article made me feel guilty for even still liking what little I like: http://www.avclub.com/article/jonah-ray-his-intense-burning-hatred-sublimes-what-206997 If I remember the guy likes Minor Threat, hates people who do drugs, personally I think straight edge people are kinda stupid but I found his argument very persuasive. I've done drugs, I might do drugs right now if you offered them to me, but I also hate people who's primary personality trait is how much weed they smoke. Sublime does represent that bro subculture of guys very well. That said, there are a number of tracks off 40oz. to Freedom that I still enjoy.
I think I've pinpointed what I don't like about the viewpoint of Sublime displayed in that article. I don't like the idea that music has to have a message for it to be good. There's plenty of good music that has no message whatsoever. I think it's silly to write off an artist merely based on the lyrical content and barely take into account the actual music. I think Sublime did a very good job of writing music that's enjoyable to listen to. Sure they're not campaigning to change the world or fight the system but not everyone needs to do that.
I agree, I think Sublime pretty much is the touchstone for 3rd wave ska. By therein lies the issue. They aren't a rock n' roll band, they a pop ska band. I think rock n' roll is effectively dead as a genera. I feel it died in the 70's and we just keep shoehorning bands from different styles into it as an umbrella term, and then getting frustrated when they don't really fit.
I can't remember, you may have seen me post these albums before. If not, you may enjoy one or both of these bands. I'm fucking pissed I just missed a show with both of them on the bill a couple weeks ago.I think rock n' roll is effectively dead as a genera. I feel it died in the 70's
I'm butting up against my mobile data limit, so I'll have to wait until I get home to listen. And I readily admit that there are still bands that carry on the torch. I guess I really just feel that the term has been diluted to the point of being meaningless for conveying what to expect.
Sublime is a gateway drug to 3rd wave ska without wholly being it. They ware their influences on their sleeve in a charming way and those influences are diverse and only partly ska. They are as much a gateway to The Decedents, Operation Ivy, various punk and hardcore acts, ska and reggee without being a pure form of any of them. As someone who played in 3rd wave ska bands long before Sublime came out the groups that everyone aspired to be like in the the 3rd wave were more along the lines of Bad Manners, The Toasters and Let Go Bowling. @Yeollowoftops@ post with Sublime and Gwen is a pretty good example of the whole Rockin Ska that No Doubt and Sublime pushed. I think it's a branch off the tree.
I've been waiting for an opportunity to tell this story for about a week, this isn't a very good segue but I'm going to force it anyway because I'm afraid I'll forget this ridiculous story. Around 2000-2001 me and a couple friends went to see Voodoo Glow Skulls and Pulley play at a club in Little Rock. One of the opening acts was a Christian ska bad. A three piece ska band made up of high school kids with a horn section that was a trumpet. They played a cover of Bryan Adams "Summer of '69" with the words changed to be about going to Bible camp in 1999. It was an origin story for an awful band told within the framing device of one of the worst musical choices ever forgotten by humanity: the Christianized Bryan Adams cover. They also asked the sound guy to make changes after every song and were about as annoying as you'd expect for a group with such poor judgement. Sorry for the tangent. I was just thinking about how weird that was and wanted to share. As a side not the VGS tour bus broke down which was disappointing but we got an extended Pulley set that was fun as hell.
Little fun trivia that you may not have heard: Gwen Stefani and Sublime did a song when they both were tramping around Orange County. The live version The recorded version
Jack White gives me a sense of going back to the late 1800s to early 1900s, as popular music took off, and new genres, styles, and instruments popped up every year. At the same time, there are developing projects to preserve folk music. What I see White doing is continuing the sort of experimentation and invention that happened then. He plays around with new instruments, styles, production. Third Man does this, I think, on an even broader spectrum. The mistake I think would be to see White as coming solely from rock and roll, or really having a discernible lineage at all. In It Might Get Loud, he says that is favorite song is Son House's Grinnin In Your Face. It is the roughness of it, a man singing accompanied by claps, that partly appeals to him. The article's take is that White is a bastion of rock and roll, but the thing is, White seems to be more about seeing what music can do and where it can go. On the other hand, the article is complete flame bait. It doesn't support it's main position with any real details, just complains about more things about the man. Then, it derides obscurity and hipsterdom, while at the same time, taking a superior stance based, it seems, largely off of knowing even more obscure bands. It's crap journalism, even for an editorial.
Yarr, he be an asshole who sells himself out like there's no tomorrow, don't be salty cause he's good at it. The little shit can work a guitar, and he already proved his worth with the Stripes and the Raconteurs– I don't think anyone serious is seriously taking him as a serious musician nowadays. Unpopular Opinion: Jack White is dead.
Spin Magazine, back in the '90s, had an article titled something like "top ten albums owned by people who hate music." I don't remember what all was on there; Fleetwood Mac's Rumours was one, Pearl Jam's Ten was another. It was basically a collection of all the shit that you got from Columbia House because the choices were so limited. Charles Mudede made a similar argument in The Stranger back in the early '00s that the Fugees were the worst thing that ever happened to rap music because they crushed the soul of black protest under a veneer of misappropriated Enya hooks. So I get his point. I've always thought the White Stripes were for people who wanted the street cred of listening to the Velvet Underground but didn't want to actually have to listen to music.
I've always liked Jack White. He's done a lot of good for Detroit and what not, he's got a great label for people to come in and record honestly. But however anyone feels about his music, anyone that claims he's not an absolute master guitarist is just lying to themselves. The guy can play the living hell out of a guitar, and that always seems to be missed when talking about anything else about him.
I don't think Jack White is that awful. I think he gets flack because he's popular and it really is cool to hate on the popular things. In my opinion, there are a lot of bands that are a lot worse for rock. The Monkees, Nickelback, Evanescence, Five Finger Death Punch, Good Charlotte, I can go on and on. Now, I'm not going to go out on a limb and say Jack White is absolutely amazing, but there's no denying he has enough talent to deserve the recognition he gets. I think he even deserves a bit of extra credit, because unlike a lot of musicians, he's willing to take on new projects every few years. If he really didn't care about what he does, I don't think he'd be willing to do that.
[tongue only slightly in cheek] The Monkeys... despite being a manufactured band had a longterm influence. Like it or not - in a weird sort of meta way... a lot of people can hum or sing the monkeys theme song.None of them had/will have any particular longterm influence.
Some of them had a pernicious short-term influence, though. Late 90s-early 2000s alternative rock was so stupidly over the top we got a decade of twee and anemic rehashes of earlier eras we haven't quite recovered from as a reaction. Unlike the reaction to stadium rock, which was great, we got rock music that was afraid to... rock.
And that is why they're bad bands. Anything that is remotely good will inspire people to be creative, to emulate yet experiment. They'll be remembered 20 years down the road. Jack White? He'll probably be remembered and people will still enjoy his music. The bands I've listed? They'll only be remembered for being awful. That's part of the problem though. They're awful bands that are easily marketable. They're out there to make the music industry a quick buck and they prove that band, easy formulas are the way to do it. In my opinion, that's 100 times more damaging to the world of music than anything Jack White has done.None of them had/will have any particular longterm influence.
I guess I'm one of those people that think they know music but don't. I don't recognize any of those bands at all, and like earlyish White Stripe songs. That said, I like them because he was able to take a guitar and drums and make it sound as full and complete as any band with tons of instrumentation can. I certainly don't think of him as a tastemaker or a standard bearer of rock n' roll.
I've been a White Stripes fan since 2000 when I first heard of them. And a fan of Jack White as well. He's not insincere as this article makes him out to be. I don't have koi sleeves and I haven't been to Coachella. As for his sound, there was a lot of lo-fi and retro-fi going around when The White Stripes came on the scene in a major way with Fell In Love With a Girl. The Strokes have been posted here a few times in the past week too, and though I don't care for them I don't think they do a better or worse job than Jack White in creating a certain sound. I say that because I don't believe that they are trying to create a certain sound, but that they genuinely are trying to create music that they envision, and that it sounds the way it does because that's how they want it to sound. Listen to Lazaretto and tell me that he's doing that to be cool or to experiment. That song is awesome, well developed, and original. If you're wondering what the Spanish is in the song, it's "I work hard. Like in plaster and wood."
I would agree with this article. I've always considered Jack White to be pretentious, I've read too many interviews with him saying stupid things that made me roll my eyes and think 'well this guy seems pretty obsessed with his image, to a degree where he's focussing on it more than the actual music'. Just never really thought the white stripes were that great, although I hated Meg's drumming far more than Jack's guitar and vocals, overall I consider him a pretty unremarkable musician. For every White stripes song that I thought was listenable there are three more that are just boring. He's much better in the raconteurs when he has good musicians around to help him up. As for the dead weather, yawn.
Nice use of 'twee appropriation of rock'
The author writes quite a lot for being wrong. I regularly enjoy Jack White's various acts, and I really don't see why he hates him so much. It's enjoyable to listen to, and there's a variety of emotions that the music evokes for me and apparently for a lot of others. I don't really understand what his standard is for good music, as I don't listen to all the obscure bands he does and he doesn't seem able to come up with an actual, tangible criticism of what makes White's music bad, or what good music should be. That said, on a side note maybe I should check out those bands, but I don't like someone just throwing examples of what they enjoy if they're going to be so critical about something and seeming to claim it's objectively bad.