The White Stripes “White Blood Cells” (Best of the Decade)
While the White Stripes catalog contains quite a bit of great material, for me the band’s greatest release will probably always be White Blood Cells. I have always gravitated towards the Stripes’ more garage oriented work, and though Cells wears Jack White’s blues and country influences proudly on its sleeve, the fast and furious guitar-and-drums rock sound is still paramount. The one-two combo of “Dead leaves and the Dirty Ground” and “Hotel Yorba” is one of the greatest album openers of all time. Where “Dead Leaves” seesaws between Jack’s almost timid sounding wail with grinding guitar, “Yorba” is a frantic nonsensical jam that is pretty much a two minute crescendo that never slows down.
Though much beef has been made of Meg White’s ability (or inability) to play the drums well, the White Stripes would have a completely different sound without her. I can’t really imagine Tool’s Danny Carey, for instance, playing the drums for “Fell in Love with a Girl” or “I Think I Smell a Rat.” Where a perfectionist would probably give those songs a clean-cut sound, Meg’s filthy abuse of the drum-set adds precisely the skuzzy element of rock and roll that I find compelling about the genre in the first place. Whether she’s banging out the repetitious beat of the frenzied little ode to the loss of creativity, “Little Room,” or adding her vocals to the sweet little schoolyard song “I Can Tell that We Are Going to be Friends,” Meg’s contribution to the sound is as essential as Jack’s guitar.
Probably the most amazing thing though about White Blood Cells is its relative simplicity. In the early 2000s, on the heels of releases like Radiohead’s Kid A and Modest Mouse’s The Moon and Antarctica, it seemed like rock was on its way towards becoming infinitely more complicated. One began to believe that perhaps all the good simple guitar licks were already gone and that the only way forward for rock was to mire itself in elaborate tangles of electronica and intricate chord progressions. Jack and Meg went the opposite route however, with 16 songs that proved that sometimes the best way to rock is the most direct approach. At the time the straightforwardness of White Blood Cells was infinitely refreshing, an immediate and accessible sound that rocked the socks off of music critics and soccer moms alike.
While the straightforward sound was at the time echoed by a few other great bands, notably in the Hives and to a lesser extent the Strokes, no one else really did it with as much of a no-reservations uppercut as the White Stripes. Now that garage seems to be making another comeback in popular music, I would hope that some of these new bands take a lesson from White Blood Cells. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes the shortest space between two points is a straight line. And sometimes you just have to rock the hell out and let the listeners pick up the pieces.