Quote:
Originally Posted by trace87
care to elaborate?
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Sure, I'll elaborate.
I generally believe, when talking about music, you have to watch for dishonesty. Not that people would outright lie, but that they would allow outside elements to influence their opinion. While this is something of a concern of mine the bigger issue is what it means for music.
I bought WBC's on a scant review and having heard Fell in Love with a girl on the radio. It played like an antidote. You weren't hearing the White Stripes style all over the radio. You didn't have a lot of garage influence out their in the minds of popular culture.
If their first album came out in 1999, in 11 years we've gone to a garage style being the absolute outlier to it being an essential ingredient. Maybe you don't see this as a big issue, but I do and thats what opinions are for after all. When I see statements like "I lived Dead Leaves in the Dirty ground and little else!" I almost want to ask
you to elaborate more. How does one find that song sufficient but no other song that they have. On WBC, let alone their catalog.
I suppose to understand where I'm coming from you should know these things...
1. I'm a huge Stripes fan and I think they've done wonders for tilling the musical soil to get more acts exposure.
2. I think the garage style is what I was always told punk was about but never actually saw. Punk seemed to take on a one-ups-manship in their quest for purity. Garage seemed to say purity could not be violated save for its removal. You were doing everything correctly if you didn't edit out flaws.
3. After all this, that I see the Stripes like philosophers. There were garage acts before them, and there are acts after them that I still love. But Jack White to me did a lot to put instruments back into the hands of Janitors and car salesmen who never really saw themselves as being able to "play" because there was this idealized vision of what it was to be a musician.
Again, maybe most of us here didn't have those visions, but we're talking at large here. Jack White to me is the installation of a musical Social Security Program, he made it better for everyone. I think when I discuss the stripes I'm probably always having a different conversation than the person I'm speaking to. I see them as a monolithic, Horatio-at-the-bridge figures and I don't think many others do.
Whether you see them as I do is nothing I pass judgment on, mind you but I'm always going to see them as the think that finally did away with big corporate rock and wasn't able to be co-opted. I firmly believe that
Get Behind Me Satan was Jack ducking the reporters from people magazine, saying "hey look, you want to come to me and put my **** in movies, fine, have this." And he played them The Nurse, and it threw the scent.
Longer than I expected, but thats what I was getting at.