Detroit Rock Roots: The White Stripes, White Blood Cells

Scott Thill

The Motor City has quite a musical heritage if you stop to consider it, a contemplative maneuver you won't get these days from the majority of teen dumbshits pounding their heads to whiteboy rappers like Eminem and Kid Rock, two disgraces to the game. And that's whatever game we might be talking about, be it hiphop -- I really wish cats like Eminem, Dr. Dre, and every hardcore act from either coast looking to market their nonsense would stop calling it that -- rock n' roll, or interesting music, in general.

Eminem is simply the repressed remainder of Vanilla Ice's short stay on the popcult landscape come back to redeem via some heavy marketing all that is White in the world of rap music. He's also the kinda guy that'll threaten to shoot someone but not put any bullets in his gun, and get busted for it. Similarly, Kid Rock's hedonistic ramblings about porn, trailer trash and, well, himself, are a version of masculine self-glorification that the world was on its way dispensing with when the sensitive and intelligent Eddie Vedder -- as well as the sensitive and dead Kurt Cobain -- made the mainstream years ago.

So now here we are in the new millennium and we're smack back in the midst of an earlier cultural shift encompassing not much more than songs about dick-sucking as power plays. Great. Nice to know the president hasn't changed either. Same old cocks, same old Bush.

So what's wrong with this picture? And, more to the point of this essay, what is wrong with Detroit? While Kid Rock and Eminem put forth more pose than anorexic supermodels, their city's sonic legacy suffers for it.

But, as they say, any publicity is good publicity these days.

More Music That Matters

"Private Press, indeed. DJ Shadow has ironically withdrawn further into himself the more public he's become. Which is a good thing, because he's a brilliant artist whose bad ideas are better than the majority of the good ideas littering the musical landscape."

"That stuff is just marketing. I don't give a fuck about it. I feel comfortable being called a punk band, because I feel that's what we came out of."

"And that's where some of the roots of this are: bizarre delusions in the minds of people with too much time on their hands that somehow I deprived them of being major label rock stars."

"It's a trend, it's a fad, it's a fashion, and it will be gone. We didn't come to build walls, we came to knock 'em down."

Although the JSBX have left splintered punk behind in favor of standard blues rock riffs, these wolves still have teeth, and they bite real hard.

Which is why we should be interested when some no-name band consisting of only two people, neither of them musical geniuses, from some small-market label start making waves and appearances on late-night television. Such is the growing rep of the White Stripes, the brother-sister combo of Jack and Meg White (hence, the band's name), who have on accident or on purpose countered the high-tech production of clean noise found in today's music with a bracing dose of honest, sensitive lyrics buttressed by drums and a guitar. That's it. Ok, maybe a harmonica or organ thrown in here or there. But not much more.

Two of the coolest people you'll probably get to meet, the Whites -- the irony is murder, isn't it? -- put a unique spin on the utterly indefinite phrase, "Keep it real," their songs pulling cleanly and with respect from that African-American heritage rock n' roll still owes back pay to, the blues. Their latest offering, White Blood Cells, is a bit more complex in terms of influences -- that is, there are no Son House covers and the entire disc is dedicated to Loretta Lynn -- but its main thesis emerges intact: the music and the method matters. The pose gets left behind.

Witness the dirty guitar intro on the headbanging intro of the disc's first track "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," all fuzz and bottom, and no cleanup. Same goes with Jack White's vocals. While eerily reminiscent of Robert Plant on their last album, De Stijl, this time around we get a little more of the original Motor City Madman, Iggy Pop, with, of course, White's high-pitched squeaks and refreshing fervor. Such fervor is ultimately what separates the White Stripes from other pitch-perfect wails found on the radio dial.

That and the lyrics, which usually take interpersonal pain and struggle as their collective thematic centers. "I'm finding it harder to be a gentleman every day/All the manners I've been taught have slowly died away," White croaks in "I'm Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman," a winsome contemplation on the shifting roles within relationships that Kid Rock and Eminem probably consider too much mental energy to waste their time on. Or "Can't keep away from the girl/These two sides of my brain/Need to have a meeting," desire's clever wordplay found in the disc finest track, the breakneck madness of "Fell in Love With a Girl." There are plenty of examples if you're not convinced, but my job is not convince you that the White Stripes can summon depth and catharsis out of two musicians and what some might consider corny lyrics about girls and boys.

Support Morphizm -- Pick up White Stripes CDs at Djangos!

And although the band sometimes dips into a realm of innocence that seems nothing but anachronistic in this age of "Real Worlds" ad infinitum/nauseam -- such as the silly but catchy "We're Going to Be Friends" -- it's still a nice change of pace from the backward-hat whiteboy metal passing itself off as cultural capital these days. And though some critics, including myself think that Meg might want to take some more drum lessons and the band ought to hire a bassist to fill out its already heavy sound and feel, there is something equally refreshing in the family affair that the Whites have put together in spite of convention, whether its an ironic jab or simple preference.

Isn't it sad that we can't really tell the difference anymore?

If anything, the White Stripes are doing their best to clean up the dumb-as-a-post Caucasian streak soiling Detroit's good name, as least as much as Michigan-native Chris Webber is doing on the basketball court. And like CWebb, the Stripes have the complete game, use both their inside and outside moves to score points, and finish well.

Let's hope it's enough to win the battle for the city's rep.

Scott Thill -- a media fanatic who finds the time to write on everything that does not include the words "boy band" -- is a gainfully employed dotcom editor currently finishing his first novel, The Dangerous Perhaps.