David Emery Online

It's better to have loved and lost...

2 February 2011

It was inevitable, really.

The White Stripes are one of my all time favourite bands. For me, they embodied a perfect representation of what a band should be; uncomplicated, inventive, dynamic. The mystique they built up around them was perfect – the ‘are they brother and sister’ story, the red and white, the constraints they enforced upon themselves.

There’s a bit in the Under Great White Northern Lights film that came out last year where Jack talk about purposely keeping his keyboard a little bit out of reach when he’s singing into the mic; the physical stretch and the added difficulty adds an edge to the performance which otherwise wouldn’t be there. It’s the White Stripes through and through.

I think that’s why I feel far more sadness then I thought I would at the news that they’ve split up. The White Stripes have always been up there for me, but nothing Jack White has done outside it has really come close. Sure, there are elements – brief flashes of genius – within both The Raconteurs and the Dead Weather (to pick the most prominent of a long list of White side projects) that remind why you’ve made the effort to listen to them in the first place, but they’re no comparison to the real thing.

It’s the constraints that make it.

As to why the split, and why now? The timing I have no idea on, although I doubt it’s chosen at random – maybe this is the lead up to yet another White project, and maybe even a solo one (which is probably the only thing that could get me excited, really). I think why can be answered by this video, which closes the aforementioned film – these two have evidently been through a lot, much that we don’t know about; it’s time for them to move on:

It would be unfair to mourn the passing of a band such as this without talking about the music, easy as it is in this case to talk about anything but. Unsurprisingly if you’ve read this far I prefer them at there most raw; simple, uncomplicated but perfect. This naturally leads to the first pair of albums (the self titled debut and De Stijl), which are impossible to chose between in my mind, although there’s no doubt that Elephant is their masterwork melding their previous rawness with an energy and popular sensibility without sacrificing their previous accomplishments.

My favourite White Stripes song oddly is a cover – of Bob Dylan, no less – that captures an atmosphere and a feeling in a way that very few songs ever have. It’s also entirely appropriate to this news:

In this day and age it’s so easy to be cynical, turn your nose up and claim that you “didn’t like them that much anyway”, or indeed don’t really like anything that much really, especially if it’s popular.

Screw that though; goodbye White Stripes. We’ll miss you.