transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. You know, with just one trip to Whole Foods, you can travel the world. First stop, discover the taste of the Mediterranean with big sales on brands like Doseco, Arreos, and San Pellegrino. With Whole Foods prepared foods, dinner is solved. You can roam the world with empanadas, burritos, soups, and more. Maybe expand your snack repertoire to South America with colorful and crunchy Peruvian potato chips, then straight to Mexico for dessert. You can pick up a Tres Leches family pack cake for only $10 every Friday. All aboard? Save on regional flavors at Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again Season 2, now streaming on Disney+. Charlie Cox and Vincent Dinafri are back, and Kristen Ritter makes her highly anticipated return as Jessica Jones. In an all-new season, as Bear Fist tightens his grip on New York City, he makes Daredevil as his top target. Matt Murdock fights from the shadows, hoping to bring down Fisk's corrupt empire and reclaim his city. Don't miss Daredevil Born Again Season 2, now streaming only on Disney+.

Speaker 2:
[01:19] It just doesn't feel like a song that one person wrote. You know? It doesn't feel like a melody. It doesn't feel like a modest series of repeated musical notes that one person can take credit for, in the sense that one day, one person came up with that melody, and now the melody exists because of that one person. Are we sure about that? No way. This melody has always existed. This melody is too thoroughly ingrained in the fabric of human existence to have ever not existed. This melody has existed for exactly as long as the land and the sea and the light have existed. And the Lord said, let there be light and the melody exists. Right? Right. Adam and or Eve hummed this melody as he and or she bit into an apple from the tree of knowledge. Right? Right. You get me. But I guess I'm wrong. Grudgingly, skeptically, I am professionally obligated to tell you that apparently for years, adverbs, for centuries of human existence, for eons of planetary existence, this melody did not exist. And then one day this melody just popped out of this one dude's mouth. What you just heard is a man named Solomon Linda, singing slash writing slash creating in the biblical sense, the melody to the song, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, in the year 1939 in a recording studio in Johannesburg, South Africa. Solomon Linda, a Zulu tribesman and singer and songwriter and leader of the super popular acapella group, Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. In that photo that Solomon on the far left there, he also gets top billing in this group because he's the tallest. We just heard Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds singing a song of theirs called Imbue, spelled M-B-U-B-E. Imbue is the Zulu word for lion. This song is less than three minutes long and the whole song's lovely. But yeah, wow, in the last twenty seconds, as the song's fading out as an afterthought, you might say, Solomon Linda says, let there be light and he just fires off the melody that we've all heard a billion times a piece because it's always existed. He just tweets it out. Solomon improvises that melody. Off the dome, get out of town. So I read this article in Rolling Stone magazine in the year 2000. And this article has stuck with me now for 26 years. The May 25th, 2000 issue of Rolling Stone. Britney Spears on the cover. Oops, I did it again, era. Britney's posing in front of the American flag. There she is. I read this incredibly long, wild, captivating, convoluted, intensely reported and quite disheartening Rolling Stone article about the history, the grim genealogy of The Lion Sleeps Tonight. An article written by the South African author and journalist Riyan Milan. The first paragraph of this article has been banging around in my skull for a quarter century now. Quote, once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Solomon Linda. It was 1939 and he was standing in front of a microphone in the only recording studio in Black Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, when it happened. He hadn't composed the melody or written it down or anything. He just opened his mouth and out it came, a haunting skein of 15 notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, which was taken to England and turned into a record that became a very big hit in that part of Africa. Now of course, this long, wild, captivating, convoluted, intensely reported and quite disheartening Rolling Stone article is about how we get from Solomon Linda singing that melody in 1939 to a dude from Brooklyn singing this melody in 1961. Yeah, here we have a Brooklyn do-wop group called The Tokens, with their gargantuan bonkers blockbuster 1961 number one pop hit, The Lion Sleeps Tonight. That's Jay Siegel of The Tokens singing lead there. Sorry, I don't know which one of these guys is Jay Siegel. Jay might be the shortest guy this time, just to mix things up. The leader of the band is always either the tallest person or the shortest. You're either Abraham Lincoln or you're Napoleon. This Rolling Stone article on the history of The Lion Sleeps Tonight is like 11,000 words long. Short version, Mbuwe, the song by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds sells around 100,000 copies in Africa, but Solomon Linda had sold the publishing rights for 10 shillings. Pete Seeger, the legendary New York City folk singer, Pete Seeger hears Mbuwe and Pete's band The Weavers cut their own blockbuster version of this song in the early 50s, and the Weavers call their song Wee Mbuwe because that's what Pete Seeger thinks Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds are singing. The tokens cover Wee Mbuwe and add some words in an opera singer, et cetera, and they put out The Lion Sleeps Tonight in 1961, and it tops the charts and becomes a song and a melody that has literally always existed. Shorter version, a whole bunch of white people, most of them record executives, make tens of millions of dollars off the melody of a black singer who gets practically nothing. Sorry to be blunt and or cringe, but that's the size of it. That's the cold, hard, realist takeaway from this Rolling Stone article. But there is also a warm, fuzzy, idealist takeaway from the saga behind The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Someone wrote that melody. Someone sang that melody for the first time. A real-life human being saw the face of God and translated the sight of the face of God into a modest series of repeated musical notes. It's the second half of that opening Rolling Stone paragraph that first struck me and has never stopped striking me, right? He just opened his mouth and at it came a haunting skein of fifteen notes that flowed down the wires and into a trembling stylist that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax, et cetera. The awestruck physical description of that act of creation, the radical and frankly unbelievable idea that that melody did not exist and then suddenly it existed thanks to a guy named Solomon Linda. In the Rolling Stone article, it says, quote, it is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows. End quote. Especially as a little kid, I knew so many songs that I just assumed the whole world had always known. Yeah, I am not convinced that this hook has not always existed. I am pretty sure that when Adam and or Eve bit into an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and got themselves expelled from the Garden of Eden, as they were leaving, God himself taunted them by singing, na na na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye. Not so, apparently, allegedly. Apparently, this is the chorus to the 1969 hit Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye by a New York City rock band called Steam. Here we have Steam on the cover of their self-titled 1970 album, Steam. I'll be honest, I could have lived with a less literal album cover depiction of the band, Steam. If you're not looking at this, don't. No thank you. Thanks for wearing towels, fellas, I guess. You're telling me na na na na na na na na hey hey hey goodbye is a melody one person came up with less than a decade before I was born? Absolutely not. And I bet this one's even older. Wilson Pickett, Land of a Thousand Dances, 1966. Now, this is definitely the version of this song I'd heard a billion times before I entered grade school. But with all due respect to Wilson Pickett, that eternal melody did not first emerge from his mouth. All right, we got a slowly evolving Lion Sleeps Tonight type situation here, melodically. Land of a Thousand Dances is written and first recorded in 1962 by Chris Kenner, who is from New Orleans. And I am delighted to say that you can totally tell he's from New Orleans. Twist, Twister, Like Your Sister. Great song, but Chris Kenner's original does not have the crucial and eternal nah, nah, nah, nah, nah part. That particular haunting skein of notes apparently popped out of the mouth of Frankie Cannibal Garcia, lead singer of the Los Angeles-based Mexican-American rock band Cannibal and the Headhunters, when they released their cover of Land of a Thousand Dances in 1966. Apparently, Frankie improvised this melody when he forgot the actual words to this song, which kind of sounds made up, that story, but it sounds made up in the cool, essential, rock and roll mythology sort of way. Yes? And then Wilson Pickett covers the cannibal and the headhunter's cover, and yeah, that's the version I've heard a billion times before I learned to speak. And the version that existed back when mastodons still roamed the earth. That was too much context. Let's do one with way less context. Gary Glitter, Rock and Roll Part Two, 1972. Gary Glitter, The Less You Know, The Better. You simply do not have to hand it to him. Let's you and me agree to think of Rock and Roll Part Two as a divine, prelapsarian, authorless specter of the public domain, which it basically is. The insidious primacy of that riff, that hook, that blunt force melody. You know, give me one solid. Woohoo! Logically, I know that this is Cool in the Gang, Cool with the K, the coolest with a K band ever emerge from New Jersey. Logically, I know that this song is called Celebration, and it came out in 1980. And thus, grudgingly, I have to acknowledge that this song is younger than I am. I am older than the Cool in the Gang song, Celebration. I personally have lived in a world without do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, woo-hoo in it. But also, obviously, no, I haven't. The first fish or whatever that crawled up on land three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, the first fish celebrated his or her or its accomplishment by going do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, woo-hoo, obviously. What do all these songs have in common? All these songs other than The Lion Sleeps Tonight. By the time I'm ten years old, all these songs, all these hooks, all these melodies feel like timeless, authorless, natural-born occurrences. They feel like crucial elements on the periodic table. And I ain't never memorized the periodic table, but you bet I got all these songs memorized, internalized, personally canonized. I will remember and love and cherish all of these songs for the rest of my life. And that's because, as a wide-eyed little kid, I heard them all constantly at baseball games. Logically, I know that this is the outrageously tasty saxophone riff to The Heat Is On, an almighty 1984 jam by Glenn Frey, He of the Eagles, 1984, it's shit. Logically, I understand that I am once again older than this song, and probably most people know The Heat Is On as that one song from Beverly Hills Cop, right? Not me, though. This is a baseball song to me. Specifically, it is a 1980s St. Louis Cardinals song to me. I spent most of my first ten years of existence in most of the 80s, living in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, and my first love, sports-wise, was the mid-to-late 80s St. Louis Cardinals. John Tudor, Tony Pena, Jack Clark, Tommy Herr, Terry Pendleton, Ozzie Smith, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee, Kurt Ford, Jose Okendo off the bench. That's the Cardinals' starting line up in 87, as immortalized by RBI Baseball for the NES. Sorry about that. Just remembering some guys. As a kid, we'd go to Cardinals' games. My parents would take me to Cardinals' games at Bush Stadium downtown, and I'd have the cliched, wide-eyed, absurdly nostalgia-oversaturated experience of walking through the stadium tunnel and emerging into the sunlight or the majestic stadium lights, the bright green grass of the outfield, the inexplicably bright brown dirt of the infield, the ecstatic roar of the crowd, the peanuts and crackerjack, the whole Cornball Glory Days experience. How Cornball was this experience, precisely? Every Cardinals' game, when the Cardinals' defense first takes the field, Ozzie Smith, shortstop, Hall of Fame, shortstop, Ozzie Smith runs out and he does a backflip to start every game. This perfect expression of exuberance and athleticism and American exceptionalism. And my young heart grows three sizes every time watching Ozzie Smith do a backflip. And soon my young heart grows larger than Bush Stadium itself. Ozzie Smith, ready for the flip and we're ready to start the season.

Speaker 3:
[18:15] Here we go.

Speaker 2:
[18:19] The 40-year-old shortstop. Ozzie Smith was still at it in 1995 when he was 40 years old. He was so much older than he's younger than that now. But despite all that other sensory overload, the lights, the crowd, the grass, the wafting omnipresent Bush beer aroma, even as a little kid, this real overwhelming life-affirming sensory overload at Cardinals games is all musical for me. Right? Just this unrelenting, joyous blitz of mostly wordless, ecstatic primordial riffs and hooks and melodies. So immediately central to the core of my being, that I just assume, and I still assume, that all these melodies have always existed. The Heat is On starts playing over the Bush Stadium loudspeaker, and I imagine a Tyrannosaurus Rex wearing sunglasses and rocking a saxophone going do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do. The Cardinals score ten runs in the first inning, and the loser visiting team pulls their loser starting pitcher, and everyone in the stadium goes na-na-na, na-na-na-na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye, which is also what a stegosaurus says before it stomps and or spikes you to death. Seventh inning stretch, we do Take Me Out To The Ball Game. That song's old as hell. And then we get a bit of John Fogarty's Center Field, right?

Speaker 4:
[19:47] Bur-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der.

Speaker 2:
[19:49] That's from 1985, but it's also the rare guitar-based Old Testament ass melody. Game's tied in the bottom of the ninth. Two outs. The Cardinals got the bases loaded, and here comes pinch-hitter Joseo Kendo. And over the Bush Stadium loudspeaker, you hear, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. That's right. It's the final countdown by Europe, the band. 1986. Except also, that's the song that started playing when all the dinosaurs looked up and saw the meteor. Hurdling toward earth, and all the brontosaurs were like, ah shit, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do- Let's see if you can catch them all. I was in the Mississippi Royals in 1987. Fuck the Minnesota Twins, but I get over it. You know, I grow up. I move away. I fall in love with other baseball teams. Other baseball stadiums. And I encounter new eternal primordial Mount Olympus-type melodies that are clearly younger than me, except obviously, no, they're not. Give me another solid woo-hoo! Blur. Song Two, 1997. Ooh, it's satire. Ooh, it's mocking grunge and bro-ish, laddish. Whoa, it's common denominator, jock jam culture. Ooh, you will hear this song at every sporting event you attend for the rest of your life. And other people heard this song at every sporting event that took place before you were born. Greek dudes throwing javelins and shit at the first Olympic Games and going, Woo-hoo! Yeah, it's the mid-nineties, and we call these jock jams now. They got a whole bunch of jock jams CDs. The meteor hits earth and goes, y'all ready for this?

Speaker 3:
[22:01] Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

Speaker 2:
[22:04] And the dinosaurs weren't ready for that. I moved to Oakland in the mid-2000s. I get heavy into the Oakland A's. Fuck the Red Sox and the Yankees. Fuck everybody, pretty much. Or really honestly, fuck the owners. And the A's got all kinds of rad, mystifying, new, ancient jock jams. Let me ask you something. What's the song that you've heard the most in your life? You recognize this song instantly, and yet you have no idea what it's called, or who did it, or when it came out, or anything. What's the song that you've heard the most, but you know the least about? Does that make sense? Anyway, this is mine. I have heard this song one billion times at baseball games, and yet I got no idea who or what or when this is. I picture a wooly mammoth downloading a pirated copy of Garage Band and whipping up this song in half an hour. I tried to use the Google Voice Shazam feature, where you sing a melody and it tells you the song. And so I pick up my laptop and I sing into it. I go, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, and Google AI goes, do-do often refers to childish slang for feces. And I'm like, ah, shut up, Google AI. I'll tell you what's do-do. That was the German group Zombie Nation with their 1999 hit Kernkraft 400. And I found that out the old fashioned way by texting my dear friend and retired A's fan, Garrett, and I sent him a voice note of me going, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, and he told me who it was. And then he sent me the link to an old episode of Married with Children, where Al Bundy's got a song in his head, but he can't remember the name of it. Kernkraft 400 from Germany. This is the oldest song of them all, somehow. Picture Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship as it sails past the sirens. And the sirens have got a giant sound system going, do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do. I think it's beautiful. It's implausible. It's unbelievable, honestly, in the sense that I still literally do not believe it. But yeah, fine. I think it's beautiful that all these melodies, all these riffs, all these chants, all these jock jams came from somewhere, came from someone. These melodies only feel immortal and naturally occurring. But in truth, each and every eternal stadium chant is the product of plain old human ingenuity. The melody emerges, humbly, from a single, humble, frail, mortal human. And then that tune penetrates so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows. And so, once upon a time, a long time ago, a small miracle took place in the brain of a man named Jack White. My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 38th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes from their 2003 album, Elephant. Right now, you could care less about me, but soon enough, you will care by the time I'm done. Ad break.

Speaker 1:
[26:03] This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. Spring is starting, so it's time to wake up your yard. And at The Home Depot, they've got everything you need to do with low prices guaranteed. Mowing your lawn is a dream with top-brand outdoor power tools like the Ryobi 40-volt mower with up to 50 minutes of run time. You can add a pop of color with spring blooms and fresh plants and refresh your garden beds with Earthgrow Mulch 5-Bags for just $10. Start your spring with low prices now through April 1st. Available at The Home Depot. Exclusions apply. See homedepot.com/pricematch for details. This episode is brought to you by Tax Act. Like an expert coach, Tax Act offers step-by-step guidance and guaranteed accuracy when filing taxes. Get tips along the way. Add Expert Assist to talk to tax experts and let our experts do your taxes for you with expert full service. Tax Act helps you find the deductions and credits you deserve so you can get them over with. Visit taxact.com to learn more, conditions apply. See taxact.com for details.

Speaker 5:
[27:11] Refreshing Wild Cherry Cola meets Smooth Cream. The treat you deserve. Pepsi Wild Cherry and Cream.

Speaker 2:
[27:26] Dude, I got like 500 White Stripes songs I gotta play for you right now. We ain't got time for digressions and frivolities. We ain't got time for digressions and frivolities starting now. The White Stripes are a bizarrely, intriguingly, suspiciously heavily stylized blues rock duo from Detroit, Michigan, consisting of Jack White on vocals and guitar, and his sister, scare quotes, Meg White, on drums and vocals occasionally. Adverbs. This is the White Stripes' debut single, released in 1998 and called Let's Shake Hands. Get a load of the way this band somehow gets even louder when the drums drop out for a second. I just love it in White Stripes' songs when the drums drop out, when the whole bottom drops out, when everything stops musically, and it's just Jack White's ranting, yelping, temper tantrum ass voice. I first saw the White Stripes live in the year 2000, opening for the immortal punk rock band Slater Kenny. I saw the White Stripes at this rad club in Columbus, Ohio, called Little Brothers, RIP., and I was just mesmerized. Whenever a White Stripes song stopped dead in its tracks, so Jack White could go, bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah bah. At one point in this song, Let's Shake Hands, Jack sings the words, he yelps the words garbage can, and he sounds like he's literally sitting in a garbage can. Like Oscar the Grouch.

Speaker 3:
[29:15] But you can do what you wanna do.

Speaker 4:
[29:18] Throw it in the garbage can, but just say my name.

Speaker 2:
[29:22] And I love it very much. Jack Gillis is born in Detroit in 1975 and grows up in the city's Mexican town neighborhood. He is one of ten children. He is the seventh son. That bums me out somehow that Jack White is actually the seventh son. That's too bad. Growing up, Jack plays in a bunch of local garage blues country punk-type bands. Often he's playing drums. He starts an upholstery business. He also reads poetry at open mic nights. At one such open mic night at a Detroit bar called Memphis Smoke, he meets a waitress named Meg White. Meg White is born in Gross Point Farms in the suburbs just east of Detroit in 1974. Meg has an older sister, which makes Meg the second daughter. Meg is, and publicly, Meg remains, very quiet, very shy, and preposterously cool. Jack and Meg start dating. In 1996, Jack and Meg get married. Jack takes Meg's name. He's Jack White now. In 1997, our lovebirds start a band called the White Stripes. Talking to the New Yorker twenty years later, in 2017, Jack says, quote, we were in the attic and I was recording something. And I asked, would you mind playing a simple beat for me? I didn't tell her what to do. Maybe I said a couple things. She sat down and did it, end quote. The New Yorker also says, quote, what she did struck him as childlike and unaffected by the wish to impress, end quote. And then they start a band where they pretend to be brother and sister the whole time. And this dynamic, Jack the cool, howling super extrovert, Meg the even cooler, near silent super introvert, and both of them pretty childlike, if you want the truth, the Meg and Jack dynamic is splendidly intensified by the Detroit of it all. The White Stripes have an extraordinary sense of place. They sound like they came from somewhere. Now, musically, there is no shortage of regional precedent for the White Stripes. John Lee Hooker was based in Detroit, if you're drawn to the blues. The MC5 and the Stooges both started nearby, if you're drawn to the origins of punk. Here at the turn of the century, Detroit's got a fantastic and vibrant and hyper-local punk scene, the Gories, the Dirt Bombs, the Detroit Cobras, the Demolition Doll Rods, etc. Most of those bands will cross paths with the White Stripes, and some of those bands will enjoy doing that. But the one super-famous song from Detroit that best encapsulates the White Stripes for me is actually Sharivari from 1981 by the electronic music duo A Number of Names. Sharivari, the foundational Detroit techno-classic. Weird, cool, male voice. Eerie, ethereal, even cooler female voice. I can't explain it, but this basically sounds nothing like the White Stripes, and yet to me, it explains everything about the White Stripes. It's just a thought. Alright, in 1998, the White Stripes make their recording debut with two singles. Let's Shake Hands is the first, and Lafayette Blues is the second. Lafayette Blues has words and stuff. Some words in French, which is fun, to hear Jack White going, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba in French. But my favorite part of Lafayette Blues is just Meg's absurdly colossal kick drum right here.

Speaker 4:
[33:17] Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 2:
[33:19] Yeah, I still hear it. Yeah, I can hear, I can feel the floor bending, the floor collapsing under Meg White's feet on the Lafayette Blues. A song that notably sounds like everybody got thrown in the garbage can, including you, the listener. The White Stripes will never leave the garbage can. The garbage can will simply expand to encompass the whole world. The White Stripes are going to be an ungodly, huge, international, sensation-type band very soon. But this band sounds huge even back when they're tiny. And even after they get huge, Jack and Meg retain their essential childlike innocence, their not-so-humble trashiness, their overwhelming, palpable sense of two human beings in a tiny room making a noise somehow louder than the baffled, booming voice of God. All that stuff in Rolling Stone about the divine and yet merely mortal creation of The Lion Sleeps Tonight, haunting notes that flow down the wires and into a trembling stylus that cut tiny grooves into a spinning block of beeswax. You hear all that stuff in every White Stripes song. The awestruck physicality, the wires, the trembling stylus, the grooves cut into a spinning block of beeswax, or whatever. The White Stripes are defiantly corporeal and paradoxically invulnerable. The cover of this Lafayette Blues single. Also, the red and white peppermint swirl. Heavily stylized. Tremendously important. What do we all learn about the White Stripes immediately? The White Stripes are a brother and sister duo. The White Stripes only use and only wear the colors red, white, and black. The White Stripes conceive of everything in threes. Everything revolves around the number three. Red, white, and black. Guitar, bass, and drums. Song structures often built around three chords, three verses, three choruses, etc. Generally, the rule of three rule is a little screwier and more abstract than the other rules. But the only wear red, white, and black rule is not abstract at all. This is a band with a code. A credo, a style, a lore. A whole heavily stylized ethos. Also, they're definitely from Detroit. The first full-length White Stripes album is released in 1999 and is called The White Stripes. Note the album cover, the red, the white, the black, the peppermint, the nothing else. This song is called The Big Three Killed My Baby. The Big Three being four General Motors and Chrysler, Detroit's three dominant automobile manufacturers. The Big Three Killed My Baby. This song, I think, is about corporate power, crushing lone wolf human ingenuity, the man crushing the little guy, so on and so forth. But man, this song, once again for me, it's all about when the drums drop out. It's about all of Jack's briefly unaccompanied ba ba ba ba ranting and yelping. The floor beneath their feet bends and collapses. But time bends, too. The rhythm is not metronomic. Yes, we are not perfectly on beat. Lyrically, Jack is cramming in as many words as possible. It's chaos. It's absurdly rough. It's enormously volatile. Holy crap, it's fantastic. Just Jack White's frantic scramble there. Why don't you take the day off and try to repair? I love the sense that he's constantly trying to keep up with this song, or the song is constantly trying to keep up with him. Meanwhile, much discourse, there will be, about the primal, the feral, the deliberately rudimentary nature of Meg White's drumming. Me, I love discourse, but we ain't got time for discourse. All that matters here is ba-bam-bam. I really dig the guitar chords changing semi-arbitrarily here. Ba-bam-bam, the frantic, semi-melodic ascent. Even by hallowed, classic, garbage-can, garage-rock standards, this is barely a song anymore. There is barely a discernible rhythm anymore. We're just vibing. Rapturously. Ultraviolently. It's a question of glorious, infinite musical space. Right? The freedom, musical and spiritual, that Meg White creates via the bashing, rudimentary, discourse-free, primordial, eternal nature of Meg White's drumming. And when the Big Three kills my baby, kicks back into gear and resumes sounding like a conventional rock and roll song on the line, and I found out my baby is dead, if you were cool enough to be paying attention to The White Stripes in 1999, this is the exact moment when you realize the whole world is going to be paying attention to The White Stripes real soon. The yeah, yeah, yeah is incredibly important there as well. Every great rock and roll band needs plenty of yeah, yeah, yes, right? Ideally, a whole lot of woes also. This song is called When I Hear My Name, but only the word whoa really matters. Only the whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa matters. The feral microbursts of Jack White's guitar are crucial also. Jack White's guitar riffs and solos and whatnot will get rowdier and raunchier and less micro as we go along, but even that's enough Jack White guitar god action to identify Jack White's signature guitar style as slippery. I've settled on the word slippery. There's a rubbery, panic-stricken, sliding down the steep, rain-slicked roof of a very tall skyscraper, what-what-what-what-what feel to Jack White's guitar playing. One might describe Jack White's guitar playing as red hot or white hot or if you're nasty, perhaps even shit hot. On this first White Stripes album, I also really dig this song called Screwdriver. Wherein Jack White yelps, I got a little feeling going now, 11 times in a row. And he does. On their debut album, The White Stripes cover Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson. They cover the blues standard St. James Infirmary Blues, made famous by Louis Armstrong and Betty Boop. The White Stripes song Canon quotes from the Sun House song John the Revelator. Just for fun, here's a photo of blues legend Sun House wearing red, white and black. A lot of flagrantly doodly energy on this first record. Yes? But even if you don't get much of Meg White's singing voice at first, her presence is felt. The harmoniousness and the dissonance of her connection with Jack White is felt. And that connection is essential. Irreplaceable. Non-negotiable. Post-White Stripes, Jack has started a handful of other cool bands with flashier and more conventional drummers. And he's enjoyed a robust solo career as well. But The White Stripes stand alone. The White Stripes tower over everyone. And they wouldn't be half as impressive were it not for Meg White not trying to impress anyone at all. Also, I don't want to be obnoxious and say that you had to experience The White Stripes live to truly get it. But it still really, really helps to even hear clips from The White Stripes live now. Here we have The White Stripes on their 2004 concert-length live DVD, Under Blackpool Lights, recorded indeed in the English seaside town of Blackpool. The White Stripes are doing a robust little seven-minute, shit-hot micro-medley of The Sunhouse Song's death letter and grinning in your face. You have to strain your ears to hear Meg singing here, and that's how she likes it. Jack White on stage has two microphones. He can sing facing the crowd like a normal singer in a normal rock band, or he can sing into a microphone planted right next to Meg's drum kit, so he can sing right into Meg's face, and she can sing right into his. It's such a simple idea, the second microphone, but if the White Stripes hit you just right, they can be a life-altering experience live. Watching these two quote unquote siblings sing, no matter how you try to live, they're gonna talk about you still directly at each other. This conspiracy of two, but just like that garbage can they live in, it's a conspiracy of two that encompasses the whole world. All right, so look, Meg and Jack White get married in 1996. They debut live as The White Stripes in 1997. They release two singles in 1998. They put out their first album in 1999. They get divorced officially, legally in the year 2000. They become super bonkers, famous rock stars very soon thereafter. In all that time, they publicly insist that they're brother and sister. And there are three possible ways this could have gone, in terms of the listening public. One, we buy it. We all believe they're brother and sister. That ain't happening. Two, we don't buy it. We emphatically reject the idea that they're brother and sister, because that's objectively false. But that ain't happening either. What happens is, three, we all know they're a divorced married couple, but we all at least subconsciously pretend to continue to believe that they're brother and sister, so long as they keep pretending to be brother and sister. We join the White Stripes in their conspiracy against us, because the lies appeal to us in a cool, essential rock and roll mythology sort of way. And our reward for pretending to believe them is six straight monster rock and roll albums, the lies immensely profitable for everybody. The second White Stripes album comes out in 2000 and is called De Style. This song is called Your Pretty Good Looking, a parenthesis for a girl, close parenthesis. And yeah, that's a perfect pop song hook right there. This will still be a perfect pop song long after the year 25, 25. Yeah, this album is called The Style, named for the Dutch abstract art movement that started in 1917. D-E-S-T-I-J-L. The album cover, red, white and black, of course, is once again excellent, especially because it looks like Jack is photobombing Meg. Meg looks like she's in a rock band and Jack looks like a janitor skulking around behind a rock band. This is the first White Stripes album I ever heard. I remember it weirdly, vividly. I'm driving around Columbus, Ohio with the girl I was dating at the time and her cool younger brother is in the back seat and he puts on this album and I spend the whole drive super conscious of his reaction to my reaction. You ever have this experience? Someone cooler than you watching you listen to something cool and you're worried you don't look cool enough while you absorb the record's coolness? We get to track two called Hello Operator and we get to Meg's micro drum solo and here in the car none of us know what to make of it but each one of us is very curious what the other two people in the car are making of it. The White Stripes are deceptively childlike masters of dynamics. They're reveling in and the strategic withholding of noise. These often super tiny little pockets of near silence. The split second caught breath before the garbage can cacophony resumes. You know the first White Stripes song I ever truly loved? And I truly loved this song the very first time I heard it in that car with those two people? Little Bird. And my reaction, my series of reactions to the song Little Bird in real time. Let's see. I think this is a phenomenal slide guitar riff that sounds like it's eighty years old. And then I hear the snorting in the car at the childlike rhyming of, if you give me a look, I'm going to get the book. And I want to preach the words. I'm going to preach to birds. And I am conscious as I hear this snorting in the car, that some of the snorting is mine. And then we get to this next part. The split second caught breath transition between the verse and the instrumental break. The slide guitar just hangs there for just an instant. Like somebody threw a water balloon straight up, and we all watched it arc through the sky, and hang in the air, and then fall back to earth. And then Jack and Meg both crash back in. And as ludicrous as this song, Little Bird, immediately sounds to me, in its pure, knuckle-headed simplicity. It sounds absolutely magical, too. And then Jack White sings the line, When I get you home, this is how it goes. And I immediately think, holy shit, that is the raunchiest line I have ever heard in a rock and roll song in my whole entire life. The split second caught breath there when the slide guitar hangs in the air right before the drums crash back in. It's even cooler when Jack White goes, oh, right when the drums crash back in. This record, The Style, has other excellent songs, including one called Your Southern Can Is Mine, where Meg sings a little bit, but the first three songs are a mini symphony to me, and Little Bird is an all-timer. Maybe partly because of the brother and sister thing. Because the White Stripes are so brazenly playing characters. They're more or less pretending to be children. They're playing make believe. All that artifice might make it hard to connect with Jack White lyrically. You don't know if what he's saying means anything. And that's fine. You don't have to believe a rock star to worship them. But for the record, the White Stripes put out Hello, Operator, the Meg White mini drum solo song, as a single. And the B-side is a cover of Dolly Parton's Jolene. And the White Stripes do Jolene a lot live. And this is as sincere and impassioned and convincing as Jack White has ever sounded in his life. That's The White Stripes live on the Under Black Pool Lights DVD. What does it mean that Jack White sounds the most sincere and impassioned and convincing when he's singing, I'm begging of you, please don't take my man, into a special microphone pointed directly at his ex-wife slash sister slash drummer? It means these people are super bonkers famous rock stars now. You know my single favorite line in a White Stripes song? This one's awfully convincing too. If you can hear a piano fall, you can hear me coming down the hall. The third White Stripes album comes out in 2001 and is called White Blood Cells. On the cover, Meg and Jack, wearing red and white, are accosted by menacing paparazzi type figures dressed head to toe in black. It's a metaphor. It's barely a metaphor. That song is called Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground. Really fantastic dynamics in this song as well. The line, and every breath that is in your lungs, is a tiny little gift to me. And then the little squeal of feedback. And then the drums kick in, and then the guitar goes, and that's the good shit. Incredible. The White Blood Cells album comes out in July 2001, the same month Is This It by The Strokes comes out in Australia. The Garage Rock revival is afoot. Rock is back, according to Rolling Stone. The hives and the vines and yeah, yeah, yeah's are all about to get huge as well. And yeah, despite being emphatically singular and hyper local and weird as hell, The White Stripes have inadvertently stumbled into a globe-spanning, era-defining cultural rock and roll zeitgeist. And that's nice. Also young wacky genius film auteurs like Michelle Gondry are making high-concept music videos now and later compiling those videos onto cool DVDs. And that zeitgeist is going to pay off for The White Stripes as well. Does it bother me at all that Michelle Gondry's Lego-based rad video for Fell in Love with a Girl also has the colors yellow, black, and blue in it? Not really. The only red, white, and black deal is not my deal. Fell in Love with a Girl features Jack White's voice at its squeakiest. Fell in Love with a Girl sounds like it's being played for you over the phone from a foreign country. Fell in Love with a Girl sounds like you and the White Stripes are all crammed inside a regular-sized garbage can. This band rules, man. And what the White Blood Cells album emphasizes is that this band's got range. Musical range and also tremendous emotional range. If you regard the White Stripes as a band that feels and conveys normal human emotions. Here we have We're Going to Be Friends. The apotheosis of the impossibly tender, usually acoustic, disarmingly sweet and extra, extra childlike facet of the White Stripes. Featuring a video in which Meg White just sleeps on a couch. It turns out rock stardom is not that complicated. Shout out Napoleon Dynamite. It's the repeated line, Teacher marks our height against the wall, that really gets me here. The implication that you are watching the White Stripes grow up before your eyes. I'll tell you flat out though that my favorite song on White Blood Cells is called I'm Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman because I love that title. And also my second favorite moment in the whole White Stripes canon is the pause. Right here, midway between the line, have a doctor come and visit us and tell us which one is sane. The caught breath here, the intensified snarl and Jack White's voice that you can feel before you hear it, the exasperated foot tapping of Meg's kick drum, this single line is a small masterpiece of dramatic tension. These ten seconds are all the White Stripes really needed to get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But that's only my second favorite span of 10 seconds in a White Stripes song. My all time favorite span of 10 seconds in a White Stripes song appears on their fourth album, which is released in 2003 and is called Elephant, and features a song called Ball and Biscuit. This isn't my favorite part yet. Ball and Biscuit is a seven minute bonkers garage blues song that starts with Jack White declaring that he's the seventh son. And yeah, is it weird if I'm bummed out to learn that Jack White is actually the seventh son in his family? It really disappoints me that he's not lying in this song. I liked this song just slightly better when I thought he was lying. Is that weird? Half of Ball and Biscuit consists of these chill yet sassy 12-bar blues verses, and the other half is Jack White playing guitar solos that I would characterize as red hot, white hot, and shit hot. Slippery. I will also continue to characterize Jack White's guitar style as slippery. Wah wah wah wah wah wah wah. I love the way Jack White says yeah, right before he plays a lot of slippery shit hot guitar. Okay, those are the two parts in Ball and Biscuit. There's the relatively quiet verses to this song where Jack White calmly says stuff like, read it in the newspapers, ask your girlfriends and see if they know. I love that line. And then there's the parts where Jack White plays insanely loud, braying, ultra distorted shit hot guitar. And my all time favorite ten seconds and the whole White Stripes catalog is a transition between those two parts. You play me just this part of Ball and Biscuit and I can bench press a car. It's the way Jack mumbles, yeah, I can think of one or two things to say about it. Slightly off mic as the guitar revs up, like brrrr-na-na-na-na-na-na, and then the explosion. That's as good as it gets. I listen to Ball and Biscuit, and I feel like I can juggle five Ford Tauruses. One time I interviewed for a job at Google, the Google, google.com. I forgot what the job was, but I was not remotely qualified, and thusly I was at no danger of getting this job. I read all this stuff beforehand about how scary and intimidating interviews at Google are. Like they ask you all kinds of abstract, genius programmer, galaxy brain questions, like why are manhole covers round, and how many quarters can you fit into an army helicopter and whatnot. So I do my research, and I show up for my Google interview in a shirt and tie. That's how solid my Google intel was. That's how well I read the room. Everyone around me is a genius wearing footy pajamas, and it turns out the only question they ask me is, why are you wearing a tie? And I'm like, I don't, I'd see you later. End of interview. But I'll tell you what. I'll tell you my one triumphant moment from this whole experience. I fly into Northern California, into the San Francisco airport. I get a rental car. I get into my rental car on like the third floor of an airport parking garage, and I turn the ignition, and the car radio is set to a rock and roll station with the volume way up. And the second the car turns on, there it is. And dude, I could have bench pressed my rental car while I was driving it. I felt invincible. I felt like I had summoned this song with the awesome power of my mind. Shout out Live 105 out of San Francisco. I'm pretty sure that was the radio station. And I said out loud, I'm gonna fucking nail this. And I threw my rental car into gear, and I drove it straight off the third floor of the parking garage. And I flew all the way to Google's campus, like back to the future. And I put on a tie, and I biffed the bejesus out of that interview. Have we ever figured out what it is exactly about this riff? This specific haunting skein of notes? Of all the rad, crazy, white-hot shit Jack White has ever played on his guitar, why is he playing this song? His rightful triumphant eternal legacy. You want to hear it again? Okay. Let's hear it again, but add Meg White's kick drum. Let's add Meg White exasperatedly tapping her foot. Crucial detail. You don't hear enough about Meg's part of Seven Nation Army. And you don't hear enough about Meg's part of Seven Nation Army because nowadays, you don't really hear any part of Seven Nation Army other than boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Except now it goes. Oh, and it sounds like this. That's from a Michigan Notre Dame college football game in 2011. I live in Columbus, Ohio, and some Ohio State fans hate Michigan so much that they will kill you for even using the letter M in written correspondence. But I'm pretty sure Michigan did this first. So there's thousands of videos like this. Every stadium does this now. Every sport.

Speaker 3:
[63:54] Oh.

Speaker 2:
[63:57] There was a brief period, a brief period that I do believe lasted years, when Seven Nation Army was just another great White Stripes song, a modest hit White Stripes song. This is the first White Stripes song that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. And it peaked at number 76. That's it. Seven Nation Army was not always ginormous. Ubiquitous. Inevitable. But here in 2026, Seven Nation Army has 2.1 billion Spotify plays, which is nearly 1.8 billion more plays than the next most played White Stripes song, Fell in Love with a Girl, with 318 million. And it's tempting at first to react by attempting to honor, by attempting to rescue the rest of Seven Nation Army, meaning the rest of the song after the first eight seconds. I respect the central lyrical image here, the petulant and yes, very childlike declaration, a Seven Nation Army couldn't hold me back. But my personal favorite line is a tie. Here, you pick. You got two choices.

Speaker 5:
[65:10] I'm going to Wichita.

Speaker 2:
[65:13] That's your first choice. I'm going to Wichita. Why is he going there? What's he doing there? I got no idea. It's way too late in the game for me to actually figure out what this song is about. You know, here's your other choice for the best line. That ain't what you want to hear, but that's what I'll do. What's he doing? What's he gonna do? Why don't you want to hear it? It doesn't matter. It's a great line regardless. Let's preserve the mystique, shall we? In interviews now, Jack White gets asked a lot about Seven Nation Army, about how he feels about the complete global stadium chant takeover of Seven Nation Army. The way you hear, oh, at every sporting event anywhere in the world now, even if usually that's the only part of the song you hear. Jack inevitably responds to these questions with a remarkably non-rock star level of humility.

Speaker 3:
[66:20] It's not mine anymore. I mean, it becomes folk music when things like that happen, becomes something that the more people don't know where it came from, the happier I am, the more it just becomes ubiquitous. I'm sure many people are chanting the melody, have no idea what the song is or where it came from or why or whatever. It doesn't matter anymore and that's just amazing.

Speaker 2:
[66:41] That's Jack White on the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2022. I don't know why Jack's hair is the color of berry blue Kool-Aid in this clip. What is that, turquoise? It's nice. The dude wore nothing but red, white, or black for 15 years. Let's let him cook. This is what Jack says all the time now. Seven Nation Army is a folk song now. It's public domain. It's not his song anymore. And incredibly, it's mostly not a song with words anymore. Talking to the Texas Music Publication Buddy magazine in 2025, Jack says, quote, What's interesting to me about it is, when people sing Queens, We Will Rock You at a stadium, they're chanting the words, We Will Rock You in English, but they're chanting the melody of Seven Nation Army. They're chanting a melody. When do you hear people chanting a melody? That's very strange to me. So there's something magical that I have nothing to do with. End quote. And yeah, sure, it's magical, but it's also absolutely confounding if you happen to live through the White Stripes phenomenon in real time. I read hundreds of thousands of words about Jack and Meg in music magazines and on the internet in the 2000s. The White Stripes were colossal and fascinating and utterly baffling. Why are they still pretending to be brother and sister? Why am I still pretending to believe it? And, most importantly, tell me what is going on here exactly. Okay, after the Elephant album, The White Stripes put out two more rad and increasingly weird records. Get Behind Me, Satan in 2005, Icky Thump in 2007. In 2009, The White Stripes star in a full-length documentary called Under Great White Northern Lights, directed by Emmett Molloy and chronicling the band's whimsical and delightful 2007 tour of Canada. The movie's in black and white, obviously. This is how the movie ends. Meg and Jack, sitting at a piano. Jack's singing a White Stripes song called White Moon. He's still rhyming Bird with Word. I respect it. And Meg just sits next to Jack, silently, crying. End of movie. Also end of band, pretty much. Shortly after this footage is shot, the White Stripes cancel the rest of their tour, publicly announcing, quote, Meg White is suffering from acute anxiety and is unable to travel at this time, end quote. They finally announced their breakup in 2011 with a statement reading, in part, it is for a myriad of reasons, but mostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band and have it stay that way, end quote. Jack goes on to make a bunch of records with a bunch of different people. Meg disappears. In 2025, the White Stripes are inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Jack gives a lovely, gracious speech. Meg ain't there. Jack thanks his sister and reads her a poem he wrote. And it trips me out to think about how much time I spent, not so long ago, trying to figure out why Meg was crying in that scene, trying to decipher the precise personal dynamic between these two people. And of course, I really don't want to know the truth, and I never did. I've always preferred the lie, the mythology. Sometimes I worry that Seven Nation Army is eventually going to crowd out everything else the White Stripes ever did, that one day we'll all completely forget where and who Seven Nation Army came from. But maybe that is amazing and beautiful and ideal. Maybe that's the goal. Maybe that's the highest compliment a piece of music can ever receive. That one day you wake up and it just doesn't feel like a song that one person wrote. We are so blessed to be joined once again by Chuck Klosterman. The best to ever do it, in my opinion. Chuck's latest book is called Football. Chuck, thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 4:
[71:29] Well, thanks for having me on. I don't know if I would say you're blessed, but okay. I think that is, I guess, a compliment to me.

Speaker 2:
[71:37] I guess we'll find out. Okay, so when you first heard the White Stripes, in the late nineties or the early 2000s, did they make sense in the context of the new rock revolution, the strokes and the hives, the yeah, yeah, yeah, all of that going on? Did the White Stripes fit into that for you or were they always their own singular weird thing?

Speaker 4:
[72:02] I didn't connect those two sort of worlds until I started working at Spin. When I first heard the White Stripes, that seemed very different from what was happening with like, say the strokes or the hives, as you say. Like those bands to me more, I mean, it's weird to say this about the strokes, but like in some ways more polished. Like the White Stripes seemed more, they were obviously midwestern, but also kind of like kind of scrunkier and just a different thing. I mean, it makes sense now to put them all kind of together under the same umbrella, but that's not what I thought at first. I would have never really connected them until sort of the world kind of jammed them together.

Speaker 2:
[72:44] Sure. And you of course wrote a cover story for Spin, you know, I think in 2002. And I just sort of wondering like, what is it like to be in a room with these two people in a tape recorder, right? Are they really easy to interview? Are they very difficult? Are they intimidating? Are they more laid back than you expect? Like, what is just the vibe being in a room with these two people?

Speaker 4:
[73:08] Well, I wouldn't put them on the easy end of the spectrum. Because, I mean, well, Meg doesn't really talk at all. I mean, even if you ask her a question, tries to answer them as briefly as possible. And Jack, you know, really interesting and, you know, was intelligent, but, you know, he has this, or at least at the time, he had this sort of interesting, I don't know if the quirk is the word. I suppose some people might say the same thing about me, which is that if you ever ask him a question, his first reaction is to always start by saying, not really. Like, that's his first, doesn't matter what the question is. Like, right, I was asking him about the song, Little Bird, okay, the song that was, you know, yeah, and I sort of said like, well, you know, it really sounds like Led Zeppelin, almost like a Jimmy Page type reference. His immediate thing was to say like, oh no, that had nothing to do with it. I wasn't really influenced by Led Zeppelin at all. In fact, I was consciously trying to go against what Led Zeppelin had done. And I'm almost, that if I had asked the question differently, if I had said like, oh, you know, it kind of reminds me of Led Zeppelin. But of course, that's not possible. You know, he would have been like, absolutely it was. That was, you know, his his sense of the journalist is always that the guy is trying to fuck his life up. He's really he's very defensive. Or, you know, but this was 20 years ago. He might be totally different now. But he just he seemed to naturally want to disagree with any assertion about his grip.

Speaker 2:
[74:43] He does seem he always seemed to be very combative just reading the interview. It was just the back and forth. It just seemed very strained and very difficult. Like, do you personally enjoy that kind of interview like a combative, like trying to get something out of somebody who doesn't want to give it to you? Is that like a challenge that you enjoy just as an interviewer?

Speaker 4:
[75:00] Well, when I was younger, I think I did. I don't think I would now. I mean, it's just I think of these things differently, where I used to really believe that it was important to have, like, creative tension with the person you were interviewing with. And because I kind of come out of a newspaper background where that's normal. Now, I don't know if I agree with that as much. I feel like you have to be more responsive to kind of the persona or vibe or energy that the other person is bringing. All of that, and that maybe would have been for with them, particularly that may have been better. But I, I mean, I, you know, it was it was still that was still during the period where sort of like the mythology they had created and created was kind of falling apart now. I mean, they were at least falling apart. Like a weird way to say it, because it almost makes it sound like, like, you know, there it was kind of collapsing on itself. It was just like they had. I think what had happened, like a lot of bands that they had sort of began with this idea that we can kind of create this little lie or that that we're being brother and sister or whatever. And we're really weird and all these things. And it will be able to exist sort of in its own world because the world is going to be small. And then it was rapidly getting bigger. I think, you know, well, when I did the cover story, it was the first time they had done a cover story for like a like a major magazine. I mean, they've been the cover of the theater, I guess, if you count that. But like this was the kind of first time that was going on. So I think that was maybe to them also, like it was meaningful for them. I remember there being like a small controversy after the issue came out for reasons that are completely unknown. I don't know why we did this. The cover of the magazine, there's a monkey on Jack White's shoulder, which of course, justifiably, I didn't know they were doing this, but justifiably, I think that he thought that we were implying that he was on heroin and that this was the monkey on his back or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[77:04] Oh my God.

Speaker 4:
[77:05] Well, I can't think of any other reason why there would be a monkey there. Although at the same time, he must have recognized there was a monkey there during the shoot. So I do recall that being an issue after it came out.

Speaker 2:
[77:18] So they were doing a photo shoot and the photographer was like, hey, we got this monkey. Do you mind posing with the monkey? And he did it. But then afterwards, he realized the connotation.

Speaker 4:
[77:30] Unless I'm completely misremembering this, there was like a monkey on the cover, you know, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[77:36] Wow, okay. I'm gonna have to investigate that. I do not remember the monkey at all, though it has been a very long time, as you say. That's very bizarre. There is a very funny part of that interview where you are, like you're trying to get him to answer the question, like why are you pretending to be brother and sister? And there's this very entertaining back and forth. And as you say, like he's very combative and dismissive of the question. But like, as you're asking them, why are you pretending to be brother and sister? Do you know the answer? Do you sort of understand that this is like a fairly ingenious sort of backstory lie that's going to create a lot of interest in them? Like, are you asking a question there that you already know the answer to?

Speaker 4:
[78:17] I think everyone knew it at the time. Plus, it was strange in the sense that the way magazines used to work. You know, I was doing this interview and, you know, it would be like over a month before it would come out anyways. So like, you're always dealing with the past in the present. But the very first, very first time that the White Stripes were in spin, to my knowledge, was prior to this, when I was still living in Akron. And it was like a small story, like just kind of a front of the magazine story about them. And I think that directly said like they were brother and sister because at the time it was like, well, the press release says it, just put it in there. No one's, you know. I don't think that there was certainly any sense that this band was going to become famous enough that something like that would somehow come back to be, I don't haunt them. I'm not sure it really haunted them. I think people did find it somewhat charming, but there was all these, you know, it almost immediately was replaced by like a different question. It's like, oh, they're not brother and sister, but they're divorced and they're working together. And he took her name and there was just like, you know, so it wasn't as though the first question is gone and there's like six more new questions in place of it.

Speaker 2:
[79:37] Exactly. Yeah. And as you've mentioned, like Meg does not talk, you know, she does not really answer even direct questions. Like being so close to them, like, did that give you any insight into the Jack and Meg dynamic both offstage and on?

Speaker 4:
[79:53] I think that their dynamic is pretty mysterious still. I, there was no sense that she really enjoyed being in this band. I'm not saying it was no sense of it though. She didn't take advantage of it in any way. She didn't become any sort of celebrity because of it. She seemed to almost recede more. I know at one point I remember there was a weird, I guess it was in the early, there was just a woman who looked like her that was sort of in this weird sex tape and that went around and it wasn't her but it was a strange thing to have been going on. I think she's like, what did I get into? It was also like a complete sense that it's like, this is his band and he taught her to play drums to do this and these are his ideas and it didn't really seem like her role in this band was incredibly critical and yet she didn't seem to have a lot of agency in it either. You know what I'm saying? It's like she's really important but I don't think there was ever any kind of belief that well I bet they're doing this now because Meg wants it but that's not how that's not really how it works. You know like when she would play live she seemed relatively happy. She looked very cool when she was playing live and there's only people up there. So of course that's going to move the drummer into a higher profile position than normal and the way the stage was aligned you kind of saw her in profile. As far as the dynamic between them I would say, no, hanging out with them did not give me a sense like oh like I like I if if someone had come up to me and said like do you think they're closer than people perceive or do you think that there's you know more distance I would be like I don't know I they they they did not give that indication I would have maybe liked to interview them separately but people were not really willing to do that they didn't want to do that you know and and it was you couldn't really force them like they're not a band you can force to do something you couldn't you know no yeah and you know I've read plenty of Jack interviews where he talks about how important Meg and keeping in mind that he disagrees with the premise of any question he's asked like I've seen he says over and over again like Meg is incredibly important in her ideas, her tastes, she's very exacting, she's not going to do just anything in terms of like songwriting, in terms of like the decisions the band makes.

Speaker 2:
[82:26] Like Jack is always very careful to say like no, Meg is absolutely crucial. You know her personality is driving this band every bit as much as I am.

Speaker 4:
[82:37] I mean that's what I mean. I don't know if he believes that. I totally understand why he would say that. It doesn't really seem like that could be possible to be honest. It doesn't seem like that's how it could work. But you know it is interesting that he has made a lot of good music since being with the White Stripes. None of it is as good as the White Stripes material for an entire record. You'll hear bits and pieces. Like if you put a singles collection of like the work he has done, it's very, very good. But the White Stripes records were there for a whole variety of reasons. Or like kind of more compelling. There's just something really, people use words like chemistry and they're kind of meaningless. But that is, there's real chemistry there. And the way they interact was the fact that you knew nothing about what their relationship, their interior relationship actually was like. It sort of made every small little detail when they would look at each other a bigger deal.

Speaker 2:
[83:39] Right. Right. You're trying to read them, close read them for clues. Just getting something that might not be there, but maybe it is there. But yeah, you're just, you're trying so hard to figure out the deal with these people. Like that always colored the way that I heard the music. It was always even the simplest song, lyrically or musically or just directly, like there's something mysterious about it just because it's these two incredibly mysterious people who are making it like we're going to be friends. It's not a song that needs to be decoded, but you can't help or I can't help, but like try and view it through the prism of what this might say about the Meg and Jack relationship. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4:
[84:19] Yeah, I guess, but I guess I always assume that I was never going to learn anything about their actual relationship through their music because the only people the White Stripes seem to be interested in are small children and the elderly. Everything that they do is real and true and authentic and then old people, they lived through what mattered most. It's like they just don't care. The people they cared about least were people of their age, the people of the age listening to their music. I'm trying to think of a situation where I listen to a White Stripes song, like say like the hardest button to button. I think that in a lot of bands, you would be like, oh, I wonder if he's talking about Meg. I never thought.

Speaker 2:
[85:11] We're a family.

Speaker 4:
[85:13] I think there was ever a time where I heard something and I was like, this is the skeleton key to unlock this relationship. They didn't really operate in that way. In a lot of ways, it was like they were a low drama band. Anything that was controversial about them was projected upon them. It didn't seem like a lot of things were coming from them that created this sense of like, can you think of anything where it was like, you suspected that something that came from the White Stripes camp was like, this is like a strategic play or something, or this is a way to move them into a higher profile position. I didn't think that.

Speaker 2:
[86:07] I didn't think that either. The thing I thought of immediately is when he beat the crap out of the Von Bondi's guy, right? Apart from being generally pugnacious in interviews and feuding with the Black Keys and all this kind of thing, I do think they were relatively low drama with the noted exception of a visceral ugly bar fight that he got in.

Speaker 4:
[86:29] That was him. That really was-

Speaker 2:
[86:30] Yes, that's true.

Speaker 4:
[86:32] Yeah, I guess yes. I suppose beating a guy up in public does not really qualify as a low drama event. But it wasn't as though like that happened because the guy had a weird relationship with Meg. It wasn't though like when the idea that the White Stripes were going to stop playing together, I don't think people, I didn't think it was like, I guess this relationship has just gotten too difficult to sustain or whatever. It's like they just made the decision to do it. It's like, so I guess that you're right. I mean, I can see when I said that it would kind of load drama, you kind of looked at me weird. I guess he is sort of a dramatic person, but the band is not.

Speaker 2:
[87:16] No, I agree completely with that. I know we'll put that in the Jack White solo category. The bar fight is canonically a Jack White solo situation. So I, yeah, I agree with that. This sort of brings us to Seven Nation Army, right? I wonder, first of all, the first time you heard this song, the first time you heard that riff, did you have any inkling that this was gonna be the one? Like this was gonna be, you know, far and away now their biggest song, like this is their legacy. Did you have any sense coming off Seven Nation Army in real time?

Speaker 4:
[87:48] Oh, no, no. I mean, I think at the time, the thing was, oh, he's playing bass guitar, which you're not, but that's what it sounded like, right? It was like you're implementing. So the initial thinking was that, well, either he is playing bass, there's going to be a third member of the band now, or it also, then it was like, okay, so now there was this interesting coolness of just having these three things, just like voice, drums, guitar. Okay, now they've made a conventional move to add a bassist or a bass player. Well, it turns out it's not bass, it's his guitar and he's playing it through this special way. But then it was like, well, why not use a bass? He wanted something that sounds like a bass, but he wanted to prove you don't need a bass to do it. Those are the main things I remember thinking about that song when it came out. It was just like, it was, I thought, you're a good riff. It was a heavier song and I think that there were a lot of people who, the White Stripes materials split up between their heavy rock and material and things that seemed really fragile and sort of drifting into almost country music and stuff like that. So I think people were always happy when there was a hard rock and song like that, even though the tempo was not that fast.

Speaker 2:
[89:05] Right. Well, now that you've got a whole book called Football, you know, about the larger culture and the future of football, and Seven Nation Army is a football song. It's a sports culture song, broadly. It's a jock jam, as we used to say. And I'm curious, how do you think it changes the song, you know, now that it's been absorbed into the football monolith?

Speaker 4:
[89:30] Changes the song. I mean, I'm not, I don't know if it does. I think it just kind of just distances the song from, you know, it's sort of, you know, original existence or whatever. Now it's this other thing, obviously. It means this other thing. And, but again, you know, it's not the song that has been adopted by like all these soccer programs. It's just this riff, okay? So it's like, it's kind of like the smoke on the water riff or whatever, and riff. It's like these things are familiar, but those even are kind of divorced from the song. You know, it's like obviously lyrically, there's no connection between what the song is about and why people like to chant it at, you know, Penn State football games or whatever. It's the ability to sort of replicate the riff verbally, and it's real familiar and simple. And so I mean, I think it would be interesting, of course, for like Jack White, it must be a very interesting thing, you know? But I don't know if, like it's, I mean, it can only be good for the song. I mean, it's hard to look at that and be like, you know, it would be one thing if someone wrote, you know, a real, say a real personal song about something that had happened to them in their life that was a transformative event, and it has like sort of maybe a personal meaning and a political meaning and all these things. And then it was suddenly became like, you know, the theme song, like for the, you know, for the NBA or whatever, then it would be like, well, that's maybe if cheap in the message, but this isn't like that. I mean, like, so the title of the song is his, like when he was seven years old, misinterpreting the phrase, Salvation Army.

Speaker 2:
[91:15] Right.

Speaker 4:
[91:15] So that's like, you know, so the very core of the meaning can't, you can't really deconstruct a song whose premise is that we once didn't understand what this phrase meant or whatever.

Speaker 2:
[91:27] Yeah. I, cause when Jack White has interviewed about it now, like he says, like, it feels like folk music now. It doesn't feel like our song anymore. And I'm cognizant of the fact that people, when people hear it, lots of people don't know it's our song. Lots of people don't know it's a song. There's just a humility and a letting go of control that I did not associate with Jack White in the era when he was being interviewed by Spin Magazine. You know what I'm saying? Like he always seemed, he's let go of this song in a way that is uncharacteristic of him or my understanding of him. Like just the idea of having control of everything, having control of your image, really caring about how you're being written about and being talked about. Like that, it's just, there's a cool dissonance for me. And now this song he wrote, being condensed to a seven-second riff and just being spread out into a world that may not even know it's a White Stripes song at all. It's just like, it's an odd sort of journey for the song to take, where it's not really his song anymore in his view.

Speaker 4:
[92:27] But in a way that might reflect just his maturation process, because I think, and it's not just for him or just for musicians, I think it's almost for all artistic people, that when you are younger, you do want to control not just the music you make or the art you make, but you want to control the reception of it too, and that changes over time. One time I was interviewing Stephen King. He was being inducted, and there's a weird thing was in Canada, he was being honored by the Canadian Booksellers Association.

Speaker 2:
[92:58] He's not Canadian.

Speaker 4:
[92:59] He's not Canadian, but it's close.

Speaker 2:
[93:03] He's close, sure.

Speaker 4:
[93:05] I'm kind of interviewing him on stage or whatever. I don't know how I got picked to do this, but I'm doing it. At one point I asked him a question like, if you could have one aspect of something he wrote, sort of live on or whatever, if in the future there was only one understanding of your work, what would it be? What he said was something that has really stuck with me, which is that he starts talking about the urban legend of the guy with the hook hand and that the couple is out driving their car, and they find out the hook is he. Yes. No one knows who wrote that story. No one knows where that came from. He said that his dream would be to have something he writes become that kind of story. That in some future world, that there is something that he came up with is now something that has no author in a way. It's just understood by everyone. My favorite short story is the Lady and the Tiger, which is something that you have read in eighth or ninth grade. I'm sure many people listening to this podcast are like, oh, I remember reading that story in school. Nobody remembers the guy who wrote that. It was a guy named Frank Stockton. But this short little story that this guy did that will just almost as a placeholder for unclear endings to stories. He is removed from it now. He came up with it and now it just exists to everyone. That has happened with this song or songs of this nature. Maybe a young person, I remember Prince, for example. Prince hated when people covered his songs. But obviously, strange to me. Even though he would give them the right to behave it. I wonder if he had grown older, if he might have changed his view on this. I think that maybe there was a time in his life when Jack White would have somehow been annoyed that his song was being like re-appropriated for this other thing, culture that he doesn't relate to or whatever. But it's different now. Now I think he probably has a more mature understanding of how these things work.

Speaker 2:
[95:04] Yeah. You've talked about the idea of songs that will endure beyond the artist, and that it's a short list. Stare way to heaven, All I Want for Christmas Is You and Seven Nation Army is in that category. Are there any other songs you can think of that are in that category, that are contemporary or after the White Stripes? Like, what does a song have to do to endure beyond the artist? And like, how rare is that?

Speaker 4:
[95:30] I mean, I think it is pretty rare. I mean, there are a lot of canonical artists who don't have that. Like, it is hard to imagine, say, in the future that there will ever be a Madonna song that is remembered more than Madonna herself. Like, she has to write the huge songs. But they will always be, or Swift, for example, the greatest, maybe the clearest example right now, where it's impossible to imagine her having any of her songs be more meaningful than her existence, you know? And when you say contemporary, do you really mean contemporary, like within the last five or ten years? Because that's becoming more and more difficult, I think. I mean, the chances of it happening are actually probably going down.

Speaker 2:
[96:15] Oh, of course they are.

Speaker 4:
[96:16] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[96:17] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[96:17] So-

Speaker 2:
[96:17] I met anybody after the White Stripes or during the White Stripes. Obviously, the strokes don't have a song like anything in the 21st century, let's say.

Speaker 4:
[96:26] Well, I mean, a song like Call Me Maybe, possibly, because it could be- Well, what always has to happen with this is the song has to end up being, taking on the meaning of a second thing. This White Stripes example, now it's this other thing. It's very easy to imagine a young person who is familiar with that and doesn't even know it's a song that was on the rock song. He just thinks it's a chant, it's from the past, but a musical chant. Maybe in a sense, that's why when you say like you're surprised that he seems open to this, I mean maybe he recognizes the chant, he sees that kind of the way the world is changing and that it is increasingly unlikely that this will happen, that you can have a song that will matter more than the person who creates it, which if you really get down to it, probably is the fundamental goal, right? I mean for anyone making anything, it's like you could create something and hope that it brings attention to yourself, but I think if you're really an artist, you're hoping the thing you create is greater than yourself. I mean that's the thing.

Speaker 2:
[97:44] A life of its own.

Speaker 4:
[97:45] It has more value than just your celebrity.

Speaker 2:
[97:50] Right. Just to wrap up, you said all of this is good for The White Stripes, all of this is good for the song. I had a reaction just to seeing, and this metric doesn't work for everybody, but just looking at Spotify plays, Seven Nation Army has two billion plus, and the next one down, I think Fell In Love With A Girl has 300 million. There's just such a huge gap now between Seven Nation Army and everything else. I just wonder, is it even slightly destabilizing to the rest of the White Stripes catalog, when one song gets so big? Is there like a zero something where we don't pay enough attention, we don't appreciate enough, all the other White Stripes songs, all the records, everything else they've done, as Seven Nation Army gets bigger and bigger? Or is it just a rising tide, lift salt boats kind of thing?

Speaker 4:
[98:42] I mean, you're completely right that will, I mean, destabilizing is a great word to use for it. As the years go by, and if someone brings up, say, Thin Lizzy, the White Stripes, they will bring up anything else, or the Boys Are Back in Town gets smaller and smaller and smaller. To the point where it would be, I think that it will become difficult for people to even sort of imagine them having other songs, you know? But they'll know that there are other songs, they won't know what they are. For The White Stripes, I mean, okay, this is true, but like, you know, you mentioned earlier with The Strokes, we use that sort of as the example of the Hives. What have they done? What have they created that will put them in this position? Where this conversation can even happen? Where someone's like, well, will this song change the way the Strokes are remembered? Or will this song change the way the Hives are remembered? I don't know if they have any songs that can do that. Like, the Strokes have a sound that could do that. Like, the sound of the book. Yeah, but that's different. But if you're talking about a look, then you're really talking about things outside of music.

Speaker 2:
[99:53] Right.

Speaker 4:
[99:53] Right. You know, so it is like, if, if it were to happen that this song, that Seven Nation Army, becomes like the totality of the White Stripes memory, that will still probably put them ahead of 99.9% of their peers. You know, that they will actually, nothing that, that, that if somebody is just interested enough in the song to re-investigate what they do, you know, or, you know. Uh, so I, like, I, I don't, um, I mean, there wasn't, you know, if, if, if it was in the past, if this, if we were still, like, in the nineties, I do think that there would be this idea that may be like, well, this is a problem, though, right? It's a problem.

Speaker 2:
[100:41] It's a sellout thing, kind of.

Speaker 4:
[100:43] But it's, like, a sellout against your will. Like, you didn't even do it. Exactly, right. And it was like, you were, you're, you're, this thing that you did is now, um, sort of, uh, being taken from you.

Speaker 2:
[100:57] Co-opted.

Speaker 4:
[100:58] Yes. Um, and I, I, I think that is, is, like, culture sort of has been just splintered so much that I don't, I don't think that fear exists in the same way. Um, I also don't think that, um, it is, you know, because we're sort of, albums matter less now and singles matter more. I mean, if, if, if the entire Elephant record had become this thing, like, you know, like, you know, that, that, that people just kept, like, the whole thing mattered to people going forward or whatever, um, that, that might be a little different. But, you know, I, I think that in some ways is obviously like the best possible outcome, you know?

Speaker 2:
[101:42] Sure. Also, the money is probably pretty good. So that's, that will soothe any legacy.

Speaker 4:
[101:48] Although, I mean, there, you know, you, I don't think, you know, you don't get a royalty if people chanted in a soccer stadium, do you?

Speaker 2:
[101:55] Yeah, I don't know how that works, but I, I'm sure he's doing all right for himself. Well, I'm sure they are, yes. That's being monetized.

Speaker 4:
[102:03] I mean, I do. Oh, do you know what, how, like, are the songwriting credits on a White Stripes record, are they 50-50 or does he get them all?

Speaker 2:
[102:13] I mean, that's a very good question. That's a very good question. I don't know that off hands. I don't, I don't know that off hand. I mean, certainly lyrically, I don't think, I think at a bare minimum, I would say music, Jack and Meg, lyrics, Jack, for the vast majority at least. But that's, I'm going to, I need to look this up now, but I'm going to guess it's just him. I think it's possibly just him and certainly lyrically, it's just him. But I don't know that for a fact.

Speaker 4:
[102:44] It's also, you know, the royalty on stuff like this is always confusing. Like, you know, you'll see something, it'll be like, like all music by Van Halen. And then you'll find out that contractually, that's not how it is at all.

Speaker 2:
[102:54] Of course.

Speaker 4:
[102:56] So it could be like all music by White Stripes. And then like the details of this are very different, you know. But I mean, she obviously, like, if she needed money, it would be extremely easy for her and Jack to play Coachella or do any of these things, you know. And she doesn't seem to need that, right? She doesn't seem to have any, like, there's only two of them, but neither one of them ever expresses a desire to reform this idea. I mean, I'm sure it will probably happen at some point, but it's never like this thing hanging around the way it is, let's say, like the Smiths or like when it was with replacement.

Speaker 2:
[103:34] My understanding of it is he sort of made it clear without throwing her under the bus that it's her, that she doesn't want to do it anymore, and he respects that. Like I thought they would have reunited by now. I thought the Coachella thing would have happened. They were inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you know, like, and that's like a corny thing maybe.

Speaker 4:
[103:51] Did they play there? Did they play there at all?

Speaker 2:
[103:54] He showed up, I don't know if he played, but he showed up, gave an acceptance speech, thank Meg, she went nowhere near it.

Speaker 4:
[104:01] She didn't go.

Speaker 2:
[104:02] She did not go. I don't, I think if they were going to reform, they would have done it by now, and I think it's her decision ultimately to not do it. And he's basically, I've always gotten the vibe from him that he would have kept the band going, and he would have reunited by now if she wanted to, but it's her decision and she won't.

Speaker 4:
[104:20] Well, it would have been, I hear again, I don't know the answer to this, but it's easy to imagine the early stages of this, where it's like, we should do this, I think it's interesting the way the two of us are together. I know we're not married, but it's like, this kind of this simple drumming, this riffing that I'm doing, these lyrics, these, and then she'd be like, well, okay. It's like, we'll play these small clubs here and there. I just don't want it to be like a hassle. He'd be like, no, it won't be a hassle. It just would have just increasingly become a hassle over time.

Speaker 2:
[104:52] Pretty big hassle. Yeah, I get it.

Speaker 4:
[104:55] But what also is interesting is it would be like, I always wonder what would happen if Jack White, because he has these different incarnations, he'll be with the Rock on tours, he'll do all these. What if he came out with just a drummer, but it wasn't her? I wonder what the reaction would be.

Speaker 2:
[105:16] Yeah. I think people would be into that and revolts by that. There's a huge warm feeling toward Meg, I think, especially now. I think the longer that she's out of the spotlight, the more we come to appreciate. As we're saying, he's had a great solo career, other projects, nothing approaches The White Stripes. That dynamic is crucial. And I don't think you replicate that dynamic just by putting another drummer on stage doing what she did.

Speaker 4:
[105:42] That would be pretty wild. I'm saying make new records. And what would be more troubling if he gets a guy drummer or a different female drummer?

Speaker 2:
[105:52] Ooh, God.

Speaker 4:
[105:54] What would upset people more? Or what would, you know? Would it be, you got this guy drummer, which would seem to some people suggest that, oh, she couldn't do it. He had to get this, you know, he had to get Stuart Copeland into it. And if it was another female drummer, then the perception would be like he somehow replaced her.

Speaker 2:
[106:11] That would be worse. The reaction to another female would be worse. The reaction to Stuart Copeland would be just total confusion.

Speaker 4:
[106:20] I mean, not specifically.

Speaker 2:
[106:21] Yeah, but I get you.

Speaker 4:
[106:23] I get you.

Speaker 2:
[106:23] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[106:24] Okay, but what if it was a female drummer, but with like the skill set of like Sheila E or something? Like not again, not Sheila E specifically, but-

Speaker 2:
[106:35] I know, right.

Speaker 4:
[106:36] But can he just never again be in a two-person band? Would it be literally impossible for him to do that?

Speaker 2:
[106:43] I think it would be not impossible, but improbable and probably unwise. There's no way, even if people accepted that and didn't like run him out of town, everything that bands hypothetically did would be viewed in direct relationship to The White Stripes. It would be compared to the point where this band would be meaningless. It would just be held up to the old thing and just not be of any use to him as like a new project. That's my sense of it.

Speaker 4:
[107:12] What if it was really complicated? What if it was Pat Kearney?

Speaker 2:
[107:18] Wow. Yeah, sure. Sure. I'll go for that. I will just, the absolute diffs. That's horrible.

Speaker 4:
[107:26] Would that be kind of like the Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement touring together?

Speaker 2:
[107:30] That's exactly what that would be. They only play crypto events. They only play corporate events, Jack White and Pat Kearney. I wouldn't go see them, but I would follow their careers, their new project avidly. That would be fascinating and terrible, but fascinating. Yes. Chuck, it's wonderful to talk to you as always. Chuck's new book is called Football. It's incredible. I thank you so much for being here, dude.

Speaker 4:
[107:58] Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 2:
[108:02] Thanks so much to our guest this week, Chuck Klosterman. Thanks to our producers, Chris Sutton, Justin Sayles, and Olivia Crerie. Additional production by Kevin Pooler, animations and graphics by Chris Kaliton. Additional art by Matt James. Special thanks to Cole Kushner, and thanks so much to you for listening. Now, let's all go listen to Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes. See you next week.

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