Meg White Is Amazing!!

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e210/thinknutt/meg_white232.jpg

http://www.9giantsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/white-stripes.jpg

I wonder what kind of rack mount she uses

[ / s ]

What would be so cool is if you said that and she was the one to provide the rimshot. :)

ok i watched this again, and while it very well might not be meg white i don't understand the incredulity from those thinking it doesn't look anything like her.

having watched this 8 times in a row i'm fairly confident by now that it might be her

LJ, watching porn so you don't have to.

having watched this 8 times in a row i'm fairly confident by now that it might be her

[eyesight joke]

my zing was too subtle :/

mine too :\

dally should have revived this one instead.

I hate everything about this.

https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a43846386/meg-white-interview-2023/

I sympathize with the author. She clearly needed to write this. But why bother? Meg has repeatedly said interviews makes her uncomfortable. Why did the author feel this would be different?

Furthermore, I love Corin Tucker and Kid Congo Powers but I’m not sure they really advance this story.

i do not sympathize with the author

All the piece achieved was confirm she was a) alive and b) apparently well. Which I guess is not nothing.

Ugh. I know I've been guilty of the same impulse, wanting to track down or understand someone who walked away after having a big artistic success. Now it seems like a kind of ideal career arc though. She obviously doesn't want the attention, leave Meg White alone.

yeah, leave the best rock drummer of all time alone.

🚨🚨 she eats a honey crisp apple every day 🚨🚨

Before White Blood Cells, the band had been, for the most part, an underground secret.

is this really accurate?

budo jeru otm. She doesn't want to be interviewed? Then kill the piece. It's not complicated. It's like that book where the author is looking for Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson. All it does is reaffirm -- to the subject, to the audience -- that walking away was the right move for them, and that the potential interviewer is a stalkery insensitive schmuck for trying to track them down.

after all the shit in this thread I wish her a very nice life out of the public eye

i do not sympathize with the author

― budo jeru, Monday, 5 June 2023 14:53 (one hour ago) link

Yeah. I’ve been trying to be more generous.

Before White Blood Cells, the band had been, for the most part, an underground secret.

is this really accurate?

― Paul Ponzi, Monday, June 5, 2023 12:12 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I suppose it depends on your definition of “underground” or “secret.” I saw them sometime in 2000 or 2001. I’m from Detroit and obviously a music nerd but I wasn’t part of the garage rock scene.

I think the CMJ set was into them after De Stijl came out. I remember one of my college roommates being a pretty big fan but it may have been one of those things where White Blood Cells came out and everyone picked up the prior releases at the same time

Not underground, but honestly there were so many bands that went absolutely nowhere that were momentarily college radio darlings and toured small venues that it works for certain levels of "underground"

The Meg White piece reminded me of old pieces about trying to interview J.D. Salinger, where the whole point was about the writer trying but failing to interview J.D. Salinger and Do YOU SEE?

This kind of piece only enhanced salinger’s mystique and the same will be true of meg white.

Does white want to cultivate mystique or merely to be left alone? She pointedly doesn’t say.

I like the idea that she enjoys being mysterious because the alternative seems to be that she found being famous horrifying and unpleasant due to the rampany misogyny in the indie music scene.

And that is depressing.

The worst part about that piece is that makes serious use of the term "indie sleaze." I don't see anything wrong with a Meg White appreciate piece, structured around the idea of seeking a new interview with her (it doesn't sound like the writer stalked/hounded her or anything). Anyway, I learned some stuff I didn't know... Olivia Rodrigo being a fan, for instance.

Indie sleaze is a meaningful term, it’s more of an aesthetic than a music genre or scene though. Think american apparel circa 2007-2012.

(it doesn't sound like the writer stalked/hounded her or anything)

I don't think the author was peering in Meg's windows or anything, but ffs, "roughly three years of persistent (yet respectful) inquiry"? That can be extremely triggering to someone known to have anxiety about fame and attention, and to Meg may well have felt like stalking/hounding. If it's known after the initial inquiry that the subject does not do interviews, fucking drop it. The writer of the piece isn't entitled to an interview, nor is the audience.

If the piece had been something along the lines of, "Here's why Meg White is great, here's how influential and important she is," with a parenthetical "(Meg White doesn't do interviews)," that'd be fine. But three years of inquiries is something that can actually cause extreme stress to someone and weigh heavily on their mental and emotional health. Knowing what the writer does about Meg's stance on interviews and her anxiety, that much pestering is in fact fundamentally disrespectful.

xp Keep it to fashion, I say... don't retroactively refer to the 2000s rock scene that way.

I totally agree no one's entitled to an interview (and three years of persistence does sound like a lot), but I'm assuming the writer was never a jerk about it, as it doesn't sound like Meg was particularly aggrieved by the inquiries.

I agree with tarfumes

I don't think there's enough context to know whether this was actually bugging Meg White or not or if the mutual contact even relayed anything

three years asking for something after a no is 100% jerk behaviour and it's irrelevant if you asked nicely the 2nd-402nd times

One specific thing about the piece that bemused/annoyed me was the weirdly convoluted way Sympathy for the Record Industry was described. You can just say the name! (And they're still around, just.)

she wasn't asking her directly ffs

Didn't think Meg was being hounded for an interview. Doesn't sound like it caused Meg "extreme stress". Surely people around her would've cut the interviewer off at any sign of a thing like that.

I never have given a fuck about The White Stripes so it was an interesting enough read.

That's actually a factor for me, too – as a non-fan, my interest was held.

Before White Blood Cells, the band had been, for the most part, an underground secret.

is this really accurate?

I'd say yeah, in the sense that they were still playing small clubs in 2000 and along the lines of the Dirtbombs in popularity (or below, maybe).

i thought it was an interesting article. Meg White, like Darcy from Pumpkins before her, is someone who had an awful lot of fans who wondered what the hell happened to them... it's kind of amazing to think people can actually disappear in this day and age (Darcy I understand got into drugs, then started to pop up again here and there, sometimes in disturbing ways).

with Meg, you wonder...does she still shop for groceries? do lots of people in her community know her and keep her privacy intact? Or is she well off enough that she has everything delivered to whatever house she is sequestered in?

Bobbie Gentry is another vanished person, though I understand she is/was very well off. There was a picture of her from sometime in the past 10-15 years that showed up a while ago.

Meg White Flight

I saw a recent photo of her, i think just in my insta feed bc i follow other indie-ish content. She is likely only “hiding” from journalists.

I saw a recent photo of her, i think just in my insta feed bc i follow other indie-ish content. She is likely only “hiding” from journalists.

She is not a recluse. I used to see her bumming around.

It’s a very 2023 idea to describe anyone who isn’t constantly clamoring for attention a recluse.

I say this as someone who constantly clamors for attention.

Bobbie Gentry is another vanished person, though I understand she is/was very well off.

Case in point: this article, which (IMO) is significantly less interesting than the Meg White one, and doesn’t function as much of an appreciation or meditation on Gentry’s artistry or influence, but is literally pretty much just “let me see if I can track her down…”.

(Spoiler alert, if you’re not able to get past the paywall:)

After a few rings, a pleasant woman’s voice said: “Hello.”

I introduced myself and my newspaper. I said I was looking for the person whose name appears on the property owner’s record.

There was a dead pause of several seconds. My fingers clenched open and closed.

“There’s no one here by that name,” she said, finally.

I apologized and started to read back the number, to make sure I had dialed it correctly, and she hung up.

What a dick