Jack White - Blunderbuss

^haha otm.

Talented dude, sure, but what a pretentious twat in that interview. Too bad.

"i can't quite figure out why everything this dude does inspires an eye-roll from me." - tylerw

Dead on. My guess is because every gesture he makes at being 'authentic' and storying himself as 'Unique Artist' is marred by his (apparently very intentional) framing of himself as a macho guitar god. That, and he apparently buys way too into his own bullshit.

I thought the 90s finally lifted the veil on this kinda crap. 'Coolest'? 'Rock Star'? Jesus Christ.

I heard David Bowie once said that he didn't really love rock music, but it was an easy way to make money.
I don't know Jack White, but he seems sort of like a snake oil salesman to me.
Sure there's some talent, but there's a lot of marketing going on as well.
I have zero problem with this. Musicians should do everything they can to get their own.

"possibly the greatest x" = code for "I don't know what I'm talking about but I'm gonna say it anyway"

also the writer makes it sound like playing on a *plastic guitar from montgomery ward* or w/e is the equivalent of having three fingers like Django

man, nicky i think you are WAY off, dude's a total obsessive music nerd IMO, like starting the white stripes in fucking detroit at that time is a truly stupid idea if you wanted to be famous, i mean fuck they were on sympathy for the record industry...there was like no reason to ever expect they'd graduate from like opening for The Makers or bands like that

plus he was doing music with some older dude and working at an apolstery shop and shit...

like he's definitely got a concocted image, but hell the band named an album De Stijl and had an official color scheme and shit (which is actually one of the really awesome things about the White Stripes)

are Airlines a bitch to play or something? i know they got a lot more valuable on the used market after Jack made them a thing

i can't imagine that they're particularly hard to play when set up properly. it was the 60s, not the stone age.

I felt like I was reading something from an interior design magazine...I mean, I know it's kind of a unique design and all and he has always had a deliberate aesthetic (though the yellow/black fixation was kind of an interesting oddity)

He's kind of an interesting guy when he talks at lengt, I think.

m@tt otm, i'm not much of a fan of White but the second-guessing itt about his entire existence is pretty over the top, he's really just a true blue '90s indie retro rock weirdo who grinded and lucked his way into superstardom

no doubt, a total obsessive music nerd, and a very hard working enthusiastic chap as well. playing with meg in dives and street festivals for two years before making the first album. Recording that classic debut in his father's living room over the course of a weekend, and then recording 2 more classics in the next 2 years...

that was all done by 2001.

i guess in a way they were kinda one of the last gasps of 90s indie rock culture that broke, like i'm sure their original big rockstar fantasies would have been to be as big as, like, jon spencer blues explosion

I wonder what the White Stripes/Jack White legacy would be if he had stopped completely after the first 3 albums.

just slightly better than every other garage band that peaked in 2001?

they'd probably reform to play Cavestomp

followed by a reunion tour with The Go and a repentant Mooney Suzuki, who disavow their Matrix collaboration

good lord that is a period of my music fandom career that i do not miss

incidentally it didn't occur to me until the article noted his age that White is only 36 and that i am kind of jealous of how much he's accomplished.

;_; Mooney Suzuki

man, nicky i think you are WAY off, dude's a total obsessive music nerd IMO, like starting the white stripes in fucking detroit at that time is a truly stupid idea if you wanted to be famous, i mean fuck they were on sympathy for the record industry...there was like no reason to ever expect they'd graduate from like opening for The Makers or bands like that...

― Mississippi Butt Hurt (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, April 10, 2012 9:55 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

m@tt otm, i'm not much of a fan of White but the second-guessing itt about his entire existence is pretty over the top, he's really just a true blue '90s indie retro rock weirdo who grinded and lucked his way into superstardom

― some dude, Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:01 AM (55 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no doubt, a total obsessive music nerd, and a very hard working enthusiastic chap as well. playing with meg in dives and street festivals for two years before making the first album. Recording that classic debut in his father's living room over the course of a weekend, and then recording 2 more classics in the next 2 years...

― nicky lo-fi, Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:05 AM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i guess in a way they were kinda one of the last gasps of 90s indie rock culture that broke, like i'm sure their original big rockstar fantasies would have been to be as big as, like, jon spencer blues explosion

― Mississippi Butt Hurt (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, April 10, 2012 10:06 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and i have no regrets about rock fandom in the late 90s & early 00s. great time to be going out to see underattended punk shows in sleazy dives.

so this is out there new, getting now.

new

Tracklist:

01. Missing Pieces 3:27
02. Sixteen Saltines 2:37
03. Freedom At 21 2:51
04. Love Interruption 2:38
05. Blunderbuss 3:06
06. Hypocritical Kiss 2:50
07. Weep Themselves To Sleep 4:19
08. I’m Shakin’ 3:00
09. Trash Tongue Talker 3:20
10. Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy 3:03
11. I Guess I Should Go To Sleep 2:37
12. On And On And On 3:55
13. Take Me With You When You Go 4:10

Release date: 24 april 2012

he hasn't made anything i've loved since elephant, and i'm not sure if that's bc he's changed or if i've changed. in either case, i kinda keep an eye on him to see if anything he does is really interesting again. seems like a lot of boring side projects like raconteurs, dead weather, black belles? maybe the magic is just gone

i think he's got a free pass to fuck around with merely solid side projects and Third Man vinyl nerd ephemera for a little while. i'm still entertained by it all.

2nd Raconteurs album was A+, imo

digging "Sixteen Saltines" a lot.

I had very low expectations of this but it is easily his best album in a decade, albeit a decade in which I have only really liked a couple of Raconteurs songs and little else. I dont understand this notion of Jack lacking authenticity, he is from a working class background and dragged himself up from nothing. I get a feeling he doesn't really have much control of this beast he has created, but that doesn't make him a phony.

I'm lukewarm over this. It's sorta plain jane. It's like a 67/100, but that's dumb. I don't know why I was expecting so much, lol.
The sound is cool. I like the production. I think he's a great producer. I just think the songwriting is lacking, musically and lyrically.
Some lyrics just totally seem free styled to fit the melody. I guess I wish it also had more electric guitar.
On the plus side, at least he's not relying on that Digitech Whammy so much.

my vinyl copy is sat at the post office because it wouldn't fit in my letterbox. won't have a chance to pick it up till saturday. am resisting temptation to dl illicitly, as that's not how a true white stripes fan should behave.

I get a feeling he doesn't really have much control of this beast he has created, but that doesn't make him a phony.

― Damo Suzuki's Parrot, Saturday, April 21, 2012 8:02 AM (3 days ago) Bookmark

surely there have rarely been rock stars in more total control of the beast he created than Jack White!

I like the first song, "missing pieces," with it's great rhodes piano. I also like "blunderbuss," and the last song, "take me with you..." I also like the first two singles. I don't really hate anything on here.
I think I just had out of this world expectations.

Discovering that it was Meg who terminated the White Stripes, while Jack would have gone on indefinitely, has totally changed my reading of the lyrics. Like his divorce is a red herring and the subject of a song like Missing Pieces is actually Meg. Maybe this is the common reading but I listened to a review copy a lot before I found out how the split went down.

Quite like it so far.

sounds like a series of sketches, interspersed with back of fag packet moments.

I wasnt such a big fan of the 2nd Raconteurs album, though it had its moments, but I'm probably the only person who has a soft spot for the 2nd Dead Weather album

xp to Vegemite Grrrl

INSIDE LOOK: Jack White & Gary Oldman - Amex UNSTAGED

A live + Digital Music Experience April 27 9pm EST

http://www.youtube.com/user/JackWhiteVevo/unstaged

Discovering that it was Meg who terminated the White Stripes, while Jack would have gone on indefinitely, has totally changed my reading of the lyrics

she quit in the middle of a tour iirc?

like, it doesn't get more obvious than that

Ha, well I can't have been following it too closely then.

huh yeah i didn't know meg quit

iirc it was around the same time that a rumored sex tape of Meg was circulating (it was, not surprisingly, fake)

Now I know why you were following Meg's activities so closely.

http://www.chacha.com/question/does-jack-white-of-the-white-stripes-wear-makeup-to-look-so-white

I think there was some common agreement about the split.

Didn't the White stripes reconvene and carry on after Meg's break?

I suppose being an obsessive blues fan means rewriting the influences into nuevo misogynist bilge.

cuz "Sixteen Saltines" is crap.

the whole show is up, and it's not bad. it starts about 10 minutes in.

http://www.youtube.com/user/JackWhiteVevo/unstaged

the setlist:

with the girls backing

Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground
Missing Pieces
Freedom At 21
Love Interruption
Hotel Yorba
Two Against One
Top Yourself
I'm Slowly Turning Into You
Blue Blood Blues
Take Me With You When You Go

with the boys backing

Sixteen Saltines
I Cut Like A Buffalo
Weep Themselves To Sleep
Trash Tongue Talker
You Know That I Know
We're Going To Be Friends
Hypocritical Kiss
Hello Operator
Carolina Drama
Seven Nation Army

favorite misogynist moment is in "Top Yoursef," where he growls:

"How you gonna rock yourself to sleep, when I give up that midnight creep, girl...
Yeah how you gonna get that deep, when your daddy ain't around to give it to you..."

Finally picked this up - it's a lot better than I expected. Really love the middle group of songs, Love Interruption, Blunderbuss, Weep Themselves to Sleep ...the piano and slightly, I dunno, honky-tonk/country-fied approach really suits him.

I feel like he's still got a lot of artifice in his songwriting that he needs to get rid of. He feels too self conscious still or soemthing, like he's trying to prove something with his songs. I think if that ever goes away and he writes from the heart he'll be incredible.

I like the artifice, at this stage in the game a rich white guy playing blues-rock is about as artificial as you can get so he might as well play around with it.

This is a pretty good album, better than the Dead Weather at least, I agree that middle section is the strongest, although I need to give it time to sink in a bit more.

i think Get Behind Me Satan was pretty from the heart tbh. in fact i think most of jack's stuff is from the heart. its just that jack's got a weird heart.

those 3 comparisons make everything clear to me

the black keys meanwhile are the work of a dave matthews fan and sound like blues traveler, and when i saw them at sxsw they had a real live shoeshine boy working beside the stage while they played, so fuck them.

― There shouldn't be a thread for Dennis Perrin tweets. (stevie), Sunday, August 4, 2013 4:17 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wait, seriously? what year was that, i gotta find that shit on youtube

2004, I think? I walked out almost immediately.

Am willing to assert that El Camino is a better record than White has made for years.

U R NUTS

I think we just need Greg Ginn involved somehow via his own lawsuits and any bands with Black in the name and the resultant paste will be a court-enforced supergroup of Ginn, Rollins, Morris, White and Auerbach that has tour calling themselves the Grey Bears.

haven't heard el camino, but despite my better judgment, i do quite like "lonely boy". every else about the black keys is a drag tho.

everything else, that is

If we're gonna take sides on which one of these guys is less of a tool, Auerbach's "dance for me, roots music legend, dance for me" Dr. John album was a lot better than White's Wanda Jackson album.

i don't mind the first two black keys records, they are decent for fuzzy white-dude blues stuff. everything jack white has ever done kinda makes my skin crawl.

Yeah, don't listen to Black Keys, but i don't find them annoying, either. Jack White seems like he's trying to be annoying on purpose, which is even more annoying.

My dream project: Jack White producing and playing on an Alicia Keys album.

That sounds OK, except for the Jack White part.

yeah i'll stand by the black keys for a couple albums, they kinda lost me around magic potion but rubber factory is pretty great, and the first one is too.

There's some White Stripes stuff that I genuinely like, but I haven't bothered to check out White's side projects or solo stuff. He really does seem to be pretty humourless and dour - which seems at odds with all his theatrics, costumes, gimmicks, and publicity stunts. I kind of liked the White Stripes' having a concept and a self-conscious myth-making made-up backstory. I know that stuff isn't in fashion - but when the White Stripes first popped up, I thought it was cool to see someone pull together so fully-formed - like the Ramones or Devo or KISS or the NY Dolls. But those bands were funny - and a little creepy and nuts - and it worked for them (at least for awhile). I think Jack White tried to create his own private world like those bands, but it ended up too precious and pretentious and closed-off to be all that interesting. Also, not enough good rocking tunes.

so no talk about the new album Lazaretto? i actually had no idea there was a new one until today. reading ILM too much, lol.

He was just on the cover of Rolling Stone...

"Feel like he's still got a lot of artifice in his songwriting that he needs to get rid of. He feels too self conscious still or soemthing, like he's trying to prove something with his songs. I think if that ever goes away and he writes from the heart he'll be incredible."

This. Although I only think it's a problem when the tempo or volume drops. When its black math or rag and bone, it seems totally undeniable.