The Black Keys

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ah ok

I would listen to a Nickelback/Danger Mouse collab.

The other thing they are missing from the Stripes is that Jack is a hotshit guitar player

Jack's guitars always sound amazing, but is he really that skilled at guitar? I'm sure he doesn't want to play fast, but could he play fast many-note solos if that's what he wanted? Can he play hotshit fingerpicking songs? "We're Going to Be Friends", if a good song, is some sub-blackbird fingerpicking.

yeah the guy has chops (doesn't always show em off, but he's more than capable)

Persona-wise, I find the Black Keys dudes way less annoying than Jack White. And loose though he may be, the drummer is miles better than Meg "1, 2, 3...um, um..." White.

Plus, I continue to find this video amusing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_PrT25o8Vs

yeah i've seen live footage of him going off and white got more showoffy on later stuff and in other projects

jack white's annoying persona is the best part!

the white stripes are super pretentious and the black keys are not and that's why the white stripes are way better

it was a concept band, naming their 2nd record de stijl and the coordinated clothes and stuff...it was art rock

full disclosure: i'm giving jack a lot of slack lately because of the neil young record and the angel holograms in his new record

What about Black Keys as NPR Gun Club?

― da croupier, Wednesday, May 14, 2014 7:40 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uuuh fuck no bro

Most people itt seem to be acting like the Black Keys still sound like they did before Danger Mouse. Now they're catchy classic rock dudes.

Persona-wise, I find the Black Keys dudes way less annoying than Jack White.

Depends what you count as annoying. I don't recall Jack White complaining about other musicians as much as these guys.

this sounds like 'jack white shreds'

those are dope solos dude, wilding out

you like on some alan holdsworth shit or something?

I guess I just find it weird to describe jack white as a hotshit guitarist when there's probably a few insurance salesmen in every US city that are more skilled.

i guess we have a different definition

if you mean like tone attorney type dudes with pristine $3000 Paul Reed Smith koa wood guitars with active pickups and boutique hand wired combo amps that have never been out of the house and boxes of polybagged back issues of Guitar Player magazines who can breeze through mixolydian mode scales up and down the neck but have never actually played a show outside of the neighborhood block party that one year yeah you're right. but jack is audacious and so are those solos. he's got solid chops and a distinctive way of playing.

yeah, i'm definitely being a bit cranky about it, but I agree with everything in that post. I think I'm just channeling some leftover hatred I have from seeing some documentary where jack white and the edge got together to talk about blues guitar.

http://thumbs2.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/mO2cvHWPAb229YPw6Bkjm3w.jpg

Yeah slippery slope there. There are "more skilled" guitarists all over the world that play the absolutely worst shit. "Hot shit" is relative to the context of the music. There certainly are insurance salesman/music store employess all over the world who believe this whole-heartedly though.

yeah but you can't really separate jack white from the insurance salesmen music store employee guitar world culture. he is often the focus of it!

as his place in that documentary suggests, he's probably the main example of a 21st century "guitar hero". is there anyone else in the mainstream along those lines?

The only parts of that movie I remember are J. White making the single-string guitar on some porch and J. Page putting on Link Wray and just dorking the fuck out over it. Those scenes were pretty cool.

xp jonny greenwood maybe?

maybe that muse guy? feel like there are lots of metal dudes that maybe don't count as 'guitar heros'

i definitely don't like jack white's style of playing, but he can def play

The only thing he really has in abundance is style!

Tom Morello feels like a "21st century guitar" guy, even though he was big in the 20th.

hey UMS! I have been cunt-struck for the "tone attorney" phrase since I discovered it on the electrical audio boards…does anyone know if that's where it emerged?

and while I can't cite any examples right at this second, it seems like all that Jack White did when he hit big was scream that every single thing about modern music—recording technique but musicians especially— were no good and that he implicitly and maybe Mick Collins or somebody were carrying the torch for real music. Reminds me of a passage in the oral history about detroit, D. rock city, where some disgruntled detroit person, one of many there who side with Jim Diamond but that JW regards as a pure hater boiling over with envy, recalled that White listened to Rage against the Machine, Korn and other mid 90s nu-metal, which seems even more damning than digging G love.

yeah, chops guys who geek out over Vai and SRV and used to read guitar mags consider White like the only bright spot in the "popular music" of the last 15 years. John Mayer can play, but they hate his songwriting, and there's guys like Oz Noy and Nels Cline, but that's niche. many of those guys are still really really mad about the decline of chops in the mainstream after 20 years.

haha oh man forgot about nels cline. That brings up mark kozelek as another potential modern guitar hero.

i guess we have a different definition

if you mean like tone attorney type dudes with pristine $3000 Paul Reed Smith koa wood guitars with active pickups and boutique hand wired combo amps that have never been out of the house and boxes of polybagged back issues of Guitar Player magazines who can breeze through mixolydian mode scales up and down the neck but have never actually played a show outside of the neighborhood block party that one year yeah you're right. but jack is audacious and so are those solos. he's got solid chops and a distinctive way of playing.

― dollar rave club (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, May 15, 2014 8:04 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^5

haha veronica i believe it came from a local music board i post to w/some crossover with EA...i believe that was a z0m-z0m turn of phrase

its too good

it's so perfect i use it all the time now and i don't even think that it's not a common phrase

I don't recall Jack White complaining about other musicians as much as these guys.

Haha, except for all the shit he talks about the Black Keys! Anyway, Jack White is annoying and I don't like him much as a guitar player. His guitar is as annoying as he is, imo. The funniest thing about that doc is the self-cancelling nature of those three dudes: Jack White is only great compared to the Edge, who is not much of a guitarist. But everything Jack White does absolutely pales compared to Jimmy Page, to whom he owes a ton. So of course they plop him next to page. It's like, "Hey, Jack White, I bet you feel great about yourself after the Edge sheepishly showed you how to play 'I Will Follow," oh you do, well, here's Jimmy Page, motherfucker, how do you feel about yourself now?"

Persona-wise, I find the Black Keys dudes way less annoying than Jack White.

otm, white was always a hurdle for me in appreciating the white stripes. i think i have more appreciation for the black keys because being from cleveland i knew them from the beginning and they really did seem like two regular dudes from a shitty northeast ohio town, and they seemed unpretentious. that said i value "pretentiousness" in many other bands (PINK FLOYD RULES!!!!!!!!!!!!!) but not really in garage blues-rock duos

every photo i see of auerbach makes me worry he's not getting enough sleep

yeah, JiC's post sums up my feelings. it's a "this dude is the heir to jimmy page's Guitar Player market?" feeling. it has nothing to do with my enjoyment of the music. sure, you can define "good guitar playing" however you want, but there are quantitative metrics. and I believe that people mistakenly think that Jack White is excellent within those metrics because he's marketed that way.

but I totally agree that white can wild out in a way that auerbach perhaps can't, and it is a big reason for the gap in enjoyment for me. so UMS's original post is otm, and I'm sad that I even went down this road ;_;

Persona-wise, I find the Black Keys dudes way less annoying than Jack White. And loose though he may be, the drummer is miles better than Meg "1, 2, 3...um, um..." White.

black keys drummer makes meg white seem like billy fucking cobham

Eh, they both suck, sorry. Would see a Billy Cobham/Jack White duo in a heartbeat.

they do both suck but one of them can't even suck properly

^^

lmao at "tone attorney type dudes" totally using that one from now on

big come up and thickfreakness were great. all went to shit after that.

I admired-from-a-distance the loose, trashy, swinging quality of Meg White's drumming, but it never lifted off when it needed to (although I'm not a Stripes fan anyway -- White always sounded like he was playing at a style of music, not unlike someone like Wynton Marsalis).

But the Black Keys drummer is just stiff and dull and I'm already sleepy from writing that much about him.

yeah, that's it. the 'looseness' of the Burt's Bees drummer seems to come from stiffness. that's what makes it so bad.

yeah, JiC's post sums up my feelings. it's a "this dude is the heir to jimmy page's Guitar Player market?" feeling. it has nothing to do with my enjoyment of the music. sure, you can define "good guitar playing" however you want, but there are quantitative metrics. and I believe that people mistakenly think that Jack White is excellent within those metrics because he's marketed that way.

― the glimmer man (Sufjan Grafton), Thursday, May 15, 2014 11:27 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hey hey hey btw tone attorney stuff aside I am in NO WAY claiming that JW is on the same planet as Jimmy page as a guitarist, songwriter, producer, anything btw

just saying him and meg were a distinctive thing, and i think he can play...but when i first saw them i kinda got they were going for a look/aesthetic in a real way which is why they turned into stars as opposed to 65 other late 90s estrus records type garage rock/blues bands that were in that world

black keys don't have any aesthetic they aren't about anything except being...well okay i guess these guys are kind of a new band that you could dig if you like classic rock but want a new band to like

kinda like the black crowes w/o the tunes

Feel like it's a testament to how exciting the Black Keys are that this thread has turned into a discussion of whether Jack White is really a good guitar player or not.

lol otm

The other thing they are missing from the Stripes is that Jack is a hotshit guitar player

― dollar rave club (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Thursday, May 15, 2014 7:05 AM Bookmark

Also that Meg, despite her lack of technique, had a great fucking drum sound

yes also true