White Stripes - Vintage people

“I would have loved to live in the Twenties or Thirties, but unfortunately my dream of being a Black man in the Thirties will never come true”

Jack White

Intro – DetroitRockCity

Detroit, Michigan. Detroit, city of engines. Detroit, musical cradle of rock bands who left more than a mark, like MC5 and Stooges.

At the dawn of the new century, after more than forty years, that same noisy, anarchic spirit returned, echoing through the “garages” of dozens of bands born from the core, unforgotten lesson of rock and roll. It's a new generation of rockers, dreaming of the future while looking back.

In New York, The Strokes try to retrace the vicious decadence of Lou Reed and Velvet Underground. The Libertines (saddled with the heavy label of “the new Clash”) throw English music, grown bourgeois with age, back onto the rebellious streets.

So, Detroit. Not just the home of the foul-mouthed Eminem and Kid Rock, but a focal point for the vintage taste of Von Bondies, Slumber Party and Detroit Cobras.

"The Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit" gathers the musical essence of this new journey into the past in a compilation album. Curating and compiling it is one of today's rock "Midas touches", Jack White.

Red and white chewing gum

John Anthony Gillis isn't cut out for manual labor. At fifteen he's an apprentice upholsterer in Detroit's Mexicantown, but despite the slogan "Your couch is not dead", his little business isn't exactly professional.

The boy is more interested in the colors of his work uniform (yellow and black) and in hiding little notes with short poems inside the sofas he repairs. Although he grew up in a part of the city - Mexicantown - where hip-hop and electronic music are the dominant tastes, John mostly listens to the blues of Son House and Blind Willie McTell.

In the early Nineties he begins his career as a musician, becoming the drummer for Goober and The Peas - a band straddling country and punk. The adventure is extremely short-lived, but it's enough to launch him into Detroit's underground circuit.

The Go are the ones who welcome him in, and it's with them that he starts playing what will become his main instrument, the electric guitar.

Meanwhile, Megan Martha White is serving drinks in a smoky bar in the American city. It's 1994, and it's in this very bar that John and Meg meet for the first time. Love at first sight.

Two years later the two get married, and John decides to take her surname, thus transforming himself into his most famous alter ego, Jack White.

"When Meg started playing drums with me, just for fun, it was liberating and refreshing. There was something inside that completely opened me up". And this "opening" soon bears fruit, because in 1997 the duo steals the name of a chewing gum.

Thus, the White Stripes are born.

Jack decides to take on vocal duties as well as all the guitar parts, while Meg settles behind the drums. After all, even the Doors didn't really have a bassist, or almost.

Baptism date: August 14, 1997. The White Stripes perform at Detroit's Gold Dollar, presenting to the small crowd, among others, the hysterical blues-rock and roll of "Let's Shake Hands" and "Lafayette Blues", which the following year become the band's first two singles. It's no coincidence that among their earliest live covers is the Stooges' "TV Eye".

Jack and Meg are ready for their venture, thanks above all to an immediately geometric style in their clothes and look. The band's signature is perceptible with great clarity well beyond the musical idioms they employ. "Red, white and black form the most powerful color combination of all time, from a Coca Cola can to the Nazi flag".

A chromatic nightmare somewhere between Mondrian and Pop Art, the likes of which hadn't been seen in rock since the constructivist rigor of Kraftwerk.

Back to the roots

Jack White: "Our debut album is really angry. The rawest, the most powerful. The record most tied to the typical Detroit sound we've ever made."

In 1998, Long Gone John, eccentric founder of the indie label Sympathy For The Record Industry, decided to sign the White Stripes.

For the Long Beach label they released a third single, "The Big Three Killed My Baby", which attacks the social injustices of Ford, GM and Chrysler. The song's twisted punk-blues riff clearly reveals the Stooges' influence and paves the way for the sonic explosion of their self-titled debut album.

The White Stripes (Sympathy For The Record Industry, 1999) was recorded entirely in Jack's apartment, in line with a particularly rough and primitive lo-fi approach. Producing alongside Jack White was Jim Diamond, ex-member of the Dirtbombs and a seasoned indie-rock producer.

Dedicated to bluesman Son House, the record certainly doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it comes across with real performative force and a good deal of cunning in presenting old genres to new generations still shedding bitter tears over the ashes of grunge. It's a fun, sweetly nostalgic way of bypassing 90s post-rock and going straight back to the dawn of time, down there in the Mississippi swamps.

When the tribal riff of "Jimmy The Exploder" kicks in, it almost seems like Jack White's intent is to go back and fish the spiritual corpse of Jimi Hendrix out of the bottom of the river. The urgency of the blues is captured in the clever cover of Robert Johnson's "Stop Breakin' Down", which recalls the driving Led Zeppelin version of "Travelling Riverside Blues".

Jack's shrill, Robert Plant-like voice accompanies Johnny Walker's slide guitar (the only added musician on the record) on "Suzy Lee", while the chanting chords of "Sugar Never Tasted So Good" rehash Zeppelin's esoteric lesson. It's impossible, in fact, not to recognize the influence of a track like "Moby Dick" in the little pachyderm that is "Cannon-John The Revelator".

The White Stripes, however, know how to veer off the path to the Delta: "Wasting My Time" turns toward a fifties-flavored pop-rock and roll. Jack indulges in atonal punk riffs fired off at full blast, while Meg backs him with obsessive, repetitive rhythms. A perfect blend for lightning-fast tracks like "Astro", "Broken Bricks" and "When I Hear My Name". The listener is assaulted, pressed hard, before things slow down with the suffering of "Do" and the blues-mex flavor of the cover of Bob Dylan's "One More Cup Of Coffee". The traditional "St. James Infirmary Blues" plays with a Brecht-inspired barrelhouse piano before Walker returns to the slide guitar for the languid closer "I Fought Piranhas".

To promote the album, the White Stripes made a different choice: rather than staying put playing around the Detroit area, they went out beyond the city and built up a wider following thanks to two tours with Pavement and Sleater-Kinney.

Among the many covers performed live, two stand out: the splendid electric version of Blind Willie McTell's "Lord, Send Me An Angel Down" and the frenzied reworking of Bob Dylan's "Lovesick".

In June 2000 the band's simplicity found new form in their second album, De Stijl (Sympathy For The Record Industry, 2000). The title, in Dutch, was openly inspired by the Dutch abstract art movement led by Gerrit Rietveld, which Jack White fell in love with after visiting the Schröder House during breaks from some European tour dates.

Beyond the artwork's blatant neoplasticism, where the two of them seem to timidly peer out from a Mondrian-colored dream, De Stijl does nothing more than retrace, with greater melodic sturdiness, the path already laid out by the first album. It's a sonic refinement of their lo-fi approach, once again recorded in Jack's apartment on a simple 8-track analog machine.

The White Stripes' visual identity thus finds its sonic counterpart in another forty minutes, this time dedicated to Blind Willie McTell. Sure, once again they play between the future and a hypertextual approach full of references, but the album manages to pay tribute to America's folk heritage with a playful spirit that isn't overly reverent.

"You're Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl)" sounds like an old Kinks song, but it's firmly rooted in the garage-flavored pop-rock of the turn of the new century. That's exactly why the record's "revival sound" works so well. Jack decides to compress ultra-sonic blues so as to alternate the Hendrix-esque "Hello Operator" and the swamp-born slide-hard of "Little Bird" with the pop drift of "Apple Blossom", which sounds like it was written by a drunk Paul McCartney.

Creative students of Professor Seventies Tradition, the White Stripes broaden their melodic horizons following the trail of the Eastern-tinged drones of "III", as in the guitar-violin pairing of "I'm Bound To Pack It Up" and the hypnotic, voodoo-blues sway of "A Boy's Best Friend".

In the year of the "millennium bug", Jack decides not to trust computers for making music and, armed to the teeth with effects and pedals, throws himself into a cover of Son House's "Death Letter", which could sit comfortably on plenty of 60s rock-blues records. It takes the combined four minutes of "Let's Build A Home" and "Jumble, Jumble" to find, over trashy riffs and raucous rhythms, a garage-punk that sounds more modern. It's only a brief leap into the future, though, because with the syncopated "Why Can't You Be Nicer To Me?" we're back to Hendrix-like territory, while the version of McTell's "Your Southern Can Is Mine" spins happily around itself over an irresistible country-bluegrass groove.

De Stijl will climb Billboard's independent albums chart, soon becoming a cult album in the White Stripes' discography, the last testament to the band's raw, minimal simplicity before the dazzling success of their third record, White Blood Cells.

No one is a prophet in their own land

Following the release of De Stijl, the White Stripes embark on a small but fortunate tour of Japan and Australia that quickly boosts their fame. Across the two Tokyo dates, their successful cover of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" takes hold, soon becoming a fixture of the band's live shows.

Riding the initial wave of enthusiasm, Jack returns to the studio in Memphis with famed producer Doug Easley to record (this time with no additional musicians) his third official album.

In 2001, legendary English DJ John Peel plays the White Stripes on London radio, sparking a new musical sensation in the UK.

The English press begins talking about them insistently: the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and, above all, NME, which even puts them on its cover. All this despite the band being virtually unknown at home and having practically no record deal in Europe.

Yet rock and roll is ready to take over the new generations, boomerang-style, even in the United States, which sends White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2001) to the top of the charts, eventually selling 900,000 copies.

The duo's media visibility spikes dramatically with an appearance on the hugely popular "Late Show With David Letterman", but above all thanks to the video for the single "Fell In Love With A Girl", honored by MTV. The video is directed by eccentric French filmmaker Michel Gondry, who accompanies the stylized forms of Jack and Meg, built entirely out of colorful Lego bricks, as they throw themselves into a raucous, irresistible full-volume punk and roll.

For the general public, this is where the White Stripes are born. This is where their mission (?) begins: to bring the fiercest, most essential and bleeding rock and roll back to the attention of an audience that may have forgotten the raw simplicity of this music.

White Blood Cells, this time dedicated to Loretta Lynn, is hailed by critics as a masterpiece, but listening to the record a doubt remains: is Jack a genius or simply shrewd?

There's certainly a strong personality at work in speaking an ancient, scorching language, but the whirl of references is still spinning wildly, caught between a Stooges-like riff and blues blasted out à-la Jon Spencer.

The gloomy, distorted feel of "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground" and the amused frenzy of the schizoid country of "Hotel Yorba": like putting a carefree Gordon Gano at the helm of the Heartbreakers. And it wouldn't simply be a flight of fancy to imagine the dusty riff of "Expecting" sung by a sultry PJ Harvey.

Jack and Meg, however, have great musical passions, electric energy, and above all the right dose of creativity on their side to put together a collage-album that still sounds fresh and enjoyable. Country, for instance, is filtered through hard-pop echoes, as in "Now Mary", just as in "We're Going To Be Friends" melodic folk finds a new dimension that's as tender as it is skeletal. Youthful neurosis vents itself in the Zeppelin-esque riff of "I Think I Smell A Rat" or in the sad martial cadence of "Offend In Every Way", before calming down in the romantic sweep of the electric ballad "The Same Boy You've Always Known".

In the end, a big question mark remains: is this refined production strategy or deliberate obsession? Perhaps both, but the White Stripes prove, beyond everything else, that they have a touch of genius, precisely at the moment when the noise-laden, noir-scented drift of "Aluminium" kicks in, or when the languid, dreamy piano of "This Protector" takes over.

Traveling with the Elephant

Despite their success (British magazine Q places them on its list of “50 bands to see before you die”), the White Stripes seem to keep their feet on the ground. Jack sticks to his idea of vintage music, essentially free of any electronic element, low-key and without excessive recording costs. The determination to do everything possible not to sell out, however, wavers in early 2002, when the band signs a million-pound deal with V2, who that same year will reissue the successful White Blood Cells.

Fueling their popularity, even the website of the staid Times gets in on the act, publishing Jack and Meg's divorce certificate. This sparks a round of pointless gossip, contradicting the pair's claims of being step-siblings.

Jack White shrugs it off and dives into the world of cinema (in Minghella's film “Cold Mountain”), earning himself another cover of American monthly Spin.

The esteem earned in the music world's showbiz circles leads the White Stripes on a long world tour that cements their status once and for all, with incendiary shows at the Reading, Leeds and Glastonbury festivals. And it's in England – at Toe Rag Studios in London – that the Detroit duo once again shuts itself away in the studio with producer Liam Watson.

On Elephant (Xl Recordings, 2003) the White Stripes stick with their raucous songs, conjuring up the good old days by blending garage, blues, acid-punk and psychedelia. Contemporary rock, then, but recorded with vintage gear, lending it an unmistakably retro touch. Compared to the multitude of people rummaging through the roots of American music, though, the duo confirm a genuine knack for songwriting. There's no shortage of emotionally powerful tracks, starting with the acoustic big ballad “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket”, with Jack's anguished voice front and center, continuing on the wave of the soul melodies of “I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s” and the vaguely lysergic notes of “In the Cold, Cold Night”, a serenade for guitar, organ and voice (Meg White's), echoing the Doors and Patti Smith. And there's also room for the dazed country of “Well It’s True That We Love Another” and a cover of Burt Bacharach (“I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”).

For the rest, rhythm is king, as shown by the energetic single “Seven Nation Army” (destined to become the anthem of football terraces the world over), with its killer riff and relentless groove, the vibrant punk tirade of “Black Math”, the Beatles-esque “There’s No Home For You Here” and also “Hypnotize”, which pairs a contagious melody with punk urgency.

But it's above all the seven minutes of “Ball and Biscuit”, a tribute to 1950s Chicago rhythm'n'blues, that give the album real musical substance. Yes, because the White Stripes often drown in a sea of ideas without managing to develop any of them coherently. They wander restlessly through the pages of rock history: from Led Zeppelin to the Ramones, from Nirvana to the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Jack White's insolent vocals and violent guitar slashes, and Meg White's primitively pounded drums, following in the footsteps of “teacher” Maureen Tucker, sometimes manage to keep even the flimsier tracks alive. But fourteen tracks are perhaps too many for the duo's current musical arsenal. And so the back-and-forth between calm and guitar surges on “There’s No Home for You Here” and “The Air Near My Fingers”, the heavy pomp of “Little Acorns” and the rock'n'roll of “Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine” don't add much of significance to their repertoire. The final country-flavored “joke”, “It’s True That We Love One Another”, at least shows that the White Stripes know how to laugh at themselves (which is no small thing). All in all: It's only rock'n'roll. And I like it. But the impression remains that White's talent could give more.

Satan's Last Temptation

At this point, the White Stripes become true icons of the rock world. In 2003, Jack and Meg are invited by cult director Jim Jarmusch to shoot a bizarre episode about Tesla for the film “Coffee and Cigarettes”. Jack's guitar skills are recognized by Rolling Stone, which places White at number 17 on its list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.

The following year, yet another triumphant tour is documented in Dick Carruthers' 16mm film “Under Blackpool Lights”, released on DVD, finally making up for the lack of an official live release in the band's discography. Among the many covers on offer: an aggressive version of Bob Dylan's “Outlaw Blues” and a wild folk and roll romp through Leadbelly's “Boll Weevil”.

Between a couple of films and a brawl, it only takes a couple of weeks to record the new album: Get Behind Me Satan. And it really is a fitting title, since the tempting demon of easy success has been promptly vanquished with blows from an electric guitar. Of course, you have to look beyond the single that accompanied the album. “Blue Orchid”, in fact, sounds like a new “Seven Nation Army”, slightly souped up with dance tones as if it had been produced by the Scissor Sisters. Meg pounds away on her hammering drums, while Jack's Robert Plant-style falsetto accompanies a handful of basic guitar chords. Fair enough, it's really a great song, but by now you might already be thinking of this album as just another rehash.

Instead, all it takes is a listen to the psychedelic delirium of “The Nurse” to understand that, this time, the White Stripes have changed their approach. A dazed nursery rhyme that seems to have stepped out of a black-and-white noir film, “The Nurse” takes off thanks to a woozy marimba and drums bordering on the synthetic. It sounds strange, but it's true: Jack “the White” has grown tired of the obsessive riffs of his red-and-white guitar, and now prefers a drunken piano that seems to have been lifted straight from Tom Waits.

Cornerstones of this new sonic path, which considerably widens the repertoire that Jack White's creation had accustomed us to so far, are the enticing stride of “My Doorbell”, which sounds like it's come straight out of a modern-day “Physical Graffiti” steeped in acid, with its formidable piano part and an irresistible melody, and the bittersweet ballad “Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)”, an updated echo of Neil Young's 1970s work.

The White Stripes play drums, so to speak, between past and present with a wonderfully enjoyable dose of irony, as shown by the saloon-style strangeness of "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely)". Naturally, the original blues matrix is always lurking just around the corner. "Red Rain" returns to explore the more painful side of "the devil's music", while "Instinct Blues" speaks for itself, simply through its title.

And yet, the heart of Get Behind Me Satan is cheerful and carefree. While he has fun torturing the piano, she sets aside her minimal, obsessive Moe Tucker-style drumming for a while (with the exception of the driving "The Denial Twist") to explore Latin sounds built around percussion, congas and maracas. "Little Ghost" is a silly nursery rhyme with a guitar that sounds like a tiny ukulele (Jack's experience with Loretta Lynn clearly left its mark), while "Take, Take, Take" sounds like a lost session by T. Rex. 

The red and white King Midas: the Raconteurs and beyond

"We're not a supergroup. That would imply something planned from the start. We're just a new band made up of old friends".

In just a few words, Jack White introduces the world to the Raconteurs, a venture that began as a lark in his attic with his friend Brendan Benson. The two write a song, "Steady As She Goes", and decide to form a band with Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler (both from the Greenhornes). There's no set deadline, and the four work whenever they find spare time, but in May 2006 they release Broken Boy Soldiers.

The album makes an immediate impact with its breezy, infectious rock and roll. As the needle starts to spin, listeners are swept up by the stinging force of "Steady As She Goes", the Beatles-meets-Beach-Boys harmonies of "Hands", the pounding, perverse groove of the title track, moving on through the purely Lennon-esque sounds of "Intimate Secretary" and "Blue Veins". And still wandering through this landscape enclosed in a colored glass globe, one runs into Marc Bolan and his Tyrannosaurs, dancing to "Together" and "Store Bought Bones", getting lost along the way in layers of sound reminiscent of the Doors, and finally finding everyone back together, celebrating a homecoming, not before stopping by to say hello to Mr. Plant and Mr. Page, after tea with Sir McCartney.

The singles "Steady As She Goes" and "Broken Boy Soldiers" chart and earn two Grammy Award nominations.

The resulting tour draws in Stripes fans and new recruits alike: by now, everything Jack White touches turns to gold.

At the end of 2006, the official White Stripes website announces that an avant-garde orchestral music project based on part of the band's catalogue will soon be released.

The project is carried out by Richard Russell, founder of the XL Recordings label, who takes charge of an orchestra to rework tracks such as "I'm Bound To Pack It Up", "Why Can't You Be Nicer To Me?" and "The Hardest Button To Button".

This avant-garde crossover between orchestra and minimal electronics is released only via the internet in a limited number of copies (3,333 CDs — the band's old fixation with the number three — and 999 LPs), which sell out at an astonishing speed.

By now, the days when Jack and Meg had fun playing in an apartment for the sheer pleasure of "making a racket" are long gone.

In the cradle of Nashville

At the start of 2007, the White Stripes leave V2 to sign an even more lucrative deal with Warner Brothers and announce the imminent release of their sixth album, Icky Thump, recorded in a matter of weeks — this time at Blackbird Studios in Nashville. A perfect location for a band that has always drawn from the folk heritage of American music. Icky Thump continues the backward-looking journey begun in the late 90s. "Rag And Bone" could be the result of a sweltering blues jam between John Lee Hooker and ZZ Top. Jack White simply can't let go of the lesson taught by rock's old dinosaurs, but, as he's already shown before, he knows how to be a remarkably creative student. "You Don't Know What Love Is" embroiders, in a power-pop vein, the unruly fabric of the 70s-era Rolling Stones. Much like the "Paranoia Key of E" from one of Lou Reed's later records. The White Stripes manage to craft irresistible, off-kilter melodies even starting from a typical stomp complete with Deep Purple-style organ, as in "I'm Slowly Turning Into You". What strikes both the casual listener and the diehard fan, though, is Jack's willingness to take risks, no matter what. The heart of the album is playful, entertaining, but above all enterprising. "Conquest" is a call and response between guitar and mariachi horns that could fairly be called hard-tex mex. And, perhaps unexpectedly, the album follows an "Irish sky" into the mandolin-and-bagpipe jig "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn", which stretches into the closing "St. Andrew", exploding, over Meg's vocals, along the lines of the metaphysical epilogue of "Baba O'Riley".

The Stripes also play games with their titles: "300 MPH Torrential Outpour Blues" sounds like it could have come from Dylan's pen, and indeed it has a melancholy acoustic-guitar structure reminiscent of "Blood On The Tracks" before it's enriched with almost noise-like electric detours. Around every heart, though, there's a tough shell for protection. And here we return to the game of hypertextual references. If, for instance, John Paul Jones were to give the green light to the much-discussed Led Zeppelin reunion and Page and Plant shut themselves away in a studio, the result might sound something like the single "Icky Thump", packed as it is with hard-rock riffs and Arabian-tinged incursions. The garage pop-rock and roll of the Raconteurs clearly left its mark, and the tribute to the New York Dolls in "Bone Broke" could easily be an outtake from Broken Boy Soldiers. Jack doesn't give up on the tender, melodic folk ballad ("A Martyr For My Love For You"), nor on his swamp-guitar-hero slide work ("Catch Hell Blues"), nor, as in "Effect and Cause", on breezy honky-tonk country. The tribal hard-blues of "Little Cream Soda", finally, harks back to the band's origins, nearly ten years earlier now. With the hope, of course, that no football crowd anywhere in the world ever adopts its main riff. Between revival and fresh inspiration, Icky Thump wins you over with its attitude and freshness. The White Stripes present "Back to the Future Part VI". And it's one of the best films in the series.

It will be the swan song for the White Stripes. Meg, after marrying the son of Fred and Patti Smith, will disappear from the scene, while Jack will keep splitting his time among numerous projects. In 2020 the two of them (or just Jack?) release Greatest Hits, a retrospective featuring some of the most representative tracks of their shared journey. Twenty-six songs in all, a sort of physical playlist – non-chronological – and listening to it, one can only reaffirm and reinforce everything good that's been said over the years about the Detroit duo, capable of reinterpreting the lessons of their masters with a creativity all their own. A sound that time hasn't dulled, precisely because it is music outside of time, rooted in the devilish, dusty blues of the Delta and in the hysterical anarchy of the sweatiest rock'n'roll.

Songs that have become minor classics, like "Fell In Love With A Girl" or "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" (a Bacharach cover), bear witness to this, and even more so do the many memorable moments gathered here: from the over six minutes of the blazing "Ball And Biscuit" to the two minutes of the overwhelming, schizoid country of "Hotel Yorba", from the falsetto drowned in the killer riffs of "Blue Orchid" to the brilliant youthful synthesis of "I Think I Smell A Rat". The selection draws evenly from all of the band's albums ("Jolene", a Dolly Parton cover, was "only" the B-side of the single "Hello Operator"), starting with the debut single, "Let's Shake Hands", recorded in a living room and released in March 1998, later reissued in a limited run and included as a bonus track on the Japanese version of their self-titled debut album. Everything else is history, more or less well known, and once the listen is over, one question remains: why now? Could Jack be cooking up an unexpected surprise for the coming months?

Jack dances alone

But let's go back to 2012, when Jack White, at 36, allowed himself his first solo record, giving an unmistakable flavour to each of the 13 tracks on Blunderbuss, mostly produced and recorded in Nashville, at the headquarters of Third Man (the label he owns), but also in collaboration with the storied XL Recordings.

Around White moves an exceptional cast, including several female voices, such as Ghanaian singer Ruby Amanfu and model/singer Karen Elson (White's second ex-wife), the wonderful pianist Brooke Waggoner, bassist Bryn Davis, and even an entire group, Mr. Pokey La Farge with his South City Three. Many of them also appear on the tour promoting the album, in a peculiar line-up: there are two bands, one made up entirely of men, the other entirely of women, with White deciding "at breakfast who'll be playing that night." The record is certainly no tornado like "White Blood Cells", but it manages to dust off tradition and reread it in a new light. The result is a delightful bit of devilry, forward-looking, at once a tribute to its roots and the construction of new horizons. In the digital age, "Blunderbuss" fuses music "from when there were no PCs", caked in sweat and saliva, with the mega-production typical of the modern era. White's voice moves tirelessly throughout, at the best point of his career, so natural in his upper register, flying between a clean expressiveness that's the offspring of good old Ziggy Stardust and the dizzying roughness of blues-rock. White almost becomes the narrator of a musical collection of gothic tales. Full as it is of angry, bruised-blue verses, "Blunderbuss" recounts the eternal, splendid war of lovers, swerving from one genre to another to catch the listener off guard at every turn.

The tense "Missing Pieces" opens the record with an electric Rhodes piano playing in the style of Herbie Hancock's jazz. "Sixteen Saltines" is blues-rock madness, vividly colourful and electric, made to be blasted at full volume, with the famous White Stripes-style melodies that nail themselves into your brain, but with an ingenious double bass replacing the obvious electric bass. "Love Interruption" is White's acoustic duet with Amanfu, threaded through with clarinet phrases. "Blunderbuss" tells of a secret meeting between lovers in a hotel, amid romantic, sexy lighting painted by the strings. "Hypocritical Kiss" is a bitter suite, cradled by the baroque hysteria of Waggoner's piano. "I'm Shakin'" is a successful cover of the piece written by jazz musician Rudy Toombs, made famous by the American R&B of Little Willie John, with the female voices running through backing vocals kissed in pure Sixties style.

After the restful R&B of "Trash Tongue Talker", whose vocal winks at Elton John, comes, completely unexpected, the fairy-tale, street-smart honky-tonk of "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy", which nods to the cartoonish vignettes of the Kinks. Instead, dancing over a jazzy melody amid the country curls of the fiddle, the desperate final plea "Take Me With You When You Go" closes the record beautifully, with a sudden shift in style into gospel-freak territory. A truly fine sonic orgy: simple and direct, as only someone with a piece of blues lodged in their heart can manage.

Jack's second solo dance, two years after "Blunderbuss", is called Lazaretto. This record too fully reflects the omnivorous nature of its volcanic creator, ranging across vast sonic horizons and reshaping musical matter through the calibrated use of a multitude of instruments (from piano to Moog, from mandolin to violins, all the way to harmonica and the inevitable bottleneck) and a top-tier roster of collaborators. At the centre of it all, as ever, is him, Jack White and his overflowing talent, which cannibalizes everything it finds around it without ever crushing it, turning to gold everything it touches. This record, more or less like its predecessor, represents a continuous flow of contrasting yet always very intense emotions, suspended between an angry riff or a sweet arpeggio line framed by strings and female voices that soften the tough R&B and blues hide. Like "Blunderbuss", and perhaps more than "Blunderbuss", the album reflects its protagonist's restless, eclectic state of mind, indulging his various "moods"; just consider the dichotomy between the reflective interludes of "Want And Able" or "Entitlement" and the ferocious instrumental march of "High Ball Stepper", a formidable war machine soaked in heavy-rock right down to the gallbladder. And then there are the lyrics: sharp, abrasive, direct, inspired by poems and stories White himself wrote as a kid, before he found worldwide success.

Truth be told, every single song on Lazaretto would deserve its own dedicated review, such is the breadth of the musical spectrum it covers. Stories barely whispered or angrily spat in the listener's face by White's usual unmistakable bittersweet voice, which, as the years go by, shows no sign of fading or weakening. There's no shortage of nods to the giants of the past, always reread in a modern, personal key. The duet with violinist Lillie Mae Rische on "Temporary Ground" instantly transports us to the banks of the Mississippi in the sweltering New Orleans summer, while the lovely honky-tonk of "Just One Drink" and the innocent melody of "Alone In My Home" bring a smile, the latter an ideal handover with the fairy tale of "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy" from the previous album. It's also worth saying a few words about the blazing opening one-two punch, with White as the absolute showman singing about his three women scattered across the States, even bringing the Beastie Boys back to life in funk-rock guise on the bloody, delirious title track, accompanied by a rather pompous video.

Faced with a record like Lazaretto, many things inevitably fade into the background. Rather like the musician's own latest stunt, when, for Record Store Day, he recorded a 7-inch and put it up for sale within four hours, claiming the title of "world's fastest released record" and notching yet another mark on the ledger of contemporary musical geniuses. And to hell, too, with the controversy over his unfortunate remarks about fellow musicians Black Keys, who, in any case, owe quite a lot to Jack and his creations.

Today, Jack White's music speaks for him better than any gossip or publicity stunt. His songs represent the best stars-and-stripes manifesto the music market is currently able to offer, especially for all those who remain fascinated by the dusty, beautifully rugged, down-home scenery of small-town America.

Having crossed the threshold of forty, White returns with his third solo effort, Boarding House Reach, twisting the rope up into the sky and letting the horse run too far loose, thereby losing sight of his own target, almost unconsciously tangling himself up through a blend that is, in its own way, "new", while still partly gravitating here and there towards his usual Jimmy Page-style riffs, as well as the kind of instrumental passages close to traditional Mexican music (already served up plenty back in the days of the wonderful "Icky Thump"); an idea pushed forward with classic vintage instrumentation, in a reinterpretation that, strangely, only he manages to pull off without it coming across as the usual outdated freak-out mush. For the occasion, White also brings various synthesizers into the studio, even African drums, confirming his wish to change the formula, at least on the surface.

Boarding House Reach, released on his own Third Man label, thus shows some bold "breaking points" with his two previous works, steeping itself in vague Zappa-esque oddities, as in the case of "Hypermisophoniac", laid out as if by the brilliant, unsurpassed alchemist of rock; or in the electric trickery, complete with Beastie Boys-style rapping and a sloppily fusion-tinged coda, of "Ice Station Zebra", stirred up by a frenzied electric piano and pushed "upward" by pyrotechnic flights reminiscent of the Who of the "The Who Sell Out" era. The two closing laments, gospel for the first ("What's Done Is Done") and melancholy piano for the second ("Humoresque"), fail to lift an album that, all things considered, is not very successful, a confused, lightless hodgepodge in which, paradoxically, the single most thrilling moment remains the one track fully anchored to the glorious past, namely the single "Over and Over and Over". And that says a lot about just how bland the attempt to reinvent himself while essentially remaining the same turns out to be.

In 2022 he decides to double his output, producing two albums within a few months of each other. The first, released in April, Fear Of The Dawn, has a title that seems to wink at Iron Maiden's almost identically named "Fear of The Dark". It is, without doubt, a solid, energetic record that at times recalls the style of English hard rock. Certainly not in its original form, though: the colourful multi-instrumentalist loves to scatter his songs with all sorts of alien elements. On "That Was Then, This Is Now" he uses synthesizers with sounds mimicking old video games to slow the tempo down and suddenly shift key. On the already-mentioned "Fear Of The Dawn", an extraordinary theremin skilfully blends with the guitars' frequent jagged bursts, while engine roars interrupt the wild (and somewhat repetitive) Rage Against The Machine-style drive of "What's The Trick".

It's an album full of experimentation. One of the most successful tracks from this point of view is "Eosophobia", which refers to a psychological disorder that causes those who suffer from it to feel terror at the rising sun. The piece is split into a main track and a later reprise. The messianic ravings with which White commands the sun not to appear help create a lysergic atmosphere, but the track's real strength lies in the excellent work done on the reprise, with layers of liquid guitars stacked on top of one another in the manner of the Allman Brothers Band. It's not uncommon on this record to run into sounds that recall the Seventies. Not all the other tracks, however, achieve satisfying results from this constant quest for innovation or reworking of vintage sounds. For instance, "Into The Twilight" is a confused Babel of sound, more like a jam session than an actual song; "The Dusk" is utterly inconclusive in its brevity. Even the collaboration on "Hi-De-Ho" with Q-Tip (frontman of A Tribe Called Quest) doesn't fully convince. Either way, it's undeniable that the album's overall result is far more effective than its predecessor's. Anyone familiar with the histrionic artist from Michigan knows how much he loves to impress his audience, and in his relentless drive to experiment, the occasional stumble is almost inevitable, especially when he doesn't let an outside perspective guide the production. In the end, Fear Of The Dawn remains a record full of original ideas and interesting touches that stays engaging from start to finish.

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