Volume CXXXII, Number 19 April 4, 2003 f

White gets it right
JAY KANG
STAFF WRITER

Four stars out of five

Jack White, high school misfit and veteran of one divorce, has written an album dedicated to, and written for the "sweetheart." To define what he means by "sweetheart," he dedicates two pages of liner notes to a written rant on how media and societal trends (he relegates his sharpest barbs for lottery tickets and uber-caffeinated soft drinks: "societal trends" that only happen inside 7-11) have destroyed puppy love. Meaning, the sweetheart is anything other than, "the thirteen year old tattoo, the hard attitude, devil may care, don't call your parents, drink, insult, thank only yourself, and blame the rest if you don't get yours."

Albums these days rarely carry such credos, especially as explicitly as Elephant does. While we might understand something of what Radiohead tries to do with their ironic song titles, sterile graphic design and socially-laced lyrics, Thom Yorke and his bandmates have never exactly told us what they are reacting against.

Jack White is hardly so bashful or so subtle and some of the strength of the White Stripes' third album lies in White's dedication to the concept. There are no cheap, radio-friendly filler songs that sort of sound like last year's hit, "Been in Love with a Girl," nor are there any sneering, blues-mired messages that might appeal to the hip crowd that follows bands like the Liars or the Strokes.

If nothing else, Elephant is earnest and it is reactionary. Lyrics compiled together, it carries an almost embarrassingly open vision of winsome innocence and all that is good about falling foolishly in love. This is White's sweetheart: the sweaty-palmed teenage dirtbag with the dozen roses in his right hand about to ask the head cheerleader out to the prom. Before he learns that she's an awful person, before he comes to understand that he only seeks out in others what he lacks himself, before he reads the Tao Teh Ching and before he learns in college that romantic love was a creation of the 14th Century. Elephant is a eulogy to this icon, and White's voice-which ranges from plaintive to tortured- perfectly reflects the dizzying emotions of the age and the experience.

Although they draw much of their sound out of the electric Detroit blues, Elephant displays the Stripes' first effort to break out of just being highly-wired, lo-fi rockers. Meg White sings a song on this album and the Stripes even condescend to include a bass in a couple tracks.

Much of the steely guitar is gone and replacing it is thoughtfully spaced, sparse guitar and more subdued vocals. Although it's refreshing to see a band trying to grow musically, some of this experimentation is of detriment to the album. Unlike White Blood Cells and even DeStijl, both of which were fueled by wild guitars and driving drums, Elephant has a tendency to drag in certain spots, ("There's no home for you here," and "Ball and Biscuit" are particularly boring) which might turn away some fans who listen mostly to get a hip charge.

There are points where the attention to minimalism does not work and there are even times when White's crunching guitar sounds a bit stale. However, these rather small blemishes are overwhelmed by White's unfathomable charisma and his innovative songwriting. (There is not a single chorus on Elephant)

Many critics have labeled White as "retro" and his sound as "garage." As proof, they point to the seventies crunch of White's power chords, the antiquity of his recording equipment (Elephant was recorded on an eight-track reel-to-reel that went out-of-date in the late sixties) and small, seemingly petty messages in his liner notes such as, "No computers were used during the writing, recording, mixing or mastering of this record."

What these critics miss is that there is a difference between being stylishly retro and attempting to reclaim a lost era for reasons other than style. The White Stripes, unlike the bands that they are so often erroneously compared to, do not dress like the Velvet Underground. They wear white and red silk suits that defy category. They do not prattle on endlessly about iconic, obscure jazz legends that are their heroes. What they have tried to do with Elephant is create a time bomb aimed at reminding their mod-haired fans that the principles of their youth are better than the concessions they've made in their young adulthood. This is a different "retro"-one rooted in emotion rather than fashion and it certainly deserves its own space and definition.

If anything, Jack White's songs are children's songs for jaded adults that inspire the same, strange time-bending sentiment that is stirred when we look through baby pictures or read over old diaries. However, unlike those personal relics whose appeal is steeped mostly in nostalgic navel-gazing, (Look how cute I was in this photo!), Elephant draws out a more profound sort of looking-back, where ideas of maturity are cast off as callousness and innocence is not merely something to lose. As Jack White himself sings in one of the album's most satisfying tracks, "The Air Near My Fingers": "Don't you remember, you told me in December that a boy is not a man until he makes a stand. Well, I'm not a genius, but maybe you'll remember this. I never said I wanted to be a man."

The whole sentiment: Two stars out of five

It's not that Jack White is wrong, or even being hopelessly naïve. I mean, it's nice to look fondly back, only see the greenest peaks of happiness, and write off your youth as some lost Shangri-La. But, really when you think back at those years, things probably weren't as sweet as you might remember.
Maybe if you were one of those kids whose entire life consisted of hitting home runs in the bottom of the ninth, watching He-Man, building snow forts, winning pinewood derbies, and kissing the hot girl behind the bleachers, you'd have some license to write an entire album's worth of songs about regaining that time in your life, but most of us spent our childhoods accidentally peeing ourselves and being bored.
Remember 4th grade? Yeah, that sucked and it wasn't like 5th grade was a week at Bikini Space Camp either. 6th grade? Boring. 7th grade? Humiliating, but boring at the same time. And so it goes on.
It's not that you should only dwell on the negative, it's just that you should be fair. For every time you talk to someone about how much Transformers ruled (which it did), you should have the decency to not carry on and say, "Yeah, and remember Thundercats? That ruled!" because Thundercats sucked. So did The Cabbage Patch Kids and so did your mom back then.
It's like playing that game where you try to name players off of old baseball teams and you're doing the '86 Red Sox and you go, "Yeah, Dwight Evans ruled," and that a**hole next to you goes, "Yeah, Calvin Schiraldi. Remember him? He ruled." That a**clown who says Cavlin Schiraldi rules is just trying to elevate anything from his childhood into a solid gold memory and forgets that it was really Calvin Schiraldi's fault that the Sox lost Game 6 of the '86 Series and that in addition to being a sweaty short man, Calvin Schiraldi just wasn't very good at baseball.

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