The problem Eric Clapton had with Jack White: “It doesn’t move me”
Throughout his career, Jack White has had a confusing relationship with authenticity. On the one hand, his whole ethos has been about genuine emotional expression—an artist communicating with their audience without filters. Recording onto tape with no pro-tools and leaving in mistakes because that’s the reality of making and performing music is what all artists should strive for. On the other, he told the world that his ex-wife was his big sister for over 14 years. So, what gives?
Surely, you can’t have it both ways, can you? You either present yourself unadorned and honest to the audience, or you don’t. However, when you really look into the blues, you see a genre that has always had a complicated relationship with artifice. It’s been this way since the beginning. After all, Robert Johnson probably didn’t sell his soul to the devil for guitar mastery, and half of all bluesmen didn’t go by their given names. Although ‘Lemon’ was actually Blind Lemon Jefferson’s birth name, fun fact.
When it comes to the blues, what’s more important than the unadorned facts of the matter are the emotional truths at play. The blues are, after all, more about how the song feels than anything else, so the facts can be played with to match. Take The White Stripes’ confusing biography for a start. Sure, the facts are that John Gillis married Meg White, took her last name, and then started a band with her, which continued after their marriage ended in 2000. However, the emotional truth sounds like Jack ’n’ Meg’s relationship began to feel more like a sibling bond than anything else, so why not frame that as the actual truth?
This does lead to many people misunderstanding that side of the blues and taking that commitment to authenticity to mean a commitment to so-called “purity”. Blues purists are, like all purists, a tiresome bunch of snobs, and it’s no surprise that they turned their noses up at The Stripes’ antics. In an interview Jack gave to Uncut around the release of his debut solo album Blunderbuss, he named and shamed one blues legend who really didn’t get the big idea behind his old band’s antics.
In the interview, White said, “Eric Clapton, for example, said he didn’t like The White Stripes. He thought we were having a laugh about Son House playing ‘Death Letter’ on the Grammys. People in that Stratocaster white blues scene didn’t understand that we could dress in red and white and black, play in the simplistic way we did, and still be the blues.” While Clapton may not have gone on record specifically dissing The Stripes, he was dismissive enough about them and the very idea of modern music in general for this to be very believable.
In a separate interview with Rolling Stone India, Clapton was asked about his feelings about the then-new batch of up-and-coming blues-rock artists like the White Stripes and the Black Keys. Clapton sniffed, “I think it’s OK, but you could probably know what I like by what I’ve got on my iPod, and that stuff isn’t there. I’ve seen ’em, I respect it, and I have no objection, but it doesn’t move me. I’m not motivated by looking for new things in the younger generation. That’s never been my MO. I’ve always looked for the older guys. That’s where I think the value is.”
Considering that, even at the tender age of 13, Clapton was the kind of tiresome bore who was judging actual Black bluesmen as “not real blues” for playing to white audiences, he was never going to give Jack the time of day. However, it’s not like Jack White ever really needed or wanted the approval of a fossil like Clapton anyway. He’s the polar opposite of Slowhand, the kind of guy who wants to take the blues into the future rather than have it remain in a comfortable, conservative past.
