Jack White reveals his “most widely misinterpreted” song
It’s not easy to know what Jack White is on about all the time. The legendary blues rock icon has spent the last three decades crafting some of the most beloved rock music in the history of the genre, but if you don’t know the story behind songs like ‘Icky Thump’ or ‘Sixteen Saltines’, they can almost seem like absurd nonsense when you listen to them the first hundred times or so.
But no song of White’s has had the longevity, staying power, and general confusion of ‘Seven Nation Army’. The riff-heavy track doesn’t even really belong to White anymore – scores of football fans around the world couldn’t tell you who wrote that riff or where it came from, much less what the song actually means. That’s lovely, but it also means that the song needs a bit of decoding.
“It’s ‘Seven Nation Army,’ no doubt about it,” White told Vulture when asked which song of his is the most misinterpreted. “That’s got a whole life of its own. The funniest thing is YouTube is full of unauthorized samples of it. From major artists and dance-music artists — I’m not talking about people in their bedroom or whatever. I don’t care about that. But it’s been remixed and sampled in various forms without permission.”
“And then there’s, of course, all of the marching bands playing it. There’s people learning the riffs when they first start playing guitar and all those great stories I hear,” White explained. “So that’s definitely connected with the most different types of people.”
In the same interview, white highlighted another song of his that he often gets asked about – The Raconteurs’ ‘Carolina Drama’. “Lyrically, there’s a song I wrote called ‘Carolina Drama’ that I’ve heard a lot of interesting versions about,” White explained. “The song is a story, and it doesn’t have full closure to the different aspects of it.”
“People have different theories about who the characters are and what the ending means,” he added. “People come up to me at shows and ask me, ‘Who was this character? What does it represent?’ There’s a character called the Milkman in this story, and the last line of the song is, ‘If you want to know the truth about the tale, go and ask the milkman.’ So people are always saying, ‘Well, who is the milkman? Why does he know the answer to the story?’ That’s a question I get often. And I’ll never tell.”
Check out ‘Carolina Drama’ down below.
