The reason why Jack White vowed never to make another White Stripes album
Of the 2000s indie explosion across the decade, The White Stripes always felt a little different from the orbiting bands similarly plastered all over MTV2.
More aligned with Queens of the Stone Age’s vintage reverence for punk and classic rock’s mystique, Jack and Meg White’s stripped-down garage duo similarly felt authentically channelled to a moment in popular music that the 21st century had forgotten, lost in a sea of drippy Travis beige or nu-metal silliness when dropping 1999’s eponymous debut.
It didn’t always work, and later efforts lapsed into tedious parody, such as the mariachi cover of Corky Robbins’ ‘Conquest’, but around the time of 2001’s White Blood Cells, The White Stripes indeed cut a fresh mark amid a rock climate panged with an identity crisis.
Clobbered in striking red-white uniforms and weaving a fictitious lore about their sibling background, the Whites seem to corral all the choiciest cuts of Detroit proto-punk, bubblegum pop marketing, and a dash of heavy blues stomp when the moment called for it to ensure cuts like ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ and ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’—helped in no small part by Michel Gondry’s promo videos—landed square in the era’s heavy rotations.
After mammoth sales and world tours, The White Stripes finally came to a halt following 2007’s parting Icky Thump. It was an intentional close of their chapter. Creatively restless, White was eager to pursue a solo record around his The Dead Weather and The Raconteurs side-hustles, eventually leading to 2012’s Blunderbuss. Such an album was never a possibility so long as The White Stripes were still together, and an eagerness to quash any rumour mill spinning over the band’s end prompted a mutual conversation between the pair to mark a clean cut.
“I wouldn’t even have considered it, and that was a reason for me and Meg to have a discussion and finally say that the band was officially over,” White told Uncut at the time. “I said, ‘Look, I’m doing other things now, and eventually I’m going to do a solo record and I don’t wanna tell them a week before I put out that record that, by the way, The White Stripes aren’t around anymore.’ Because then it looks like I’m exploiting that band to sell this record”.
It’s a noble insight into the love and care White shows in handling his creative legacy, vigilant in warding off any remote impression that The White Stripes’ story had ended on a note of cynical opportunism or calculated careerism. For the fans, they get to enjoy an unblemished oeuvre if pining for that dream come true reunion show.
When asked if he was missing his old drumming comrade, White summed up his artistic trajectory with zen acquiesce, “I think that I’m supposed to do this right now. If you’d asked me before I started, I’d say probably not, and probably the best way to fulfil myself would have been to do The White Stripes. But now I feel this has happened exactly the way it should have”.
