The role religion plays in the sound of The White Stripes: “I was gonna become a priest”
With sticky floors, sweat-stained walls, and the lingering smell of cheap lager, the Detroit clubs from which The White Stripes emerged are about as far removed from a church as you can get. Nevertheless, Jack White and his songwriting mastery gave legions of outcasts, misfits, and garage rock obsessives something to worship in the early 2000s.
Although White was never going to throw down his Eastwood Airline in favour of the clergy, the Christian faith has had a colossal impact on the songwriter’s output over the years.
Throughout White’s upbringing, his parents worked at the Archdiocese of Detroit, and he was raised staunchly Catholic alongside his nine older siblings. Faith was an important, all-encompassing aspect of his life throughout childhood, and he became an altar boy during the mid-1980s. For a time, the future songwriter even considered joining the clergy himself, recalling in a 2005 interview, “I’d got accepted to a seminary in Wisconsin, and I was gonna become a priest, but at the last second I thought, ‘I’ll just go to public school’.”
Seemingly, it was the world music which had earned White’s worship. “I had just gotten a new amplifier in my bedroom, and I didn’t think I was allowed to take it with me”. Nevertheless, his adoration of music always seemed to go hand in hand with his faith. For instance, he has always maintained a deep interest in the sounds and history of religious music in Detroit, particularly the work of old, largely forgotten, blues musicians who often sang about their faith.
Inevitably, therefore, theology is something that has crept into his musical repertoire on multiple occasions. One of the most overt examples of this Christian influence comes on The White Stripes’ seminal 2005 album, Get Behind Me Satan. The album’s title itself is a reference to a biblical verse, Matthew 16:23, which reads, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me. You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns”.
That verse is often interpreted as Christ’s warning on the dangers of the human ego, which distracts from the “concerns of God”. However, it also acts as White’s prevailing inspiration for the 2005 album. After all, The White Stripes were among the most recognisable names in American rock by the time 2005 rolled around, following the smash-hit success of records like Elephant, and iconic singles like ‘Seven Nation Army’. In the midst of that intense success, though, Jack White was struggling to come to terms with the attention it brought him.
Hence, Get Behind Me Satan offers a stark departure from those previous White Stripes records, doing away with the distorted garage rock sound in favour of something more acoustic-driven and typically gentler. What’s more, if you dig into the main themes of the album’s content, there are many theological parallels to be drawn.
On the track ‘Red Rain’, for instance, White evokes the apocalyptic judgement day from Revelations, keeping things just cryptic enough to invite the possibility that the song’s storm could be connected to the wrath of God, if not an internal struggle within White himself. Further, ‘Take, Take, Take’ deals with the singer’s newfound fame and success in a head-on fashion, tackling the topic of false idols in a way which feels deeply connected to those Catholic roots in Detroit.
Get Behind Me Satan might not have been as well-received as the duo’s previous efforts, but it espoused a completely novel aspect of White’s songwriting, which he has continued to explore through subsequent solo records. In many ways, the record feels like a form of therapy for the songwriter, as he lets out his feelings on the rollercoaster journey The White Stripes took him on, in a way which also harks back to his Catholic upbringing and the values which were instilled in him.
