‘Icky Thump’: The White Stripes song that predicted the rise of Donald Trump
On May 6th, 2016, Anais Mitchell’s musical theatre masterpiece Hadestown premiered off-Broadway at the New York Theatre Workshop. The critical response was mixed, with some finding the act one closer ‘Why We Build The Wall’ in poor taste considering Donald Trump’s election campaign promising to build a border wall between the US and Mexico. The song, however, was already ten years old when the production opened. Art seems to have a way of arriving long before it’s relevant, as The White Stripes themselves found out at around the same time.
Their 2007 album Icky Thump was heralded by its lead single of the same name. It remains one of the most bizarrely brilliant hit singles of all time, getting knocked off the number one spot on the UK singles chart by Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ of all things. Right from the off, you’ve got its terrible title. An American localisation of the northern English expression “Ecky thump!”, a saying Jack nicked from his (then) wife, Oldham native Karen Elson. It just gets weirder from there.
Musically, it’s all over the place. A thudding verse riff rabbit punching the listener from behind a smokescreen of burbling synths. White’s vocals offer a barely tuneful shriek unbefitting one of the great melody writers of his age. Then, the instrumental chorus swaggers in on a riff that could annex a small country. After that, we’ve got the stylophone solo, which, bizarrely, sounds less like a dial-up internet connection arguing with a dying Dalek than the actual guitar solo.
It is something close to the idea of Suicide covering Black Sabbath with Tom Morello on guitar. On paper, it sounds less appealing than a bag of boiled puppies, but so does Back To The Future on paper and in practice, both of them are genuine high points of their creators’ careers. The music wasn’t what made ‘Icky Thump’ suddenly very topical in 2016, though. It was what ol’ Jacky boy was hollering about instead.
Jack White’s music is rarely dubbed “political”. This is strange for a man with more strong opinions about the modern world than silly hats (and he has a lot of silly hats), and his apoplexy has found its way into his art from the very beginning. The third track on the Stripes’ very first album is a blazing screed at the corporate greed of the car manufacturers that (used to) run Jack’s home city of Detroit, Michigan, called ‘The Big Three Killed My Baby’ after all.
‘Icky Thump’, though, is probably the band’s most explicitly political moment. A surreal, bitter screed against white America’s attitude towards immigrants and the country’s immigration policy in general. White’s narrator starts the story by easily swanning into Mexico mid-bender, getting scammed and robbed by a sex worker due to being an entitled moron and resolving to “go home and learn how to clean up after myself”.
The core lyric, though, the one White spits with particular venom and that became a rallying cry over the past ten years of American politics, is the penultimate verse. “White Americans, what? Nothing better to do? / Why don’t you kick yourself out? You’re an immigrant too / Who’s usin’ who? What should we do? / Well, you can’t be a pimp and a prostitute too.” It’s a brilliant line. One that sums up the hypocrisy of “America First” attitudes, and it led to the song becoming an anthem of resistance when Donald Trump took office in 2016.
Like ‘Why We Build The Wall’, though, it wasn’t that these songs were anomalies when they were written. They were treated as paranoid ramblings upon release, but the fact is that the fascists that run the world’s most powerful countries have always been there. These songs aren’t any more relevant today than they were upon release. The rot has always been there, and it may already be too late to stop the spread.
