“Underground garage rock”: the two-piece band that influenced The White Stripes
The White Stripes had the odds stacked against them from the very beginning.
As we crossed into a new millennium, rock music in general was supposed to be ushered out. The year 2000 brought with it the promise of modernity and the expulsion of garage rock and roll. Technology and futurism were supposedly on order, and so, within that, there was little to no room for anything remotely analogue.
But music fans did what they always do – rebelled against the commercial slop being served up to them. Turning away from what was expected of them, they galvanised around a counterculture movement that championed the rock and roll sentiment of old, and a myriad of garage rock bands came to the fore and defined a new indie movement for the 2000s.
The Strokes, Interpol, and The Hives were all bands profiting from this new wave of rock music, but largely, they were representative of a familiar musical disposition. Mostly four or five-piece bands, there was a traditionalism to how they operated that felt inherently linked with this movement towards familiarity. The White Stripes, as powerful and as traditionally rock as they were, were the exact opposite of line-up familiarity.
A two-piece band, made up of a married couple, they were a far cry from the stick-it-to-the-man model that so many rock fans were used to, let alone the one that was booming in the 2000s. Largely made up of male-only bands, this new era of rock was indeed refreshing for the millennium, but still steeped in an antiquated sense of masculinity.
Pushing back against a barrage of thinly-veiled misogyny, Meg White proved that she needed no assistance in the rhythm section while Jack White continued to lay down monster riffs that similarly thrived on their own. Against all the odds, this was a two-piece band, making more noise than anyone, and so the rock-thirsty audience of the 2000s lapped it up.
Culture critics were left scratching their heads as this bizarre duo of a couple stormed onto the scene and inverted every sonic expectation they had at the time. Desperate to know just where this chain of influence started, they incessantly asked the band what two-piece influences they drew from in shaping their music, and one seemed to consistently crop up in the band’s answer.
Jack White explained, “There’s been two-piece bands around, I think a lot more in the underground garage rock realm, it’s a pretty common occurrence. The Flat Duo Jets were a big influence on me. They were the two-piece band in the South, and I really [loved] them a lot in high school.”
White’s unfettered love for a two-piece band that directly spoke to him is what was fed into his own project and ultimately made him one of the most beloved artists of the 2000s boom. The White Stripes were perhaps the coolest outfit of the bunch, because they weren’t trying to be a carbon copy of the bands who existed around them – they defied all of the odds stacked against them and did it entirely their own way.
