What is the “astro” from the classic White Stripes track ‘Astro’?
Not every piece of music is going to explicitly tell you what it’s trying to say, but more often than not, if the singer sings it well enough, that is, you’ll know exactly what they’re talking about.
Lou Reed didn’t have to spell out who the man he was waiting for was because everyone already understood. And Bob Dylan didn’t need to explain what was going on either; we weren’t clueless like Mr Jones in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’.
John Lennon, when he told us that our “birds can sing”, said “but you don’t get me”, although, really, we did, and we didn’t need an FBI investigation to understand what was going on in ‘Louie Louie’.
Jack White is another writer who has always had a great knack for writing an ambiguous set of lyrics that needed no further explanation; be it ‘Ball and Biscuit’, ‘Seven Nation Army’, ‘Blue Orchid’, it was all there in the songs. It was all there in the steady beat of Meg White’s drum, in the violent stabs of Jack White’s guitar and his high and whining voice, in the spaces between the music, and in all the words unsung.
It was in those spaces and unsung sounds, those un-played notes and places where nobody’s ears could get to where ‘Astro’ came from, too. From the White Stripes’ eponymous debut, ‘Astro’ is send up of the late 1950s and early 1960s dance craze songs, like ‘The Twist’, ‘Land of a Thousand Dances’, ‘The Locomotion’ and ‘Let’s Twist Again’, such that you shouldn’t need to be told how to do the astro, it’s just whatever your body wants to do in time to this music as it plays.
That didn’t stop people asking, though, and perhaps, if the lyrics had been more instructional, like another ’50s dance song send up, ‘Wilbury Twist’, (you just “roll up your rug / Dust your broom / Ball the jack / Howl at the moon”, nice and simple) then people wouldn’t have had to ask for guidance, but they did.
Actually, the imaginary move came from the name of one of Jack White’s dogs at the time (another one of his dogs, Jasper, was namechecked in the first verse but his other canine companion, Elroy, is nowhere to be found in the song), but when a reporter asked White how you “do the astro”, he simply told them that “the astro is whatever you do in secret that nobody knows about. Everybody does the astro”.
“Actually, for a while there, right before we recorded the album, that song ‘Astro’ was just an instrumental”, he expanded, “I was just mouthing syllables, I didn’t say anything, I didn’t write lyrics to that until just a few minutes before we recorded it. And that ended up becoming about something I had been thinking about. It’s about the things that people do in secret.”
So really, you’ve been doing the astro all along, and you didn’t need to have all this explained to you. Maybe somewhere, even Elroy is doing the astro, as well.
