“It doesn’t move me”: Why Jack White thought Eric Clapton simply didn’t get The White Stripes
At the start of their career, one thing plagued The White Stripes that Jack White never understood. For some reason, despite the music they were playing or the cult of fans they were growing, people just couldn’t stop talking about their clothes.
“When we played our first shows, a lot of people were really mad at the colours we wore,” White said to Uncut in 2012. Black, white, red, that was the uniform, and they typically wore exactly what they wore on the cover of their 1999 debut, which was red trousers and a white top, or vice-versa.
Over time, it morphed slightly. Jack might have worn a black suit with a red shirt, while Meg might occasionally wear a white dress or some black and white polka dots. It never strayed from the colour scheme, only varied on the theme, but really, at the end of the day, literally who cares?
Who cares what the duo had on their bodies when they were coming on stage and unleashing new and instantly timeless tracks like ‘Seven Nation Army’ or ‘My Doorbell’. Surely people should have been more hooked into other things about them, like at least the strange mystery of their fake-sibling, genuine-marriage relationship, with their largely plain outfits the least interesting thing about them?
Yet still, Eric Clapton joined the boring masses commenting on it. “Eric Clapton, for example, said he didn’t like The White Stripes. He thought we were having a laugh about Son House, playing ‘Death Letter’ on the Grammys,” White recalled. Clapton laughed at the band, at their outfits, but also at their entire artistic identity.
It was symptomatic of a bigger and even more exhausting attitude as Clapton told Rolling Stone India, “It doesn’t move me”. Talking about White’s music but also the entire new wave coming in, he said, “I’m not motivated by looking for new things in the younger generation”. In that moment, it became clear that Clapton had fallen into a state of cut of superiority, believing that his generation was the last soldiers of ‘real’ music, and everything fresh coming in was weak and phoney in comparison.
That brings us back around to the matter of the outfits, as really, that attitude is exactly why the band picked out the image. At their core, The White Stripes were inspired by tradition and the various greats, but they wanted to make the point that an artist could be influenced by that and still be forward-facing.
“To me, how we presented ourselves was to show people how stupid it is for them to think that, to play authentic blues, I’d have to dress like I’m from fucking Mississippi,” White said, refusing to wear the tired uniform of the old days in order to gain respect.
To him, Clapton not getting their look, nor their music, only pushed his mission on. “People in that Stratocaster white blues scene didn’t understand that we could dress in red and white and black, play in the simplistic way we did, and still be the blues,” White said, throwing the former in with the tired masses who were digging their heels in and refusing to modernise or innovate, or even just accept that there were now new kids, borrowing from the same influences they had, but just not wearing the same clothes as them.
