FEATURE:
Sister, Do You Know My Name?
Looking Ahead to The White Stripes’ Greatest Hits Album
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MANY people were not expecting…
PHOTO CREDIT: Pieter M van Hattem/NME
The White Stripes to release a greatest hits package this year, but it is actually going to happen! I have been a fan of their music for years, and I discovered them at university in 2001 – their debut, The White Stripes, of 1999 is one of my favourite albums. Their second studio album, De Stijl, turned twenty in the summer, and their sixth and final album, Icky Thump, was released in 2007. Pitchfork provide more details regarding the December-due greatest hits album:
“The White Stripes have announced their first official Greatest Hits collection. It’s out December 4 via Third Man/Columbia. It features 26 of the band’s songs spanning their discography. Accompanying the announcement is a previously unreleased live video of the band performing “Ball and Biscuit”—the only song so far confirmed for the tracklist—live in Tokyo in 2003. Check it out, along with the album cover art, below.
In addition to the standard CD, double LP, and digital editions, a 3xLP edition with colored vinyl will be available as part of Third Man’s Vault Package subscription. The Vault version also features new artwork from the White Stripes’ collaborator Rob Jones, silk-screen prints, and White Stripes-themed magnetic poetry. More special versions, benefitting independent record stores, will be announced later, according to a press release.
The announcements come with news that White and Third Man have signed a new agreement with Sony Music Entertainment covering distribution of most of his career recordings. There’s also a new White Stripes Instagram page”
It is a shame that Jack and Meg White are not playing together, as I think The White Stripes were such an original and consistently innovative act. With guitar, drum, and a few other instruments, they created such a sound and incredible catalogue of songs. Although Jack White wrote the songs, I think Meg White’s drums were the heart of the band – a playful, child-like yet incredibly powerful and original approach was the perfect beat for Jack’s guitar and voice. Through The White Stripes, I was introduced to the Blues and artists like Son House and Robert Johnson. The way the duo fused the music of the 1920s and 1930s with elements of The Stooges, Led Zeppelin and other Rock bands was a heady chemistry and combination. I think they infused to much new energy and personality into a Rock scene that was starting to fade and wane in 1999. Now, we have bands like Foo Fighters and Royal Blood, but I don’t think they have the same chemistry and range as The White Stripes. If 2003’s Elephant was a stripped-back and raw album of Blues and Rock, future records like Get Behind Me Satan (2005) incorporated instruments like the marimba - and there was a wider sonic palette. Earlier this year, Louder Sound produced a feature about the legacy of The White Stripes:
“Jack was a twenty-first-century blues acolyte willing to go way too far in his unhinged pursuit of authenticity. He grinned as he finished making that statement to the NME, faintly recognising the absurdity of his words. But still he continued. “As far as hardships go,” he said of a generation of black Americans who could still be lynched legally in Mississippi, “at least their lives made sense to them. They were playing for money and they were playing to get by. Music was a form of communication.”
Born John Gillis (he later took his wife Meg’s surname) in Detroit’s Mexicantown and having attended a largely black and Latino school, he was hardly ignorant of race’s musical trip wires. Distaste for hip-hop’s dominance among his 90s classmates had left him a freakishly inverted, archaic figure as a teenager.
As I discovered on trips to Detroit and Nashville researching my biography of him, Jack White: How He Built An Empire From The Blues, he has in fact made a thriving music business materialise around him, through The White Stripes’ campaign of blues evangelism.
This was a march into the heart of the charts so redolent with mystery that it already seems a historic product of an almost pre-internet age, when a woman’s ex-husband could turn her into his sister and the world chose to believe it, falling for a brazen smoke-and-mirrors deception that brought the blues songbook’s incestuous voodoo to life every night that his White Stripes partner Meg faced down Jack’s bitter guitar sallies from behind her drum kit.
And yet in 2020, his label, Third Man Records, has not only been fundamental in the equally archaic vinyl format’s revival, it is also reissuing old blues gold for a new generation, pressing up the complete works of the Mississippi Sheikhs, Blind Willie McTell and the early, Detroit John Lee Hooker, in stylish editions designed to snare generations too young even for The White Stripes.
IN THIS PHOTO: The White Stripes headlining Glastonbury Festival 2002/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Willsher/NME
On Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2003, The White Stripes spent seven and a half minutes excavating all there was to find in Death Letter and Blind Willie Johnson’s Motherless Children.
“Does anyone know the name of the person next to them?” Jack asked, trying to conjure the intimate humanity he heard in this music in the 40,000-strong massed in front of him. More blues, in the form of Boll Weevil and the then unreleased Elephant’s tumultuous, sparking and shrieking guitar centrepiece Ball And Biscuit, crackled through the set.
Did any 15-year-old go home tricked into Son House fandom? The old bluesman was at least being smuggled into mass consciousness for the first time in 30 years. The radical jolt White was applying to the blues’ slumbering carcass was way too much for Eric Clapton, who decried The White Stripes’ version of Death Letter that he watched from the audience at that year’s Grammys.
Looking ahead to December, and I wonder which tracks are going to be included in the greatest hits collection. I love the lesser-known songs like Let’s Shake Hands (their debut single released in 1998), and Hand Springs (which is available on an album of B-sides). I would think there is going to be at least one track from every studio album, and one would expect the big-hitters such as Seven Nation Army, Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground, Fell in Love with a Girl, My Doorbell, and Blue Orchid.
The thing with The White Stripes is that their albums were so rich when it came to strong material. There is so much variety and choice for a greatest hits collection, and the B-sides are incredible and really interesting. I think White Blood Cells, and Elephant are the albums that will be best represented through the greatest hit album, but there are going to be some surprises lobbed into the mix – maybe their live version of Jolene, or a late-career song like Icky Thump. This year has brought us some great boxsets, re-released albums, and greatest hits collections, and it is wonderful that we will get a selection of The White Stripes’ best cuts. For those who are relatively new or unaware of the duo, it might be a great place to start, as it will provide a good overview of their work and development. I also think that the album will inspire some new bands coming through; the songs still sound brilliant now, and it is inevitable that it will resonate and connect with new listeners. I will wrap up now, but I am looking forward to 4th December and seeing what comes out – a nice early Christmas present! Though it is hard to predict which twenty-six tracks will appear on the greatest hits album, I have ended with a playlist of my favourite twenty-six White Stripes songs that demonstrates why, twenty-three years after their formation, their music still…
IN THIS PHOTO: Jack and Meg White enjoy a dance on stage at London’s Alexandra Palace in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Willsher/NME
MOVES you and stirs the senses.