FEATURE:
There’s a Home for You Here
The White Stripes’ Elephant at Twenty
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I have a lot of features coming…
that celebrate big anniversaries for important albums. One of the biggest comes in the form of the twentieth anniversary of The White Stripes’ Elephant. Released on 1st April, 2003, it was produced by Jack White and recorded at Toe Rag and Maida Vale in London. The use of Toe Rag in Hackney is particulate key to the lo-fi brilliance of Elephant. A studio with oldskool equipment, the duo (Jack and Meg White) wanted to go back to basics. You get hints of their eponymous 1999 debut album, but one with stronger and more complex songs. One of the best albums of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Elephant went to number-one in the U.K. and six in the U.S. There is an anniversary edition that you can pre-order. I am going to come to a couple of reviews for the mighty Elephant. An album that was recorded on equipment that pre-dates 1963, it is a wonderful blend of a modern duo doing vintage Blues and Rock in their own style. They would follow Elephant with 2005’s Get Behind Me Satan – where they did produce something more modern-sounding and polished. If you look at the Elephant album cover, Jack and Meg are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. It’s a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either. I am not sure why the title was selected, but it seems very apt in terms of the immensity of the album, and perhaps something deeper in terms of an elephant’s routine, habits, and nature.
There is no denying the genius, brilliance and important of an album that took The White Stripes’ previous work and momentum and turned it into something next level. Many fans consider the 2003 album to be their very. In 2009, The Guardian voted Elephant as their seventh-best album of the decade. I would place it even higher perhaps, as its influence and legacy now are huge. It still sounds so fresh, thrilling, and wonderful:
“The cricket bat on the cover, along with utterances about cups of tea and the Queen, announced that the White Stripes were a long way from Motor City for their fourth album. They also seemed, at times, a long way from the decade in which this was made. Elephant was laid down in east London's Toerag Studios for just £5,000, on analogue equipment built before 1963, whereas the sleeve notes boasted that it was recorded and mastered without using a computer. This stripped-back approach to rock'n'roll influenced countless Stripes imitators at the start of the decade, but nobody matched Jack and Meg when it came to creating a colossal sound out of such basic ingredients. Elephant, after all, was the release that banished preconceptions about the White Stripes' self-consciously limiting format and affirmed that they were consistently and swaggeringly magnificent.
Their first recording for a major label, the 14 tracks had a gritty truculence that was still accessible enough to transform them from a cult act to a global concern. Meg White's guileless, tick-tock drumming style was the perfect anchor for the mangled blues and squalls of noise Jack White wrung from his guitar. Beneath the seismic grumble of Seven Nation Army or the caterwauling helium chorus of There's No Home for You Here were pithy specimens of songwriting craft.
At its heart was Jack's hankering to be born in an age when men were gallant and women swooned with feminine modesty. It was subtitled The Death of the Sweetheart and was rife with thwarted love affairs, boiling sexual tension and declarations of desire. More often than not, however, Jack came across as a rascally old-school chauvinist. Along with his mannered vocal style and the ludicrous insistence that he and Meg were siblings, fans gobbled it up as part of the White Stripes' theatrical intrigue. This was the occasion when the Detroit odd couple triumphed on their own irresistible terms. Righteous fury, melodramatic wit, hookline-and-sinker choruses – it was all here, in one brilliant package”.
Opening the album is The White Stripes’ best-known song, Seven Nation Army has gone on to be a chant that is heard at sporting occasions. Such is the addictiveness of the riff (which sounds like a bass but is a guitar through a pitch shift effect), it is a stone-cold classic. One of the all-time best album opening tracks, people hearing this track for the first time must have been blown away! It is distinctly The White Stripes, but bigger and more anthemic than anything they had ever released. In 2018, Albumism celebrated fifteen years of the Detroit duo’s masterpiece:
“Did you know that Elephant has more than six different versions of its cover with Jack and Meg positioned to create the shape of an elephant?
The legend of The White Stripes is fascinating—the rumors, the truth, and the personality (a loud, chatty, definitive frontman and a silent drummer). Add the concept—strict dress code and design only using the colors black, white, and red—and we haven’t even gotten to the music yet.
Sonically the concept is simpler: they were a blues band. Everything revolves around the guitar. The drums are overtly basic, which has caused naysayers and critics to perpetually roll their eyes at Meg’s drumming. But what those people don’t want to give into is that the elementary drums are on purpose, and that purpose serves the guitar. Meg’s modest drumming allowed for Jack’s guitar to speak and spit in many languages. The White Stripes’ music is innovative inside these boundaries. They were designed that way, in concept.
Because we are able to look at The White Stripes as a whole, complete discography, it’s easy to pinpoint Elephant as their magnum opus. When introducing the band to a new listener, it’s where to begin if only because it contains their most famous song, album opener “Seven Nation Army”—a perfect earworm riff (that has since become an international stadium chant) you know even if you live under a rock.
But Elephant is more than its fame. Between tracks are the different sides of Jack White as a songwriter, and his techniques as a guitarist and producer. The preceding White Stripes’ records—their self-titled debut The White Stripes (1999), De Stijl (2000), and White Blood Cells (2001) —all released one year after another are fabulous lessons in sound and color, sound that melts the mind and color that pokes the eye. But it’s Elephant where The White Stripes’ ethos proves the devil is in their details—slide guitar on “I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart,” twisted guitar on “There’s No Home For You Here,” and muddy, dense guitar on “The Air Near My Fingers.”
For me it’s always the sheer volume of the band. The louder it goes, the calmer I am. “Black Math” is a death rattle wall of muscle, as Meg keeps steady on the cymbals. Until the bridge and the squealing and moaning of Jack and his guitar are so loud they’re soothing.
Alternatively “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket” is an acoustic track, just Jack and six strings. It’s nearly romantic if he wasn’t singing about how he’s worried she’ll leave for someone better, “like she’s threatened before.” It’s a song savoring what you have but feels like a heart has already been broken. There’s a depth to “You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket” even in its track placement—a soft piece of wonder in the middle of a record that pumps your blood around their veins like a damn water slide.
Then the crescendo rises again, taking its time on “Ball and Biscuit,” the longest studio track the band recorded. The lyrics to the song are so one-dimensional—a blues song repeating its story of woe over and over—they don’t really matter. It’s the freedom of the guitar we’re here for, and Jack even uses the lyrics to talk to it: “I can think of one or two things to say about / alright listen” before he shreds enough electricity to power a record plant in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. The truth in this song always gets me: Jack White is actually the seventh son (and youngest of nine) and eventually became the “third man.”
Everything The White Stripes did was on purpose and another code the band lived by was to keep things in three’s (Jack’s favorite number and symbol “III”). The supreme success of “Ball and Biscuit” is three little things: guitar, drums, and voice.
A month before the album was released Jack and Meg confirmed to The New York Times that the theme of Elephant is “the death of the American sweetheart.” Everything was made, they said, and written in response to how kids live today: because they listen to hip-hop, smoke a bong, and play on a Sony Play Station. (The album was recorded in two weeks on “pre-1960s recording equipment” including an eight track.) Jack then directly claims not to be a Luddite, which is a hard sell. He then goes on to talk about creating a box to live inside as an artist, to make sure nothing is easy.
The only direct attack on youth and the 2003 status quo, and this is pure speculation here, is the blues and the band’s minimalism. And if that’s actually it, then it worked. Elephant has become so beloved that it’s now a benchmark in indie and alternative rock catalogs everywhere. It even won the duo a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album”.
I want to jump to 2020 and a feature from Guitar. They celebrated the brilliance of Elephant. A wonderful guitar album that features some of Jack’s best playing, I also think it is one where Meg demonstrates her percussion genius. A sensational chemistry was created in London when The White Stripes made Elephant. Ahead of its twentieth anniversary, I know there will be a slew of articles written that delve into a remarkable album. It is one that everyone should add to their collection and play as much as they possibly can:
“Whammy mammoth
Jack White referred to Elephant as his “guitar album”. Even leaving aside that riff for a minute, the rest of Elephant is teeming with wild, combative guitar playing courtesy of White’s Airline ‘JB Hutto’ Res-O-Glass through an EHX Big Muff Pi then a DigiTech Whammy, and Fender Twin and Silvertone 1485 amps: some of it smuggling evil intent behind a sheen of disarming innocence, some of it unvarnished and confessional; yet more channelling the demons of the Delta.
Black Math is unadulterated, greasy sleaze; its solo is satisfyingly batshit crazy. On There’s No Home For You Here, White’s guitar delights in vandalising the song’s comically overwrought Queen-like vocal harmonies with a six-string spraycan of feedback and fuzz.
Even in gentler moments, rage is never far away: I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’s string rakes and split-second howls of feedback are like a ball of barely suppressed anger, finally released in a frenzy of dirty fuzz in its final minute.
But Ball And Biscuit’s backdrop of out-and-out blues bravado is where Jack White finally succumbs to the lure of full-fledged guitar solos, peeling off three startlingly chaotic, animalistic soundscapes that foreshadow the abrasive Whammy-smeared soloing antics of his later records.
Contrasts abound as the album stretches out: where The Hardest Button To Button’s clever riff is a perfectly formed, precision-tooled earworm (with Michel Gondry’s video turning its rhythm into a playful stop-motion-style movie), Little Acorn is a slab of dumb-downed edge-of-breakdown riffery ushered in by a self-help story about a determined squirrel: “Give it a whirl, be like the squirrel,” White urges us, before Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine’s stuttering killswitch-mimicking solo offers a final shot of his relentless, manic lead style”.
An album credited with kickstarting the 2000s Garage Rock revival; Elephant is one of the most important albums of its generation. Now Jack White has a solo career, and I am not sure whether Meg is playing still. It would have been good for them to briefly get back together for a twentieth anniversary performance or chat, but I think the dust of The White Stripes has settled and they have both moved on since the split in 2011. I am going to round off with a couple of reviews. This is what AllMusic had to say about Elephant:
“White Blood Cells may have been a reaction to the amount of fame the White Stripes had received up to the point of its release, but, paradoxically, it made full-fledged rock stars out of Jack and Meg White and sold over half a million copies in the process. Despite the White Stripes' ambivalence, fame nevertheless seems to suit them: They just become more accomplished as the attention paid to them increases. Elephant captures this contradiction within the Stripes and their music; it's the first album they've recorded for a major label, and it sounds even more pissed-off, paranoid, and stunning than its predecessor. Darker and more difficult than White Blood Cells, the album offers nothing as immediately crowd-pleasing or sweet as "Fell in Love With a Girl" or "We're Going to Be Friends," but it's more consistent, exploring disillusionment and rejection with razor-sharp focus. Chip-on-the-shoulder anthems like the breathtaking opener, "Seven Nation Army," which is driven by Meg White's explosively minimal drumming, and "The Hardest Button to Button," in which Jack White snarls "Now we're a family!" -- one of the best oblique threats since Black Francis sneered "It's educational!" all those years ago -- deliver some of the fiercest blues-punk of the White Stripes' career. "There's No Home for You Here" sets a girl's walking papers to a melody reminiscent of "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" (though the result is more sequel than rehash), driving the point home with a wall of layered, Queen-ly harmonies and piercing guitars, while the inspired version of "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself" goes from plaintive to angry in just over a minute, though the charging guitars at the end sound perversely triumphant. At its bruised heart, Elephant portrays love as a power struggle, with chivalry and innocence usually losing out to the power of seduction. "I Want to Be the Boy" tries, unsuccessfully, to charm a girl's mother; "You've Got Her in Your Pocket," a deceptively gentle ballad, reveals the darker side of the Stripes' vulnerability, blurring the line between caring for someone and owning them with some fittingly fluid songwriting.
The battle for control reaches a fever pitch on the "Fell in Love With a Girl"-esque "Hypnotize," which suggests some slightly underhanded ways of winning a girl over before settling for just holding her hand, and on the show-stopping "Ball and Biscuit," seven flat-out seductive minutes of preening, boasting, and amazing guitar prowess that ranks as one the band's most traditionally bluesy (not to mention sexy) songs. Interestingly, Meg's star turn, "In the Cold, Cold Night," is the closest Elephant comes to a truce in this struggle, her kitten-ish voice balancing the song's slinky words and music. While the album is often dark, it's never despairing; moments of wry humor pop up throughout, particularly toward the end. "Little Acorns" begins with a sound clip of Detroit newscaster Mort Crim's Second Thoughts radio show, adding an authentic, if unusual, Motor City feel. It also suggests that Jack White is one of the few vocalists who could make a lyric like "Be like the squirrel" sound cool and even inspiring. Likewise, the showy "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" -- on which White resembles a garage rock snake-oil salesman -- is probably the only song featuring the word "acetaminophen" in its chorus. "It's True That We Love One Another," which features vocals from Holly Golightly as well as Meg White, continues the Stripes' tradition of closing their albums on a lighthearted note. Almost as much fun to analyze as it is to listen to, Elephant overflows with quality -- it's full of tight songwriting, sharp, witty lyrics, and judiciously used basses and tumbling keyboard melodies that enhance the band's powerful simplicity (and the excellent "The Air Near My Fingers" features all of these). Crucially, the White Stripes know the difference between fame and success; while they may not be entirely comfortable with their fame, they've succeeded at mixing blues, punk, and garage rock in an electrifying and unique way ever since they were strictly a Detroit phenomenon. On these terms, Elephant is a phenomenal success”.
The final review comes from NME. They reviewed Elephant when it came out in 2003. On 1st April, we will mark twenty years of one of the very best albums. A huge statement from a duo who we felt hit a peak with 2001’s White Blood Cells. They outdid themselves a couple of years later. I have not heard many albums as good as Elephant since 2003 – such is its consistency and sheer quality:
“For one who talks so much about honesty, Jack White is a difficult man to trust. When last we hear him on 'Elephant', he is hanging out on what sounds like Lee Hazlewood's porch, but is actually Toerag Studios in Hackney, engaged in a giggly menage a trois with Holly Golightly and his beloved sister Meg. Holly is pushy, loving Jack "like a little brother". Meg opines, "Jack really bugs me". Jack is cagey, but eventually succumbs. "Well Holly I love you too," he admits, "But there's just so much that I don't know about you."
And just so much, Jack, that we don't know about you. Even after 'It's True That We Love One Another', Track 14 of the fourth White Stripes album, all remains deliriously unclear in the world of Jack and Meg White. Here are devious confusions between romantic and maternal love, a neurotic approach to the wiles of women, numerology, infantilism and, not least, some of the most obliteratingly brilliant rock'n'roll of our time.
In other words, business as usual at Camp White Stripe. Improbable success, old marriage certificates in the public domain, the New Rock Revolution - nothing has adversely affected the way they conduct their business. There are cosmetic changes, with longer hair and outfits fit for Grand Ole Opry goths. But, still, they look more suited to a night out in Detroit's ruins rather than restyled for celebrity.
In the recording studio, too, not much has altered. The location's shifted from Detroit to London, though only the presence of Holly Golightly and Jack brandishing a cricket bat on the cover signal it. 'Elephant' remains the work of champion Luddites, recorded onto eight-track tape using equipment built before 1963 - guitars, Meg's drums, the odd keyboard. The bristly frequencies that open the album aren't a bass, but Jack's guitar fed through an octave pedal. Review copies are exclusively vinyl. Jack and Meg still address one another as brother and sister. How sweet. How determined. How treacherous.
Musically honest - as in untainted by those hussies, computers - it may be. But Jack's definitions are slippery. The White Stripes' music has always existed in a fabricated reality, defined by Jack in his first NME interview. "I like things as honest as possible," he conceded, "even if sometimes they can only be an imitation of honesty."
If The White Stripes hadn't become superstars, 'Elephant' would probably sound pretty much like this. It stretches their musical parameters without betraying the tenets of rawness and immediacy. It sounds massive, but intimate: between Jack's slide runs, you can virtually hear the air moving round the studio. And it reminds us that, of all the bands we've embraced from Detroit and beyond in the two years since 'White Blood Cells', none can match the depth of The White Stripes.
So from the start, 'Elephant' is breathtaking. 'Seven Nation Army' begins with that faked bass, heartbeat drum, and Jack snarling through a distorted mic. The one obvious diatribe against fame, it finds him paranoid, hemmed in by intrusive questions, and pondering a move to a Wichita farm. Confusion remains his most effective security blanket. The brother and sister legend still diverts attention from when he really exposes himself, and it's now augmented by a recurring smudge between sexual and motherly love. 'The Air Near My Fingers' is typical, painting Jack as chronically nervous of a girl, longing for the security of his mom.
Is this Jack White at his most truthful? As a man unnerved and bewildered by women, who yearns for the certainties of childhood? He'd certainly like us to think so, although the attentions of Marcie Bolen may suggest different. 'Elephant' is full of songs that sound like their subject is sex and read like it's actually inadequacy. 'Hypnotize' - a belting evolution of 'Fell In Love With A Girl' - sees Jack trying desperately to control a woman, before he collapses into meek chivalry and pleads, "I want to hold your little hand if I can be so bold." On 'I Want To Be The Boy', all his attempts at courtly dating rituals end in failure. "It feels like everything I say is a lie," he mopes, pointedly.
If only girls behaved the way he wanted them to. 'There's No Home For You Here' finds him so frustrated with yet another volatile woman that the trivia of their affair becomes despicable. At times, this stereotyping of women becomes faintly unsavoury. But it smells like fiction, especially when the sentiments come couched in such histrionic music. 'There's No Home. . .' takes grisly instrospection and the tune of 'Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground' and makes vast melodrama out of them, with multi-tracked choral howls, theatrical pauses and the kind of shrill, compressed guitar solos that pockmark the whole album.
Within his valve-driven little universe, Jack White is an extravagant drama queen. Surpassing 'Jolene', on Bacharach & David's 'I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself' he replaces Dusty Springfield's forlorn grandeur with spluttery exasperation. But when he gives Meg a song to sing, 'Cold, Cold Night' is unambiguous in its carnality, a calm come-on pitched somewhere between Brenda Lee and Moe Tucker. Perhaps all those apparent flaws of fickleness and duplicity lie in the minds of men, not women.
It's easy to get lost in the vivid, unstable emotional tangle of 'Elephant'. But consistently, the brilliance of the music acts as a compass. When Jack bitterly resolves to study the rules of attraction on 'Black Math', he does so to juddering garage punk that recasts 'Let's Build A Home' in corroded metal. When he practices more dark algebra by comparing his status as his girl's "third man" to that as his mother's "seventh son" on 'Ball And Biscuit', he streamlines the epic crunch of Led Zeppelin in the album's most overt nod to the blues.
That said, the strongest influences on 'Elephant' are the three albums which preceded it. But it's a heavier one than they've made before, less immediately pop-friendly than 'De Stijl', especially, and with a nasty undercurrent that battles for prominence with Jack's romantic anxieties. He's a fabulist and a showman. But he can also voice sweetness and torment with an intensity that most conventionally emotional songwriters would kill for. Critically, he can make you believe in his songs, at the same time as you don't believe a word of them. This, perhaps, is what great songwriters do.
And always, there's the implication that he can do more. Right now, the eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of 'Elephant' make it the most fully-realised White Stripes album yet. All the excitement we want from rock'n'roll is here, and miraculously few of the cliches. But there's a sense, too, that Jack White is still grappling with adolescence: explicitly in his lyrics; metaphorically in the astonishing, still rudimentary punch of the music. The prospect of his finally reaching adulthood - with or without Meg - is explosive, and not a little terrifying.
John Mulvey
9 out of 10”.
1st April marks twenty years since the release of Elephant. If The White Stripes never quite hit that peak after the album was released, they did give us two more studio albums (their last, Icky Thump, came out in 2007). Whereas a lot of albums from 2003 and the years around it have dated and were very much relevant during their time, Elephant remains so compelling and relevant all these years later. Although Elephant arrived in 2003 – and some other classics came out that year – it is still one of the greatest albums…
OF that decade.