It’s true: The White Stripes could pretty much do no wrong in 2005. They’d gone from cutesy garage-rock-revival also-rans to rock demigods with Elephant (2003), which bequeathed us the invincibly virile “Ball and Biscuit”; the lilting and gorgeous “I Want to Be the Boy to Warm Your Mother’s Heart” and its show-stopping steel guitar solo, and, of course, “Seven Nation Army”; which all but became our national anthem.
So Get behind Me Satan (2005), the band’s follow-up to the gargantuan Elephant, is a weird record, without question. It might even be a bad record, as anybody who’s heard it would indicate. But it’s a bad record in an interesting sort of way, and, to be honest, I could never really put my finger on it until just recently, when I was sitting in this park, just spacing out, as I sometimes, ironically, find to be one of my most productive practices.
The record, anyway, is very original, possesses an energy, and teems with emotional authenticity. All of this, typically, should precipitate artistic quality. There’s even a special sense of urgency, namely, to defeat the “devil,” as is indicated in the lyrics. If this seems to imply that, a bit prior, the devil seemed to have taken hold of Jack White, such a thing might be corroborated by his December 2003 bar fight with Jason Stollsteimer of The Von Bondies, which landed him $500 in fines, a protective order and anger management classes. (There’s also the horny outburst of “Ball and Biscuit”; which might not have helped his “choir boy” status.)
So the stylistic innovations abound: “Blue Orchid” is pretty much just awesome, with its unprecedently heavy reverb within the band’s catalogue and those backwards hats in the intro and first verse. “The Nurse” gives us melodic percussion instruments approximating xylophone, and, conspicuoulsy, “Little Ghost” is proviso of the first ukelele spotting in Stripes history.
Really, they could have built an album around any one of these single motifs, and probably made it a classic, given just a little more time, considering the amount of inspiration that seems to have gone into the songs on this record. I’m guessing they were rushed by the label into slopping this whole thing together as the bizarre, discombobulated expedition that it is, where none of the selections seem to make sense and each track seems disdained by the artist just for sheer, inevitable stylistic abandonment thereof displayed right away in its wake. (Actually, a glance at Wikipedia reveals a switch from Universal to Warner, following this record, and then of course to the independent Third Man, suggesting maybe Satan was a stopgap means-to-an-end toward ending an abusive business relationship, after all.)
Short of getting all long-winded on this subject, one weird thing I noticed, recently, about Get behind Me Satan, among many others, was that a lot of these songs, as awkward as they are mid-album, would likely work stupendously as closeurs. Along these lines, likewise, it’s amusing, if not necessarily important, to note that Get behind Me Satan has pretty much the epitome of an awesome closeur. To get stoned and listen to “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” is to encounter a surreal level of artist’s emotional connection with his audience, buoyed brilliantly by some enlivening runs on piano, an instrument not typically, up to this time, associated with the band’s most vital work. But “My Doorbell”; “The Nurse”; “Forever for Her (Is over for Me)” (perhaps the most egregious display of noxious mid-album awkwardness in recorded history), and, perhaps most vitally, the slow, brooding “White Moon”; I just realized, all seem like cuts that would thrive by being placed at the end of an album, what with their ham-handed geysers of emotional authenticity (if not necessarily “earnestness”), and, of course, complete lack of project-ingratiating groove. All of these songs sound like they were created on their own, separate rhythmic island, in other words.
What was the unfortunate catalyst that led to all of these “misfit” tracks, masquerading as album denizens when they’re really black sheep? Just to recap: it was the fight with Stollsteimer, it was the daemonic display of amorousness that was “Ball and Biscuit”; and it was the band’s apparently irksome relationship with Universal. Well, the important thing is, Universal got behind them, this puppy came out, nobody was hurt (too badly) and we’ve all got the cerebral capacity for making fun of the arts, or at least granting unto it some constructive criticism, when the occasion seems epochal and appropriate.
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