About Jack White...

Jack White has been talking a lot of shit about a lot of subjects lately, from how he felt Meg White wasn't exactly an encouraging teammate in The White Stripes (and was a recluse) to how The Black Keys are a watered-down version of his old band.

The thing is... he's not wrong.

The White Stripes were essentially an experiment in making music within a certain set of rules, performed within a certain aesthetic - two band members, few overdubs, based on the blues, in a three-colour peppermint scheme dress code, trying to bring out the best songs possible and the most emotion within this context, as a two-piece. Easy to tour, easy to record. Easy to write.

From one record to the next, they pushed the envelope further, and eventually veered away from the guitar-oriented songwriting to piano and old keyboards, but set to blues progressions.

The Black Keys didn't instill a rule book when they set out to make their tunes, but they made pop based on blues, too. And when WS became really big, BK made their guitar sound fatter to match. When they lacked inspiration, they brought in outside musicians and producers to help with the songwriting process, more often than not making their sound poppier, but they rarely went out of the 4/4 beat with three-or-four chord progressions in fifths or thirds.

Same formula? Check. More pop than rock? Check. Therefore: watered-down version. Absolutely.

And Meg had dated and married Jack before starting the band; by the time they made it big with White Blood Cells, they'd divorced and she was unimpressed with both his bullshit and his genius. That's just normal stuff. So when he came up with one of rock's best riffs of all time for Seven Nation Army (an improved version of something similar to what Soundgarden had come up with for Spoonman, with much better lyrics to boot), well, hourray.

He was proud to have come up with amazing shit, but just may have turned to the wrong person for approval and ''high fives''.

At this point, there is no use for (Jack) White to pretend to be humble. He is the pre-eminent rock songwriter of his generation, and the lone guitar hero ''made'' past 1991. The 1960s and 1970s gave us a slew of real ones, the 1980s tried to sell us a ton more (Slash stayed, just like the instrumental virtuosos à la Joe Satriani and the dead guys, like Dimebag Darrell), but when the grunge/anti-hero thing came along, talent was something to hide, not be proud of. And the 2000s just sucked, so here we are.

He's good, he knows it. Everything he touches turns to gold. He wants the world to acknowledge it. Fine by me.

Video Of The Week: Jack White

I had a ton of options to go with this week, but I opted for this Jack White number because it was just nominated for a Grammy or an American Music Award or one of those things. It's the only track off his debut solo record that's a cover, as it was originally sung by Little Willie John and written by Rudy Toombs.

The video showcases both bands White toured with for his album, the all-female The Peacocks (in light blue), and the all-male The Buzzards (in black) in a battle-of-the-bands setting, preceded by a breakdancer.

And it's a riff I've had in my head all week, so that's that.

R.I.P. T-Model Ford

Had I not worked at used record-and-book shop L'Échange (I'll tell the whole tale eventually) in the late 1990s, I would never have found out about all the great blues artists on the Fat Possum label roster, among which Junior Kimbraugh and the late, great R.L. Burnside, who I opened for in 1998 or 1999.

Also on that dream team of disregarded and discarded Mississippi old-timers was T-Model Ford, often an afterthought because his simplistic guitar-playing style didn't have Burnside's feel, or Kimbraugh's raw chops, or even Cedell Davis' weirdness (he plays off-key and de-tuned, whether you want to go with it or not, using a butter knife as a slide that he'll just change the angle to to get the tone he wants to hear).

But Ford was much more than a storyteller who accompanied himself, much more than ''shredding other people's songs and refashioning them as minimalist chants, underpinned by open-chord guitar and (drummer Tommy Lee Miles, a.k.a. Spam's) joyous drumming.'' He melted the songs down to their essence, then went inside himself to extract the honesty needed for the delivery, and gave you the concentrated soul of each song.

With 1997's Pee-Wee Get My Gun and 1999's You Better Keep Still, he made a name for himself and a reputation that was only accentuated with his next 6 releases. His reputation wasn't always stellar, though, as he didn't lean to play in a school or anything - he didn't even go to elementary school - so ''properly-trained'' musicians often found him difficult to work with:

Frank Frost, who played on a couple of tracks, had declared, "I want everyone to know that I'm playing against my will."

Well, in any event, the man died in mid-July. He may have been between the ages of 89 and 93, as his record label put it:

T-Model thinks he's seventy-five but isn't sure.

That was in 1998.

And this is how one of his nights went, in his hometown:

T-Model and Spam are the only men still playing on Greenville's Nelson Street. Most of the audience has scattered due to violence from the crack trade, and with the exception of T-Model, the street that once boasted Booba Barnes and others is dead. On a typical night Spam and T-Model will arrive at the club and unpack T-Model's guitar and amp, and the bass drum and snare he allows Spam to use. When T-Model feels there are enough people, they start banging away in their own post-war Peavey-powered hill stomp. It's nothing unusual for T-Model to play eight hours a night. They keep going until no one's left standing. After his equipment's packed up T-Model will coat himself with Outdoorsman Off and climb into his van to crash.

 I miss him already.

Mississippi Community Supported Records

Indie music labels can be a bitch to follow: not only are they irregular with the timing of their releases - completely understandable considering their rosters and he way creating music works, i.e. when inspiration comes for writing, and the funding to record for release - and the usually limited number of pressings each release gets.

Mississippi Community Supported Records (or Mississippi CSR for short) are trying to get around that problem by offering a membership program of sorts:

The purpose of the CSR is to give people who don't live in Portland, or do not live at their local record store, a chance to get the more limited Mississippi/Change releases. The CSR also gives you an opportunity to support our label in its mission to keep prices low, to make important cultural information available to those who care, and to support artists and their ancestors who have all too often been screwed by the mainstream record industry. We consider the CSR a partnership between ourselves and our customers. We will do everything in our power to honor the trust members put in us. We plan on showing appreciation to members by randomly including special free records and other shwag in packages, on occasion.

Here's how it works: You send us any amount of money, between $68 & $300 (sorry not paypal – you actually mail us a check or cash). In exchange, we will send every Mississippi/Change Record that comes out until that amount of money is tapped out. An average Mississippi/Change title will set you back between $10 and $12.

Video Of The Week: The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

A month in the making, a post about the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the band I was most compared to in my NYC days (1998-99), before those comparisons turned to the White Stripes.

Jon Spencer made it big with JSBX, but older fans remember him from his similarly-styled but rougher-sounding previous band, Pussy Galore, whose records were always harder to find than the Explosion's, but are just as worthwhile for music fans.

The band has collaborated with tons of other artists (R.L. Burnside and Dub Narcotic Sound System, notably) and been remixed by countless others (Beck, Chuck D, and members of Atari Teenage Riot among them).

Bellbottoms is the lead-off track off  1994's Orange, a magnificent fucking record.

Spoonman?

No, this isn't a re-post of a previous Video Of The Week by Soundgarden.

It's actually a video about a guy playing his guitar very well... with a spoon in his mouth instead of a regular slide. Great stuff!