Video Of The Week: Jack White

I haven't been able to listen to Jack White's latest record, Boarding House Reach, with the same fervor as, well, anything else he's ever done; it just doesn't resonate as much as a whole and the individual pieces that I want to listen to over and over are few and far between.

Except the actual song Over And Over, that is, which has a riff reminiscent of Icky Thump and Lazaretto, a fact that isn't surprising considering he's been toying around with it since his days with The White Stripes, having almost recorded it with The Raconteurs as well.

The video, directed by Us (Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor), shows alternate-universe Whites in the same room matching with each White personae, accompanied here and there by his band, background singers, a bunch of children, or by himself:

My conclusion: White The Brown seems like the most natural, while White The Blue is in his solo project's palette; White The White is more country and has the best décor.

Video Of The Week: Jack White

What I like most about Jack White is that everything he does feels real. His live shows feel unique, and even his videos seem like they are different, alternate versions from the songs on his records - particularly his solo work.

In Would You Fight For My Love?, directed by Robert Hales, he keeps using the blue colour palette he's been known for since The White Stripes went on (in)definite hiatus:



That song and Three Women have been on continuous rotation on all my media players since Lazaretto was released two full years ago this week. It's pop perfection.

Video Of The Week: The Dead Weather

At long last, The Dead Weather (Alison Mosshart of The Kills on vocals, Jack Lawrence of The Raconteurs and The Greenhornes on ass, Dean Fertita of Queens Of The Stone Age on guitar and a guy named Jack White on drums and vocals) are set to release their third record, Dodge And Burn, at the end of the month.

As with most things Jack White, it happened with one phone call and a couple of days to record two songs in late 2013, the same for two more mid-2014, and 8 more songs this Spring. Crash, bang, boom - 12 songs, one record.

I won't pretend that I Feel Love (Every Million Miles) is the most original track each of these four artists have ever created, but it certainly fits in all of their respective cannons as a groovy, listenable song, etched in blues and hard rock, with just the right amount of lyrics for the right amount of time it lasts.

And the Ian & Copper-directed video has just the right amount of budget to be considered serious and professional while not being over-the-top nor overshadowing Mosshart or the music. You can hear White's voice at times, particularly near the end, but it's all Mosshart walking up a street against a wind machine.

Video Of The Week: The White Stripes

I featured The White Stripes for the first time last month, and it's probably time to properly play catch-up. So here's one from their sixth (and final) studio album, Icky Thump. It's unclear if at this point, Jack White (vocals, guitars, keyboards) and Meg White (drums) had already had their falling out or if it was about to happen, but this video, directed by Emmett Malloy and shot in front of the historical Hudson's Bay Company (the first company in North America) buildings in Iqualuit, Nunavut (Canada) shows the former couple's usual possibly-fake-angry faces and complicit smiles that, in retrospect, seem to have been part of a romantic prolonged breakup.

Jack, of course, is often quoted as saying Meg won't return his calls when inquired about a White Stripes reunion, and it's probably a shame for music as a whole, because while Jack's solo band is the best collection of musicians he's ever played with by far (no offense to The Raconteurs and Dead Weather, which I both love) and gives him a broader range of styles to explore, the confines of a two-piece really seemed to stimulate his creative juices. The third WS album (White Blood Cells) was already one of the finest creative pieces in rock history, but his songwriting just kept improving every time.

I have written songs myself that could have used someone with her touch on the drums, her unique metronomic pounding. In the 00s, there were as many mean jokes about Meg's ''lack of talent'' on the drums as there'd been about Ringo Starr in decades previous - and perhaps that's part of the reason why she won't come back - but you could always tell it was her playing that beat. Some have tried to sound like her, but they just can't cut it. It's probably partly due to Jack's obsession with vintage gear both in the studio and to play with, but a Meg beat remains a Meg beat. There are no substitutes, and right now, her absence has created a void - in my musical life, at least.

Video Of The Week: The White Stripes

Eight years in, perhaps it's time to feature one of my favourite bands of all time for the first time, no? The White Stripes were a Detroit-based two-piece consisting of former spouses Jack White (guitar, vocals, keyboards) and Meg White (drums) who restricted themselves to playing 4/4 blues-rock (and dress in red, white and/or black), and yet with every passing album found ways to expand the sound while staying true to its roots, improving the lyrics and delivery each time.

Many times, their videos were directed by master director and borderline-illusionist Michel Gondry, a drummer himself who really understood and had a great gut feeling about how to transpose the beatiness the White Stripes had behind them to video.

One perfect example is this great video for an equally great song (one of two WS numbers I cover live at times myself), Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground (from their 2001 masterpiece White Blood Cells), with projections of good times over post-breakup scenes:

Video Of The Week: Jack White

Ok, so Jack White has been on a tear lately, prepping for his tour of festivals. The important thing is: can he still deliver the goods, musically?

His recent performance at Glastonbury would show that's a resounding ''YES'', despite being very drunk (and at times angry). And despite briefly quoting Metallica's Enter Sandman.

In the video for the title track off his most recent album, Lazaretto, he enlisted directors Jonas & François, a French directing duo specializing in advertizing who had previously worked with Kanye West, Justice, and perhaps are best known for 4 Minutes, the Madonna song with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland.

The black and white video focuses mostly on White, his bandmates getting some air time, particularly his spectacular drummer Daru Jones. Musically, it follows in the logical paths White has been exploring since The White Stripes, with overblown blues-meets-funk riffs delivered with fiery passion, while lyrically, the delivery is more aggressive than ''regular Jack White'', and even includes Spanish sentences, a theme more present since he moved to Nashville, and since the WS song Conquest in particular.

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.

Video Of The Week: Jack White

In honor of this week's superb performance by Jack White, I've decided to feature his solo album in this segment again, this time in a video directed by AG Rojas.

For the longest time, music videos didn't have to make sense. The directors had no clue what they were filming and it was mostly an editing job that put the whole thing together and viewers would frame up a story in their minds. Until, say, the mid nineties, where everybody wanted to make the next November Rain (and most failed).

This video falls into that category.

At times like a modern version of the 1995 film Kids, it follows dangerous actions undertaken by kids and teens as they break shit in abandoned buildings, tie people up, light cars on fire, fight, and sure, even dance.



It's not the best song of the record by any stretch of the imagination, but it sums it up pretty well.

Jack White @ L'Olympia, October 2, 2012

Yes, in Montréal, a $59 ticket actually costs $79.

It was my fourth time seeing a Jack White project live, after the White Stripes, The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, and like every other time, I came out fully satisfied.

The energetic frontman once again proved to be a generous performer, but also a tremendous band leader. It's one thing to be in synch with one drummer, a co-songwriter, or to be the guy holding the beat down, but it's a whole other to lead a full band into a setlist-free 90-minute show, and dictating when the violin, organ or banjo solo will occur, and for how long.

As expected, his greatest rapport came with drummer Daru Jones, who added fluidity to Meg White's parts on the many White Stripes songs performed that night, even White's biggest hit, Seven Nation Army.

White travels with two bands this time around, deciding on the morning of which one (or at times both) will accompany him onstage, and The Buzzards (Los Buzzardos), the all-male counterparts to the all-female The Peacocks, were the chosen ones on this night; they are, at heart, a soul/r'n'b band, with a definite rock edge. If there was a band you could see baking Al Green for a Queens Of The  Stone Age crowd, it'd be them.

Throughout the evening, White ended up playing 8 White Stripes numbers, 2 Raconteurs songs, I Cut Like A Buffalo from The Dead Weather, 3 covers (Hank Williams' You Know That I Know, Robert Johnson' Stop Breaking Down, and a bit of Dick Dale's Nitro) and 6 songs off his recent solo outing, for a total of 19 discernible tracks of aural pleasure.

Oddly, he seemed less inclined to go on never-ending solos, perhaps because he didn't want to outshine his band, but after seeing him with his previous acts, always taking center stage, I kind of expected him to continue in that vein with his name being alone on the marquee. Whether he was just not in the mood for showboating or is just more humble with his top-notch backing band, or perhaps because he was using a Fender telecaster guitar rather than his usually strident low-budget Italian six-strings, he concentrated on performing it raw, which was just fine with the typical Montréal crowd - loud, happy, into it. It even led to a few impromptu sing-alongs, which White seemed to enjoy.

The sound was both pretty good (you could decipher every instrument in the band) and average (some of the vocals were hard to hear if you didn't know the songs well, as was pointed out in a few reviews I read), but it's a damn rock show, not an album, so I was more than ok with it.

It was loud, but you could taste the blues, you could hear the country, you could touch the folk and you could definitely see the rock.

And I thought I saw Brendan Benson as the go-to backing vocalist, guitarist, tambourine man and small string instrument player:

If it is him, I'm a tad disappointed that they didn't play Steady As She Goes, but if your lone gripe is about the one song in a 200-plus catalog that wasn't there, you're kind of missing the point.

Video Of The Week: Jack White

This guy really is a genius, and he attracts top-level talent like an awards show. This time, Jack White got rap-poetry legend Hype Williams to direct, and Queens Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme to play in it.

And it's a riff-a-rific good time of a song, too.

While I'm Into Music... Here's Jack White

Once again, Jack White has taken one of my ideas and gone mainstream with it. After reviving the blues spirit in rock, the two-piece band and the girl drummer (all with the same band while I did it with 3, he's good at condensing!)...

I've always said my biggest wish in music would be to front an all-girl band. Said it loud, said it proud. Tried to do it for one song in a studio with two different sets of members and it never panned out properly...

And he goes and does it on Saturday Night Live of all places...

Video Of The Week: Jack White And Alicia Keys

Yes, a second week in a row with Alicia Keys, this time her duet with Jack White for the James Bond film Quantum Of Solace.

There are two camps when it comes to this song: those who despise it so much they'd trash their TV when it comes on, and those who love it so much they call it a work of genius. And those are the ones who are right, of course.

This song manages to take a three-chord progression that has withstood the test of time and give it a fresh new twist; it also stays true to Jack White's White Stripes sound, while being very James Bond-y in its orchestration. And that's where it takes its importance, in my opinion: it's pretty much a parody of a Bond tune, mentioning secret agents, killers, Her Majesty, getting things done ''in the nick of time'' - but the parody is so complete that it becomes the quintessential Bond song - a new song taking elements of all past songs and making them bigger, better, a whole.

And because the riff gets stuck in your head so much, without ever becoming annoying, it was also my Song Of 2008.