Video Of The Week: Nikki Lane

I can totally relate to Nikki Lane, who moved to NYC only to be forced out by its high cost of living that is not artist-friendly; I came back home to Montréal, she moved to Nashville - big enough to qualify as a ''city'', but not so much down in the Red States as her native South Carolina.

Director Andrew Hines captured the essence of her energy in this video, for the song Right Time, giving it country's requisite amount of white trash-ness (couples fighting, day-time beer drinking, a poor neighbourhood that could pass as a trailer park), but also the power, control, strength, coolness and hard-headedness Lane naturally exhudes. She is like Johnny Ramone (or Joan Jett) walking amongst a bunch of decrepit nobodies.

Also, this is a nice way to use Dan Auerbach's trademark Black Keys sound (he produced the record), without relying on it as the basis of your own art. Well played.

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: The Black Keys

I was hesitating between featuring The Black Keys themselves or their hip-hop side project which I happen to listen to a whole lot more, BlakRoc. I opted for the real band, and then hesitated between the blues-rock of their beginnings or their recent, poppy sound. I went for the pop, no idea why.

This song has been overplayed everywhere from commercials (beer, trucks, cars) to bars to sporting events to douchebags' cars, but the video was funny enough to warrant inclusion in my weekly spots, I think.

The Black Keys have often been compared to The White Stripes for obvious reasons: a two-piece consisting mostly of drums and guitars with with added keys; blues-rock beginnings; both moved from their original  hometowns in the Northern U.S. (Akron, OH for BK, Detroit for WS) to Nashville as their sound(s) expanded, names based in the most extremes of (non-)colours... but they couldn't be any further apart: Jack White takes inspiration from music that is 50-100 years old, and draws every possible emotion from it while creating a sound delivery unheard until now in songs that may stand the test of time; Dan Auerbach draws inspiration from riffs our ears have been used to, and incorporates modern sounds into them to make them contemporary.