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:

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 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.