Last night on MTV, Madonna held some sort of listening party/hype
session for her new album. In between dodging forehead-smackingly
stupid questions from the giddy studio audience and sitting down for
a heartfelt one-on-one with MTV's resident toothy creep John Norris,
she played/lip-synced a few of her new songs. The single, "American
Life" (that's her album's title), has a neat little electro buzz riff
and spotless production, but half an hour after watching the show, to
save my life I couldn't hum any of her new songs.
If you can't count on Madonna to shoehorn a melody into your frontal
lobe, pop music is truly in trouble. The pop landscape is dominated
by anonymous hacks like Faith Hill, B2K, Godsmack, etc., and there's
nary a memorable tune among them. And that, for my money, is what
makes the White Stripes special. It's not their blues-exhuming
"authenticity," not their publicity-stunt gimmicks, not their
up-from-indie success story, not their admittedly-great wardrobes. It
has nothing to do with the fucking Strokes. The White Stripes are
special because they managed to land an album full of instantly
memorable songs into Billboard's top 10. This year, only 50
Cent has managed a comparable feat.
It's impossible to overlook cultural context when judging
Elephant. It's also impossible to overlook White Blood
Cells, Elephant's stellar predecessor and the album that brought
Jack and Meg to the masses. White Blood Cells is practically a
masterpiece; it's the album where the duo's fuzz-guitar ferocity,
endearing shyness, and uncanny tunefulness all came together into a
near-perfect package. It's a much better album than Elephant.
Elephant is still a good album, sometimes a great one. "Ball
and Biscuit," for example, is a stomping, snorting seven-minute
powerhouse. In a Spin interview, Jack White claims to have
"wanted [the song] to be making fun of cockiness." That's a shame,
because White does cocky almost as well as 50 Cent. Affecting a
bitchy sneer, he whoops, "Right now you could care less about me/ But
soon enough you will care by the time I'm done," before launching
into a ferocious series of guitar solos. White's never allowed
himself to play guitar solos before, but on Elephant he proves
he can cold rip that shit. This is telling; White's litany of
self-imposed restrictions (this album, for instance, was recorded
entirely on antique equipment) may be more of a hindrance than a help.
Most of the band's bolder leaps pay off. The propulsive bass riff of
"Seven Nation Army" shows that the band might benefit from the
inclusion of an actual bass player. The psychedelic opera chorus on
"There's No Home for You Here" makes a pretty good case for them to
work with, I don't know, a gospel choir. On these tracks, the Whites
deviate from the template laid down by the previous albums, and the
departures work mightily. But not all of these leaps work. On "Well
It's True That We Love One Another" Holly Golightly stops in for an
obnoxious, goofy honky-tonk kindergarten sing-along. The song is a
puppydog-eyed pander not unlike the maudlin Nate Dogg love song that
nearly killed the momentum of 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die
Tryin'. Other songs, like "Black Math" and "In the Cold, Cold
Night" simply seem thin and unfinished, making Elephant the
Whites' most uneven album since their debut. We demand better from
our rock stars, Jack.
On Elephant, the White Stripes deal with the pressures of
newfound international stardom by completely ignoring them and making
basically the same kind of record they always have. This is both
admirable and irresponsible. A great number of us in indieland have
charged the Whites with saving mainstream rock. The Billboard
charts need a kick in the ass, an example that shows how much kids
need exciting, powerful, frenetic, passionate music. Elephant
isn't that example. It's just a good album, nothing more and nothing
less. And from the White Stripes, at this particular moment in time,
that just isn't good enough.
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