Today, the White Stripes—the garage-rock duo founded by Jack and Meg White, in Detroit, in 1997—released a twenty-six-track greatest-hits compilation, titled “My Sister Thanks You and I Thank You: The White Stripes Greatest Hits.” The band put out its sixth and final LP, “Icky Thump,” in 2007, before officially dissolving in 2011. As with most breakups, the precise catalyst for the rupture remains unclear, although, in an interview with Rolling Stone, in 2014, Jack suggested that Meg wasn’t especially keen on the demands of celebrity. “She’s always been a hermit,” he said.
For devoted fans, greatest-hits records can feel like a cheat, in part because they repudiate the long-playing album as a sacrosanct document, inviolate and complete. That dismissal also jibes with the music geek’s tendency to moralize suffering: a belief that pleasure needs to be both earned and accounted for. Using that logic, an entire album of recontextualized hits is simply too indulgent. A real listener should be prepared to endure duds, filler, cringey spoken-word interludes, skits, and various half-cooked song-experiments before getting to the thrill of the single. The reality that greatest-hits albums have always been wildly lucrative for artists—attracting, as they do, the dilettantes and dabblers—probably hasn’t helped to win over the purists. For decades, “Eagles: Their Greatest Hits” vied with “Thriller” as the best-selling album of all time, while similar compilations by Madonna (“The Immaculate Collection”), ABBA (“Gold: Greatest Hits”), the Beatles (“1”), Bob Marley (“Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and the Wailers”), Queen (“Greatest Hits”), Elton John (“Greatest Hits”), and Céline Dion (“All the Way . . . A Decade of Song”) have each sold upward of twenty million copies.
Though the idea of an album as a complete, cohesive text now feels entrenched, it’s actually a fairly recent (and brief) development in the history of recorded music. The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” released in 1967, is generally considered the first entry of the so-called album era, in which records were no longer merely collections of individual songs but narrative objects in their own right. It’s harder to pinpoint precisely when the album era ended. The popularity of curated playlists, in which songs by different artists are grouped together by mood, genre, or some other inscrutable metric, seems to indicate that it’s well behind us. Spotify’s “This Is . . .” series, which compiles the most popular or emblematic tracks by any given artist, allows the service to create, present, and perpetuate a kind of populist canon—greatest-hits albums for the digital era. (Though the ordering is different, “This Is the White Stripes” hews awfully close to the track listing for “The White Stripes Greatest Hits.”) Greatest-hits albums do still appear from time to time (the indie-rock band Spoon released an excellent one, “Everything Hits at Once,” in 2019), but they mostly feel like one more thing (along with fair revenue for songwriters, extensive liner notes, and large-format album art) that streaming has made obsolete. Still, I’ll cop to some fondness for the format. At their best, greatest-hits albums cleanly illustrate an artist’s creative arc. It can be edifying (and sometimes thrilling) to watch a writer or writers evolve over time. There are a handful of greatest-hits collections—Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Greatest Hits” chief among them—that I would defend as masterpieces.
It makes some sense that the White Stripes—a band fully dedicated, from its outset, to anachronisms and incongruities—would embrace the greatest-hits form at the end of 2020. Beginning in the late nineties, the band presented an elaborate backstory: they told everyone that they were brother and sister when, in reality, they married in 1996 and divorced in 2000. They dressed exclusively in red, white, and black. To an extent, the band seemed governed by inflexible ideas about authenticity (Jack’s favorite guitar was plastic and from Montgomery Ward, and he edited the band’s recordings by slicing tape with a razor blade), but its visual presentation was meticulous and unyielding, and its history was an elaborate yarn. There were more contradictions: Jack was a virtuosic guitarist, but Meg’s drumming was unfussy and elemental. (Whether you believe that the band might have benefitted from a better drummer, or that the fission between Jack’s flash and Meg’s plodding beat-keeping was in fact the alchemical key to the band’s success, indicates something about what you value: rhythm or a kind of uncanny extramusical chemistry.) Jack’s songs are melodic, and therefore easy to sing along with, but also brash, idiosyncratic, and strange. Since the nineteen-sixties, garage rock has been governed by a kind of scrappy, no-pretense ethos—things should be as amateur, crude, and real as possible—but the White Stripes were engaged in deliberate, shameless theatre.
Tensions like that often lead to interesting art, and “The White Stripes Greatest Hits” is a good reminder of how odd and inventive the band was. Jack’s songs sometimes feel familiar, as if you are travelling down a road that you drove down once before, decades ago, in the middle of the night. (His writing is born chiefly of the blues, a deeply American idiom that has informed nearly every corner of popular music.) Yet there is nothing common or recognizable about the way he presents these songs. The lyrics are simple and childlike, but his voice is high, feral, and startling. On occasion, he will sing something gently, and it’s startling in a different way. On “We’re Going to Be Friends,” from “White Blood Cells,” released in 2001, Jack’s voice is soft and tender: “Teacher thinks that I sound funny, but she likes the way you sing,” he coos. On “I Think I Smell a Rat,” from the same record, he sounds as if someone has, in fact, just dropped a rat down the front of his pants.
“The White Stripes Greatest Hits” opens with “Let’s Shake Hands,” the band’s first official release (it was issued as a seven-inch single in March, 1998, on the tiny, Detroit-based label Italy Records), and closes with “Seven Nation Army,” which features a riff that is now broadcast, over and over, at sporting events around the world. The framing of the album is not chronological but nonetheless feels deliberate: the original pressing of “Let’s Shake Hands” was limited to a thousand copies, whereas “Seven Nation Army” is one of the most recognizable songs on earth. The sequencing feels like yet another example of the band’s penchant for dualities: the White Stripes can be both arcane and ubiquitous.
In between those poles is a comprehensive rundown of the band’s many feats, from “Ball and Biscuit,” the band’s longest and most explicitly blues-indebted song, to “Hotel Yorba,” a bouncy acoustic number about finding a person who makes you want to disappear into love. Jack isn’t an instinctively confessional lyricist—he prefers to incorporate obtuse allusions and wordy tricks—but “Hotel Yorba” is an earnest fantasy of domestic harmony. If there is any through line to his narratives (besides a fixation on death and legacy), it’s romantic yearning, a desire for more formal courtship:
Jack can be irascible in interviews, and he is exceedingly particular about what he likes (mechanical thingamajigs, taxidermy, the number three, the colors black and yellow, old photo booths, reupholstering vintage furniture), which has caused some critics to dismiss him as ill-natured or curmudgeonly. Since 2018, he has banned cell phones at his live shows, requiring concertgoers to seal them in little pouches, and, in 2019, in an interview with the U.K.’s Channel 4 News, he admitted that he has never owned one himself. “I’m an anomaly, and I’m looking at everybody, and to me everyone sort of looks silly,” he said. He went on to describe technology addiction as “sad,” and suggested that social media runs on an engine of “competition, voyeurism, jealousy—those are really shallow human characteristics.” This resulted in some gleeful dunking on him for what seemed like a predictable, backward-looking stance, though it is also hard to say that he was wrong about any of it.
Most contemporary rock and pop stars perform a kind of transparency as part of the gig: tweeting, posting faux-candid images on Instagram, self-producing high-budget, not-so-revealing documentaries about their lives. Jack White now feels like one of the last figures truly dedicated to the kind of calculated obscurity perfected by Bob Dylan in the nineteen-sixties. Jack’s always been a bit of a song-and-dance man when it comes to formulating and presenting his mythology, and, over the past two decades, he has developed an almost savant-like acumen for messing with the press. (He went so far as to name a side project the Raconteurs.) “The White Stripes Greatest Hits” seems germane to that trajectory. It feels old-fashioned, even deliberately so, but it sounds awfully good.
