I would have to start doing tae-bo and anabolics to have the strength to care any less about this year's White Stripes album than I already do. It's not just that it's dull and poorly-conceived, that Jack's a liteweight creep who thinks he can fight middleweight by preening as a race-baiting aesthete, or that rooting for Meg to make a break for it can be exhausting. It's that this album, if one had been uncertain, confirms that the White Stripes are bare schtick and have always been bare schtick. By winding the retro-blooze/hillbilly-savant cuckoo clock a few turns too tightly this time, Jackie has exploded the works for all to see, and it turns out it was always a shallow and mean-spirited machine.
Therein lies the rub. For suharhigh perserveres in its belief that White Blood Cells is, more or less, a superb album. One could offer some explanations as to why it might be an exception, e.g., that the folk influence is more powerful here than elsewhere, which means more melodic range and less sphinter-clenched formalism. But this is specious, in the end; White Blood Cells is no less schticky a contrivance than anything before or after, even if the ratios of revanchism show mild variations.
It's something at once simpler and more mysterious: even schtick, and hypocritical authenticity-touting schtick at that, can have its moment when it achieves true artfulness, even if it never exits its limitations — can achieve an intenisty within them that is nonetheless powerful and moving and surprising. Even assholes in straitjackets with midget visions can make great music. It can't stay great; aesthetic flaws are as fatal as a lame character, and the more one has, the sooner they will bring you down. Jack can never go back to Hotel Yorba, but we can, and that seems like a cause not just for hope, but a kind of celebration, even if — especially if — it's at Jack's expense.
PS: as a sort of related reason to be cheerful, I think that Robin Thicke's original musical bed for "Shooter" is kind of dully disorderly, and his loop of it a little laughable; moreover, with the exception of one verse, Lil Wayne's lyricism on the track is unremarkable to say the least. And yet, somehow — and in that "somehow" lies all the ineffable that subtends the idea of art, the shape of which the critics scramble to show like every day — the track and vocals together make one of the year's irresistible and redolent songs. "More of that," as we like to say.
Posted by jane at January 4, 2006 11:10 AM | TrackBack