Instinct Blues: The White Stripes’ Get Behind Me Satan Turns 20

Jack White is all-time proof of the axeman’s axiom that someone who knows the rulebook front and back is the best candidate to break them.

The world loves a weirdo freak once they’ve proven they can groove or shred with the best of them; just ask Prince or André 3000. The White Stripes were arty in a simple way, the kind anyone could love, c.f. Talking Heads, B-52’s. By leading with Jack’s porterhouse slab riffs and Meg’s mesozoic pounding, they cleared the way for eye-popping goofiness in their videos and all kinds of antique aural junk in their arrangements (literally in 2007’s “Rag and Bone”).

On their biggest album, Elephant, left-field hits like “The Hardest Button to Button” and the enduring stadium smash “Seven Nation Army” found Meg making kick-drum history while Jack delighted in all the space leftover he could take up. But Jack was already showing off his adoration for unusual shapes; can’t think of another meat-and-potatoes band who stacked three ballads in a row like he does in the middle, and that’s before the one with the mantra “be like the squirrel, girl” and the comedy closer with Holly Golightly that could’ve been a sketch on the Porter Wagoner Show.

For whatever reason, Elephant’s not one of my favorite White Stripes albums; maybe because “There’s No Home for You Here” felt too blatantly xeroxed from “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” or maybe the songs lacked a personal touch like the homemade bedlam of White Blood Cells that made me fall in love with them. Its only two follow-ups, Get Behind Me Satan and their swan song Icky Thump, though, were so fucking weird and silly (and bashed out with so much righteous conviction) that I love them to pieces.

 

VIDEO: The White Stripes “The Denial Twist”

In the case of Satan, which turns 20 this weekend, my elation comes from Jack’s determination (and success) at making a another bone-simple, pachyderm-loud, downhome White Stripes banger while swapping out the ingredients almost entirely. Pounding a piano, marimba and even a bicycle bell on “Red Rain” as hard as his famous electric, Jack transcends his own sonic palette (not the visual one, though — still black, white and red all over) while staying true to his blunt-force program.

 

VIDEO: The White Stripes “Blue Orchid”

But even funnier, it’s a bait-and-switch. Because before we get into all that fancy stuff, Get Behind Me Satan kicks off with first single “Blue Orchid,” one of the Stripes’ best-ever barnburners, with a guitar sound so completely inhuman it led me to drop more than a Benjamin on a then-new Electro-Harmonix POG2 pedal at a time when I mostly just kinda stuck with my $175 Telecaster (which got stolen but I stand by it) and much shittier amp (also stolen but good riddance). I needed my conductor to sound like that: a chainsaw, a dentist drill. Only a band as spartan as this duo could’ve made the POG2’s dense, slightly detuned harmonizer effect sound good and not muddy as fuck; it’s got lots of room to manspread. Beautifully surreal video, too, with a final shot that lives up to the song’s full-stop ending.

That’s where the public perception of the band ends during this cycle: business as usual. On the album it’s immediately followed by a clunging marimba as Jack croons “The Nurse,” an almost nursery-rhyme melody while Meg detonates her crash cymbal throughout the song with the careful calculus of a minefield. “The Nurse” is maybe as avant as the Stripes ever got; they made plenty of weird music but rarely so dissonant, perhaps random. It’s a thrill, and also hilarious, how sloppy they allowed the track to be, while simultaneously being catchy enough to make you idly mumble “no I’m never no I’m never no I’m never gonna let you down now” while putting in your Doordash order or something.

With that kind of bracing prep comes release, though: “My Doorbell” demonstrates how the first two tracks’ approaches come together, an irresistibly charming single made of big-banging piano with a jaunty hook. “The Denial Twist” is just as funky and mapped out the radio strategy for this one, which was neither disappointing nor dominant. They stayed on MTVU where they belonged and didn’t exactly exit MTV proper. The latter came with a typically zonked video that made elongated use of seven-footer Tom Breihan, one of my favorite music critics to read over the last two decades, and Conan O’Brien, who’s always game for a weird bit.

But even without any surefire beer-commercial fare, Get Behind Me Satan was as catchy and fully realized as any other White Stripes, just usually unplugged: “Little Ghost” (“can you scare me up a little bit of love”) and the country-soul-vaudeville denouement (they love those, huh) “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” are true ditties. So’s the 35-second Meg White vocal “Passive Manipulation,” and the amazing “Take, Take, Take,” perhaps the most successful fame-complaint song of all-time this side of “Stan” from fellow Detroiter Eminem, which, to be fair, has a lot more going on. Jack puts on the skinsuit of a cluelessly entitled Rita Hayworth fan abusing his chance encounter with the actress; it resonates much more chillingly and presciently in the era of social media and bad (projectile) audience behavior.

As tune after well-written tune on the band’s fifth album unfolds, a funny thing happens: you never miss the rock ‘n’ roll. Partly because these impromptu-sounding acoustic/piano/tambourine bops are still rock, but the rare crunched-out vamps (“Red Rain,” “Instinct Blues,” — wow if only “White Moon” was electric too; took me 20 years to notice the red-white-blue schema and it’s not entirely clear if Jack did either) add (lol) color more than anything else. I don’t come away from Satan thinking it’s much slower or softer than their other records even though it might be. But the loud songs don’t feel like much-needed variety or relief, just other shades of paint in a cleverly conceived mosaic. Maybe even the Stripes’ experiments felt like formalist exercises because they never for six full-lengths ever came off like they didn’t know what they were doing.

Sadly, this cannot be said of Jack’s solo career, though last year’s No Name is indeed worthy of his greatest band. So we’ll end on some good reasons to miss Meg: the charm, the foil, the bullshit detector. The kick drum. She took a wild orchid, turned it blue.