But my young friend at work is right. If the White Stripes sound like “the
rebirth of rock” blah blah blah, it’s only to the dull
people who write record reviews. Listen to Elephant. Whose
melody is that that Jack’s cribbing on “You’ve Got
Her in Your Pocket”? The Seeds? The Troggs? The Count Five? Hell
no, my friend: listen to the phrase “no way out.” That’s
right: it’s Supertramp. “Take the Long
Way Home” from Breakfast in America, to get
technical about it. The whole album is not an immersion in rock tropes,
but a cloaking of pure pop impulses in cannily chosen rock vestments:
the whole Toerag Studios/vintage equipment thing, the feet-in-the-water
backwoods mystique, the these-aren’t-our-clothes-but-we’ll-keep-’em,-thanks
photo shoots. The rock is zeitgeist; the substance
is the same stuff that’s been selling like hotcakes pretty much
without interruption since the days of Tommy Dorsey. And that’s
their genius, and that’s why you can’t escape them right
now. They fit in but manage to look like they don’t. It’s
the whole cake/eat-it thing, and when your discourse is public, you
can’t beat that with a whole army of tropes. |
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