The White Stripes
Greatest Hits
scum stats: too crazy to even parse here...or anywhere
So the day is finally upon us where the White Stripes Greatest Hits is unleashed on the entire world...at least in digital form.
For all you die-hards here, the inside scoop is that the demand for the vinyl was so much more than we had initially anticipated that we could not press up copies fast enough to supply anywhere outside of the United States. Hence the delayed release date for the rest of the world.
Even then, we had to enlist the help of an additional SEVEN different pressing plants to be able to tackle this quantity. The etchings in the run-out grooves of the album, with all sorts of recuts and retests and Roman numerals as prefixes and suffixes are just a DOOZY and I'm pretty confident that no one will ever properly decipher it all...if only because *I* haven't even been able to keep track of it all. I am hard-pressed to name any other new release in the past THIRTY years that would have been on the machines across eight different manufacturers.
And in some weird way, I can think of no better metaphor to encapsulate the feeling of a White Stripes Greatest Hits record. Does anyone outside a couple dozen people in Detroit TRULY understand how weird, how outsider, how unpromising of a band this was considered upon their debut back in 1997? For something so unique, so beautiful, so true to actually cut through and emerge and succeed in the mainstream...from my experience, this almost NEVER happens.
Yet here we are, coordinating with the fine folks at Sony/Columbia and their gargantuan worldwide reach and influence and truly hitting new heights of saturation for the band. And as we're just at the start of that relationship, I'm excited to tease that we've got MUCH more coming.
All of this reminds me of something Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney once said about the White Stripes. I'm paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of "The White Stripes are like the Simpsons. It's SO good you feel like it SHOULD be an underground, unknown, cult-like thing. The fact that it actually became wildly popular across the globe is just that fortunate twist of the cosmos."
The idea of a two-piece band from Southwest Detroit still being talked about over twenty years later, arguably more important than they've ever been, nearly ten years after they've ceased to create new work, who had no struggle bouncing from shows at bowling alleys to hockey arenas on the same day, with a band member who literally built his own state-of-the-art pressing plant three blocks away from the collapsing walls of the first club they ever played. All together it's a journey that is both shouting to those a million miles away and whispering someone right next to you. Dispatching records to the farthest reaches of the planet and hand-delivering one to your neighbor. Writing lyrics that feel quintessentially universal and at the same time as if they were specific to you and your life and thoughts that no one else would ever know.
The duality of being both gargantuan large and intimately small at the same time. After all these years...that's what the White Stripes mean to me.
If you've made it this far...great. Post a comment about what the White Stripes mean to you and the best one will get some beautiful gem from my closet or floor or wherever the gems happen to have fallen on that beautiful day.
PS. got stuck at home today with car troubles so I don't have an actual copy of the Greatest Hits for my photo here. So I made my own. Winner can get this jacket maybe with one of the million test presses tossed inside
PPS. I believe the title of the album is, officially "The White Stripes Greatest Hits" as there was initially a concern that having two different titles "My Sister Thanks You And I Thank You" for standard and "Aside From That And Besides This" for the Vault would make it ineligible for chart placement. But a bunch of new chart rules changes made all of that a moot point anyway.
The song that made me want to learn how to play and the first song I actually learned on guitar was seven nation army. I’m now a couple of weeks away from heading into the studio to start recording my first full-length album. Jack and Meg were more than an inspiration throughout middle school and high school. Raw, beautiful, authentic.
Jack made me wanna play guitar and I’ve been a huge fan ever since, 20 years later
Blah, blah, blah. Don’t care if I win anything.
Thanks Jack!
The passion of the White Stripes drips from the tape that it was recorded on. That is why people get it. It is not the “novelty” or the “cuteness” of the band. It is what went down on tape and then was passed around from person to person. Orators of passion with Meg’s drums being as important to drive home the message as Jack’s guitar or vocals. Then, if you were lucky enough to see them live, your mind was eternally blown. Not many artists are able to achieve this transparent passion. The White Stripes thoroughly accomplished it. This is the White Stripes to me.
To begin with, everything.
I remember sitting uncomfortably at the first day of a new job and the guy training me put on Hello Operator. Him and the girl sitting next to us both played Meg’s stick break perfectly on their desks. I fell in love with both of them.
4 daughters all that made the long drive with me from Mahtomedi Minnesota to Third Man Records in Nashville, 4 different records in my collection of them singing Taylor Swift and Daya songs recorded in the Record Booth, 4 girls that all have thier own record players and ask me to buy them records all the time knowing it might be the one thing I do without hesitation, 1 that stood on the rail with me to see the Rac’s for her first concert. All of this because I flipped through a record bin at Hymie’s record store in South Minneapolis and plucked out a copy of Elephant. Cheers!
You said it perfectly – The duality of being both gargantuan large and intimately small at the same time.
You know how music goes… different songs become markers in your life. Our family sat down together reviewing the song list. We were surprised to see how many family memories we have associated to more than half the list.
One of our favourite memories. We had an exchange student (he was 16 at the time) from France who was visiting to learn english. The initial struggle to communicate was real. What broke the ice? Guitar hero – 7 nation army. It ended with the boy grabbing our guitar while my husband drummed on the coffee table… Full on living room concert with 7 nation army being sung hard & loud by the entire family.
My mom bought White Blood Cells and Elephant in 2003 and I was initially perplexed as to what she was playing on the stereo, but the more I listened to Elephant, the more I got hooked. Got every new White Stripes and adjacent release since. Fast forward to the early 2010s and me and a high school buddy would sit out of gym class going over the track list for Elephant over and over again when we were supposed to be playing kickball or whatever lol. When I played bass in a band we’d jam on a medley I cooked up of “The Air Near My Fingers” into “I’m Finding It Harder To Be A Gentleman” that ripped pretty well but we never got around to performing it. The White Stripes never cease to inspire my own songwriting and playing. They are the most important rock act since Nirvana, hands down
My goldfish is named Yorba. My wife said no to naming our daughter that.
As a 33 year old i cant say i was not old enough or cool enough to experience TWS in their early days of playing Detroit bars, Bowling Alleys, or any other DIY space that Detroit of that era was rich with. Though The Whites Stripes were like a Rosetta Stone to so many other bands and events that i might’ve missed out on had I not dug in so far. I would not have gone to See the Gories first show back together at the Majestic in 09 (Highlight both Meg and Jack were standing right next to me near the bar unbothered by anyone for most of the show),or The Dead Weathers “secret” show at the Magic Stick prior to the release of Horehound, or The Dirtbombs and Soledads play a NYE show together, for fucks sake i wouldn’t know to go see Johnny Walker(All-Seeing Eyes) play for a room of 20-30 people at Outer Limits and the Lager House 4 or 5 times a year (the lack of people showing up to those shows is criminal by the way) and furthermore the acts that i’ve gotten to see at TMRCC. I mean the JW and BB covering Fearless, MC5, Oblivians, Henthcmen, Melvins, the Mummies!!! They never played a show in Michigan ever before. The list of experiences and records that the Stripes opened me up to is endless and that’s the best part, there’s always more. Third man has grown into a library of new sounds and archival gems of the past. The Stripes have been so much more than just a great band, but one that changed the trajectory of my life through music and culture and its not too often that has happend for me. That’s what they mean to me.