Cameron Gibbs takes a look back to 2003 when The White Stripes released the album that would with one song, at least, mark them as cross-cultural icons. But Elephant is much more than this song; rather, it's a case study into the trajectory of modern-day music.
Returning to Elephant, I wanted to try and expose some great flaws of The White Stripes’ seminal album, for no good reason, but certainly for petty ones. Any record that holds the status as a band’s best work evokes intense scepticism on my behalf (for my opinion must be different and therefore better) and housing the big hit certainly did not help Elephant’s case. Seven Nation Army is a song that has transcended its context and forged its own place in music history - surely the album had to be riding the coattails of this legacy. More than any of this though, it was never my album by The White Stripes; a huge part of me wanted to satisfy my own nostalgia and proudly declare that the rakish follow-up Get Behind Me Satan was the true understated masterpiece. So, I sat down and listened, with the unwarranted desire to dislike a project by a band I really liked.
It will come as no surprise that I was obviously very wrong. Elephant is a lush, smoky foray into garage rock soaked in the southern gothic. The album is “dedicated to, and is for, and about the death of the sweetheart,” or so the vinyl sleeve says. Ambiguity is no stranger to the band, and there is no clear answer to who or what this archetypal character represents. Yet somehow, we are gifted the most conceptually tight work of the band’s career. While the lyrics contribute images of tenuous love and slipping values, my perspective is that the sweetheart being honoured here is most likely music itself. The sound of The White Stripes has always been bare-bones rock and roll, and they take this even further on Elephant. If the twelve-bar blues, the Burt Bacharach cover, or the expansion of instrumentation to keys and bass wasn’t enough evidence, Jack White’s insistence on using antiquated recording gear no older than 1963 is indicative of a want to return to the halcyon days of music. In the context of post-grunge butt rock and melodramatic nu-metal, it becomes very easy to sympathise with the mindset that music was going awry.
Attention should first be given to There’s No Home For You Here, as it is sorely overlooked, especially in relation to the more monumental singles, and it’s a personal favourite. A powerful chorus trades with gentle, almost conversational verses, demonstrating the conflict between searching for the right words to end a relationship and a blunt uncaring answer. The dropout into the layered “aah” sends chills down the spine, given greater immediacy by the start of the vocals being slightly cut off. There’s no more deliberation, no more attempts to sugarcoat the truth; “there’s no home for you here girl, go away.” Succeeding the howling solo and lively piano work is the transformation of this emotion. The bitterness found in the punchy bridge gives way to the delivery of the statement turning quiet and desperate, which builds once again to try and drive the message home as the song fades out. Even when the listener immediately gives the answer, the song is designed to emulate the passage of the narrators understanding, and the anguish that can come of that.
"When the album constricts itself to bare essentials, it reveals its melancholic heart, which we see expounded upon in the realm of crunchy guitars and pounding kick drums."
This is a more measured approach from the band, infusing their scrappy sound with a greater sense of maturity and patience, as also seen in the likes of The Hardest Button to Button and Seven Nation Army. That’s not to say these songs don’t have soaring moments, but it is not at the cost of working towards Elephant’s brooding sound. Tonally, the album is taken to the extreme on In the Cold, Cold Night, a slow blues, scarcely arranged, yet creating a warmth that Meg White’s narrator is trying to seduce her lover into. The deep organ creates a thermal low end that along with the noise of the tape machine evokes a crackling hearth. Contrasting is the playful creeping guitar that, like the tender vocals, rings out into the night air, leading listeners onward into the embrace of the song. Similarly, You’ve Got Her In Your Pocket is a very earnest stripped-back affair - Jack White’s gentle message of holding on to your loved one is accompanied only by guitar, enhancing the inherent intimacy of the lyrics. When the album constricts itself to bare essentials, it reveals its melancholic heart, which we see expounded upon in the realm of crunchy guitars and pounding kick drums.
Fans of the band’s more riotous songs like Fell In Love With A Girl aren’t robbed of animative tracks, however. We are treated to such exhilarating songwriting in the chugging riffs of Black Math and Hypnotise. Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine matches this pace too, reinventing the twelve-bar blues as a thrashing pulse. Surprisingly though, it is the lyrics of this track that delight the most, as Jack White slips into their relative simplicity the sublime rhyme and wordplay of “acetaminophen, you see the medicine.” It’s one of those lines that stick with you and elevates you to another plane on every relisten. Wordplay of this quality is strewn across the album, such as in Ball and Biscuit, setting the innocent connotations of the titular words against their use as slang for drugs. Additionally, the swagger of “It’s quite possible I’m your third man, girl/But it’s a fact that I’m the seventh son” oozes into the virtuoso soloing and strut of the guitar. Maybe the song’s seven-minute runtime could’ve been trimmed down a bit, but it’s so filled with the strengths of The White Stripes that it doesn’t feel like wasted space.
One staple of the band is excellent covers, and I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself is no exception. It takes the Burt Bacharach/Dusty Springfield/Dione Warwick number and infuses it with a new intensity. The strained vocals enhance the longing feeling of the chorus, but the interchange of vocals and the squealing guitar melody at the tail end of the song is what really makes this cover electric. When it came to a couple of the originals, too, the work of others inspired the creative process, albeit a little more abstractly. Little Acorns is a strange but great song, with all the riffs and beats seemingly hanging in the air in-between verses of contorting vocalisations and lyrics declaring that your problems are easier if you “rip ‘em apart.” It was inspired by the spoken word intro of American news anchor Mort Crim, which was discovered to be already on the tape used for a piano take. Undoubtedly an oddity in this corpus of songs, it makes another convincing argument for the wonders of analogue production. A quick mention also for the album closer, It’s True That We Love One Another, a pleasant little ditty sung by Jack, Meg, and English singer-songwriter Holly Golightly. Under the weight of this darker album, it feels like a curtain call, stripping away all personas and clearly expressing the joy of the experience.
"The point of The White Stripes is this childish, wide-eyed delight in the grassroots of rock, and the only perfectly crafted sound they have is of loose emotive playing."
Before I conclude, and as it has once again become a discussion topic of the big brains of Twitter, I’m going to restate what should be pretty obvious about Meg White’s drumming. No one has ever argued that she is wildly technically proficient, but to equate being a good drummer with playing polyrhythms or Neil Peart solos ignores the nature of musicality. The point of The White Stripes is this childish, wide-eyed delight in the grassroots of rock, and the only perfectly crafted sound they have is of loose emotive playing. Meg White tethers her bandmate to those principles while economically creating tension and enforcing power in all the right places. So many people act like the band would’ve been so much better with a “stronger” percussion section, but they’re already the White Stripes, and who could’ve done The White Stripes better than Meg White?
I imagine in 2003 it was hard to conceive of any way The White Stripes could have made another album as strong as White Blood Cells until Elephant was released. It takes all the characteristic elements of the band and moulds them into laments for crumbling sounds and fading virtues inside and outside the musical world. The judicious addition of crunchy electric pianos and hypnotising basslines allowed The White Stripes to approach their craft in different ways, generating a new flavour in a revival movement designed around emulating the past. Elephant is a mimetic work, taking the best of the old ways and creating something that’s somehow viscerally original. Whether it's their greatest album or not is irrelevant; it will certainly make you fall in love with The White Stripes. Perhaps all over again.
Cameron Gibbs
Edited by Roxann Yus
Cover image and in-article images courtesy of The White Stripes via Facebook.
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