Though from Detroit, The White Stripes fit neatly into the New New Yorker scenester scene. Y’know, all those poor little rich boys, The Strokes, A.R.E Weapons, Moldy Peaches and so on, slumming it in their ‘poor person’ chic, belting out 70s garage pop and getting the NY fashionista magazines in a dizzy-spin.

The Stripes then are kooky looking, and raucous sounding enough too be allowed into this hallowed circle and to be a name to drop amongst the loft-dwelling SoHo-ites of Manhattan.
So their face fits but what of the music? Are they merely today's darlings for the notoriously fickle scensters or is there real, lastable substance here? Well, lets find out...

“I didn’t feel so bad till the sun went down
then I come home
no one to wrap my arms around”
~’Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’

FIRST LISTEN
Above the Aegean, flying home and tired and tired of the sun and barely there, I put on my headphones and slip the new White Stripes tape into my walkman and press play.
Ugh! I hate this kind of music! Un-reconstructed, ‘honest’, sweaty US alt-Rock. All jabbing power chords and wailing vocals. I mean really, it’s the 21st century, get out of the 1970s for fucks sake! Joey Ramone’s dead! Catch up!
By the fourth song (‘Fell in Love With a Girl‘), a thrashy scrawl played at blistering pace, I realise that this is exactly what I need right now: sounds of the city, urban and angular, all shadows and speed. More than that though, Jack White’s words are emerging from the gloom, they are wise and funny, hurt and angry, wordy yet so unfussy. I begin to hang onto his every word. It’s clear we have a great talent here.

As I said, The White Stripes aren't from New York they are from the northern, heavily industrialised city of Detroit. The Motor Town is arguably the US’s capital for music innovation. In the 60s it was the famous home for Motown, in the 80s however, black musicians who had been listening to Kraftwerk recognised something in the pioneering German’s electro-pulse, something that perhaps called to mind the repetition of sounds of the car plants where they worked. They took that sound, added an underlying soul and gave birth to Techno, the most futuristic music of all. So what are The Stripes doing messing around with this hoary old guitar music?

“Think of what the past did
it could have lasted“
~’The Same Boy You’ve Always Known’

SECOND LISTEN
So, now I’m sat in my flat, at my window. Sleepless in the early hours and staring out into the dark, empty street. ‘White Blood Cells‘ plays as loud as I dare. I’m getting into this now, the music seems so basic but it grows on you - it grows in you, should I say, winding it’s way around your heart like a slow vine. But, yeah, still the fact remains this could have been made in 1969, this could have been made in 1973, or 1979 or 1987 or 1993... but not 2001. In that way, I suppose, it surprises. Okay, it’s retro. It is. But it evades irrelevance due to the fact that there is no smugness here, no irony. And unlike most retro bands that want to keep the past forever re-heated and re-heated, The White Stripes use retroactivity as a way to scrape away the build up of masks that has accumulated on the Rock [music] face over time. It is a scrubbing, a cleansing, an exfoliating away of all the clogging grime and then a peeling away of the skin to finally reveal the bare bone so new skin, new layers can form. Call it slash and burn: for new shoots to form, the dead wood has to go.
This scorching of the pop landscape naturally happens every so often. Rock’n’Roll did it in the late 50s, Punk did it in the mid 70s and Detroit’s Techno did it in the mid 80s.

“Too many lonely days
I feel like a throw away
well now it’s my turn“
~ ‘I Can Learn‘

Detroit’s history, and the histories of it’s closest comparable English cities, Liverpool and Manchester, have almost certainly played their part in the shape of the music that has spawned and formed within the respective cities boundaries. All the cities have a long history of multi-ethnicity, they have had a prosperous working class population and productive industrial pasts but, more recently, times of great, sustained depression which still bites at the heels. All of which seems to have acted as a catalyst to the energetic and vital musical growth. Music (and, sadly, inevitably, drugs) has provided the escape for their youth.

The huge black population is mainly responsible for Detroit’s musical legacy, though a few working class white kids have made their voices heard in equally strong terms. Madonna and Eminem are two such figures to have emerged from Detroit’s cold, hard streets. And now the alternative scene in Motor Town has seen a re-emergence of fiery, discordant Garage music. Dirtbombs and the Detroit Cobras are two such bands, but it’s The White Stripes who are getting the attention. There is a lot of excited talk (i.e. hype) in the US and this kind of chatter can put off as many people as it can attract and some bands quickly wither when the spotlight is taken away. Now on their third album, the Stripes look best placed of all the Detroit/NY hip bands to ride the storm.

“The coldest blue ocean water
cannot stop my heart and mind
from burning“ ~’The Same Boy You’ve Always Known’

THIRD LISTEN
In bed, headphones on, a bit too drunk. ‘White Blood Cells‘ is an angry and rueful album. Jack’s voice goes from Cobain rasp to Buckley swoon. And like those two Godheads he’s a bruised idealist, his songs are of love and loss of love and love confusion and no love lost. He’s once bitten, twice bitten, three times bitten and now forever disillusioned. Relationships just seem to fall apart in his hands, and now he‘s exhausted: “being your mate / means trying to find something / that you aren't going to hate“ he sings on ‘Now Mary’ cynically. But I know what he means. Those who are nursing a wounded heart can be the most heartless
He even finds time to spit and sneer at... his contemporaries? - “All you little kids / seem to think you know / just where it’s at / I think I smell a rat“
Watch out you New New Yorkers - you’ve been rumbled.