I chatted last week with someone confused by Citizen Kane‘s status as the greatest film of all time. Here’s what I know: The film is praised for its cinematography. The groundbreaking narrative structure includes flashbacks and varying viewpoints, a technique cinematographer Gregg Toland also used when he won an Oscar for Wuthering Heights. Equally acclaimed is the script. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, though there’s been serious debate about the authorship of Citizen Kane. Regardless, Mr. Kane’s clever words are my favorite part of the film:

“How did I find business conditions in Europe? With great difficulty.”

“I’m wiggling both my ears at the same time. It took me two solid  years in the best boys school in the world to learn that trick. The fellow who taught it to me is now the president of Venezuela.”

“Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can, form such a committee, and put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.”

On Newspapers:

“I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

“If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.”

“I’m something of an authority on what people should think.”

“If I hadn’t been very rich, I might have been a really great man.”

Relevant note – The lyrics of The White Stripes’ “The Union Forever” are made up of Citizen Kane quotes:

If you’ve seen the film and don’t mind a little crudeness, read the supposed inspiration for Rosebud; it could be the lewd trivia that cinched Kane the top spot on so many lists. Or look at this cartoon, which isn’t lewd at all.

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

But how’s this for an idea – celebrate their music instead of whining about their demise. 7 days, 7 songs. One from each album, one off the singles and B-sides, and a joker in the end.

Day 3, from White Blood Cells (2001): The Union Forever

Who suspect these innocent-looking grungy teenagers would take over the world in the name of devil music?

The White Stripes have always blown my mind, from when I first listened to them briefly before the release of the Fell in the Love With a Girl video (my first experience with being hip to something) to their continued excellent outputs in the midst of massive success. A couple years ago I was going through a pile of old Zines in East Williamsburg’s The Vortex and found one from 1998 featuring a brief sidebar interview with The White Stripes. Unfortunately, not much about the band’s early days was revealed, even at the closing question which asked “What will you do when you become rich and famous?”

Jack White (or could it have been Meg?) responded with an equivocal answer that wasn’t even worth remembering. It seemed like he didn’t take the prospect seriously, and yet stardom would come so fast and was achieved so effortless that, in retrospect, it seemed like they knew their destiny.

Despite their unremarkable early media skills, their full length debut was a garage punk triumph. Starting with the instrument-smashing Jimmy the Exploder, the album proceeds through 17 songs in 44 minutes, only five squeaking over three minute mark. Through the messy punk intensity there is only a red-herring hint of amateurism though, as the Whites’ high level of song craft and Jack’s guitar virtuosity show through, setting their sound far apart from garage rock fandom’s generally low standards of excellence.

The follow-up, De Stilj was a commercial leap in terms of success, but the content remained on par, as was White Blood Cells, which launched them to MTV and radio play with Fell in Love with a Girl (the ensuing garage rock explosion would also launch the Hives, the Strokes, The Vines, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs into popularity).

While their excellent songs and videos were enough for me, their enigmas kept the casual pop consumers hooked. Audiences loved knowing so little about their personal lives, but not being sure if they were brother and sister or husband and wife. They were so odd with this attire that they seemed like they could be a cell of some cult, and the bizarre neo-blues myths woven with their songs helped add to the mystery. Jack’s voice was like nothing anyone had ever heard before, and Meg was like no woman in the history of rock n’ roll. High School kids who would typically limit themselves to Led Zeppelin and Paul Simon covers learned Hotel Yorba and I Can Tell that We are Gonna Be Friends on acoustic guitar. The White Stripes weren’t out of this world in terms of avant-garde punk, but they brought their world into a completely oblivious one, and somehow it worked.

In the following years, pop rock struggled for legitimacy after the 2002 garage explosion and give the masses anything so genuine. While other bands that sprung out of the error released progressively bad efforts, The White Stripes stayed on message, but let their freakiness proliferate. Jack started to dress like Johnny Depp playing bourbon-swilling southern gentleman and Meg dressed like his plantation maiden follower. They continued to move towards major-label success on the final three releases, allowing pop producers into the studio to manufacture radio-friendly tracks, but kept the heavy riffs and rock freakouts. Their videos started to look like latter-days Smashing Pumpkins, but retained elements of their early style, such as the stop-motion animation in Blue Orchid and the chromatic themes in Icky Thump.

In this late albums Jack began to fully answer the question of what he would do if he were a rock star. The Raconteurs were one the first answers, a vintage-themed pleasing pop rock band that maybe represented more of what the music industry wanted out of Jack’s talent. The second project was the unbearably weird Dead Weather, acclaimed by some for moving The White Stripes surrealist take on blues to the next level, but to me the project seemed like an unrefined portal into Jack’s increasingly deranged ego. Sometime during the time period, Jack dated Renée Zellweger and married model and cabaret performer Karen Elson.

Meanwhile, Meg sort of stayed stagnant. It always bugged me how friends of mine would deride her, stating things to the effect of: “Yeah the White Stripes are great, but Meg is a shitty drummer.” I don’t know anything about drumming, but if you think a band is great who cares if there’s some massive imbalance in the ability of the two musicians? Why isn’t it possible that the disparity only makes the band stronger and more unique? Unfortunately, Meg (literally) taking a backseat never really ended, and Jack’s star rose while Meg continued to be the silent partner. According to their break up announcement the two remain good friends, however, so it’s not impossible that Meg’s position continues to be the one in which she feels most comfortable, but the presumption that she was holding Jack back will probably linger until Meg does her own fantastic thing.

The best account for Jack’s current use of stardom would probably be his record label, the Nashville based Third Man. Originally founded as a vehicle for The Dead Weather, the label’s catalog is filled with rarities, live shows, one-off releases for friends, and cool colored vinyl. Two Third Man projects really stand out for me:

First– The Black Belles

This band represents everything that was good about The White Stripes– catchy songs that rock, a cool aesthetic, and with a sound that doesn’t seem to foreign to garage practice session or a bar rock show (with a good line up, at a bar that plays good music).

Second– Wanda Jackson’s new album

So, obviously, Jack White was thinking: “I’m a millionaire, I have great taste in rock, and I can do whatever I want. I think I’ll including resurrect the Queen of Rockabilly, Wanda Jackson.” Reasonably, this combination of forces would have resulted in a boring nostalgic rehash of Wanda’s 50s and 60s material backed up with an a proficient Third Man house band, and that’s how the video appears at first, but then Jack White has to take everything to that next level, as if rock has never done enough without him. When the song threatens to hit a lull, Jack jumps in and rips away a talking guitar solo. The octogenarian Wanda actually has to push him out off of her at one point; he just won’t stop moving to the spotlight.

The result of the pairing is another example of The White Stripes greatness (although perhaps poignantly with no involvement from Meg). A relic of rock history is dug up and made new again with a punk spirit that has always strove for a future music. This ingenuity is what made Jack White the greatest rock star of the last decade, but while remaining credibility with music snobs as an enduring punk icon.

And this contradiction is what has always most interested me about The White Stripes. How could a band as punk, subversive, arty, and weird as they were ever have made it to top, when 99% of pop rock bands that make it to similar heights are total crap? As rare as it is for a band this good to make it this far, it’s even rarer for their success to last. Jack White might be the last decade’s Kurt Cobain, but their final trajectories were very much opposites. Both became stars around the turn of the decade, fueled by their innovative combination of pop rock, punk, and lifestyle imagery. Both made music that sounded like nothing else before (take The Union Forever and Milk It for example), and both became way more massively successful than either would probably have ever felt comfortable with at their outset (both bands have singles regularly played at sporting events, for instance). The difference between the two seems to be that Jack has never cared too much about the contradiction; he’s made himself famous and his own terms and continues to do whatever he wants. Maybe it’s lame to write an essay congratulating corporate success, but sometimes a happy ending is better than a suicide.

My music schooling is highly influenced by two bands who was ‘the shit’ during 2000 and 2001. It was then took the definite step from radio music to truly trying to find out what it was I really wanted to listen to. These bands were The Strokes and White Stripes, and they were my gods. I listened to their albums obsessively and thought that the White Stripes song The Union Forever was about my own relationship with my father, and The Strokes song Last Night always meant compulsory dancing, no matter the location. I look back at these times, when I also attended a music festival with a sleeveless shirt where I had written You’re Pretty Good Looking (For A Girl) with a red felt pen, fondly. These days the bands are more loved by myself for nostalgic reasons, although I do occasionally put on The Dead Leaves and The Dirty ground and rock out in my underwear when no one else is around. But that is what every music lover does to his/hers old favorite tunes, right?

Fortunately there is new music being produced by one of the founding fathers of my music schooling: Jack White. As some of you know he formed the band The Dead Weather quite recently, a rowdy Blues Rock orchestra with Jack on the drums and Alison Mosshart, from the once amazing The Kills, singing (or trying to rape the mike depending on how you see it). I just got their second album, and dear god! Just as Richard Yates wrote the book I’ve always wanted to write (Revolutionary Road), The Dead Weather plays Blues Rock exactly how I would play it if I could play an instrument. On their 2009 debut Hore Hound and the 2010 follow up Sea Of Cowards the bands spit out dirty, rowdy, rock filled with base and gritty atmosphere that is taken to its limit by White and Mosshart who spit out bad ass lines in the same way that made me love the first Von Bondies album and Grinderman‘s sexual frustration. There is no better way to prepare for a floorball title fight than with angry blues rock geniuses!

Ieri mi son guardata uno dei film più innovativi e meravigliosi della storia del cinema: “Citizen Kane” (1941) di Orson Welles, tradotto in italiano con “Quarto Potere”. E’ uno di quei classici che non avevo ancora visto, mea culpa (colpa della Mea) e così, per rimediare, mi ero abilmente intascata il dvd dallo scaffale di casa di amici cinefili. A un certo punto del film mi son trovata a recitare le parole senza capirne il motivo. Eppure il primo indizio era già in una delle scene iniziali quando Charles Kane da bambino grida: The union forever! Ma certo! Ecco a cosa si era ispirato Jack White per scrivere il suo pezzo in “White Blood Cells”, il terzo album dei White Stripes. La coincidenza incredibile è che non ascoltavo quell’album da anni causa rigetto: avevo esagerato, l’avevo talmente consumato che mi era andato di traverso e solo 2 giorni fa ci sono ritornata riassaporandomelo con gran gusto. Ecco cosa siginificava quando Jack cantava: “Sure I’m CFK, but you gotta love me!” CFK, Charles Foster Kane. E tutto il testo, fino allora criptico, si è spiegato davanti con un’epifania fulminante. 

Quasi tutti i versi di “The Union Forever” sono tratti dal film di Welles: la mia stima per Jack White non può che aumentare, se possibile. Lui non è solo un Dio della chitarra ma anche un grande interprete, qualsiasi cover che tocca rende oro, chi lo ha visto suonare dal vivo sa cosa intendo. E con questo pezzo è riuscito ad interpretare non solo i versi di un film ma l’intera atmosfera e il significato ultimo; il video qui sopra che ho trovato oggi in rete googolando ne è testimone. E bravo Jack, dopotutto, chi altro poteva prendere una filastrocca stile cabaret e renderla così orecchiabile e al tempo stesso quasi opprimente:

There is a man 
a certain man
and for the poor you may be sure
that he’ll do all he can
who is this one?
who’s favourite son?
just by his action has the traction
magnets on the run
who likes to smoke?
enjoys a joke?
and wouldn’t get a bit
upset if he were really broke?
with wealth and fame
he’s still the same
I’ll bet you a five you’re not alive
If you don’t now his name!