“Jimmy the Exploder“
from the album The White Stripes
1999
It is an infrequent occurrence that a modern rock band only comes to prominence with their third album but it is, however, unsurprising that it took two years for the White Stripes to strike commercial gold. Due to their deliberately unpolished and unprofessional approach to recording it was obviously deemed to be unnecessary for the band to spend years honing their sound and their songs before releasing their first album. Their eponymous debut was therefore knocked out to little and exclusively local fanfare and, although the following De Stijl saw their exposure increase and their momentum gather pace, it is still too noticeably raw for the more fickle of indie hipsters. One thing that has always been a constant, though, is Jack’s superb guitar playing and it is altogether unsurprising that the band never sought fit to recruit a bassist as even with a single instrument he creates enough energy and power to match most other rock ‘n roll combos. Although they have undoubtedly wrung nearly every ingenious trick available out of their limited instrumentation (hence the prominent piano on the fifth album, Get Behind Me Satan) on their debut it is kept relatively unsubtle and unsophisticated, with Meg’s childish drum-beating providing sufficient accompaniment to Jack’s wailing, hyperactive vocals and vicious guitar playing. Furthermore, unlike on future albums, none of the arrangements are particularly long or clever with the album consisting of 17 tracks, all of which fly by pretty quickly. The album opens strongly with the anthemic “Jimmy the Exploder” and the hysterical onslaught of “The Big Three Killed My Baby.” Jack also pays his loving respects, as he does on the next album, to his blues heroes of yesteryore with covers of the blues standards “St. James Infirmary Blues” and Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down.” Although Jack has always liked to protest that he prefers to listen to the “real” classics, rather than the hits from the rock ‘n roll era, his squealing cover of “Stop Breaking Down” surely owes more to the Rolling Stones’ version than Mr. Johnson’s. This is further reinforced with the cover of Dylan’s 1975 classic “One More Cup of Coffee,” with Jack wonderfully recreating Dylan’s wailing, even if the arrangement is — obviously — nowhere near as full. Jack tries to vary the mood and pace on occasions but the likes of “Suzy Lee” and “Sugar Never Tasted So Good” are still obviously inferior to the primal rock’n roll rages of “Astro” and “Broken Bricks.” Although such blasts are a pleasure to behold, the whole album is rather unavoidably primitive and although it is no surprise the Stripes went on to greater things it is also no surprise that the general public took a little while to cotton on.