White Light, White Heat
The Raconteurs are not a side project, even if they sometimes seem like a sideshow
by Steve Haruch
This is an article about The Raconteurs. It only seems to be an article about Jack White, for whom the band is most certainly not, as he has told us many times, a side project.
It's been an interesting few months for White. In July, he published a poem in the Detroit Free Press entitled "Courageous Dream's Concern." Anyone who read it was likely struck by the poem's lack of, well, poetry—especially since White's lyrics are rarely without some measure of it. Nonetheless, his free-verse paean to Detroit—which he deemed necessary in light of his, you know, choosing to not live there—drew plenty of fire from detractors. But that did nothing to slow White down or diminish his stature as an iconic figure at once seemingly heroic and odd.
Later that month, word broke that the same Jack White who wrote nostalgically about "Seeing white deer running alongside / While I glide, in a canoe" would be collaborating on the theme song for the new James Bond film with Skip Gates' favorite piano-playing siren, Alicia Keys. While that wasn't entirely unexpected—Keys had mentioned in a May interview that she'd be interested in working with The White Stripes, calling them "very raw, very cut-and-dry"—news of the pairing certainly made for some upwardly mobile eyebrows. As the blog Idolator put it: "File under things that are either going to be pretty OK or trainwrecky on a Converse sneaker-ad level."
It is, at the very least, pretty OK, and maybe even a little bit awesome. The song made its debut (sort of, almost, not really) in a Coke Zero (Zero Seven) commercial about two weeks ago—as an instrumental. This did not sit well with Mr. White, whose camp released a statement that said, in part, "Jack White was commissioned by Sony Pictures to write a theme song for the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, not for Coca-Cola." As some commenters on the Scene's music blog Nashville Cream put it (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Boo-fucking-hoo. When you write a song for a blockbuster movie, they're going to use it to sell Coke and Happy Meals, etc."
The Internet and the times being what they are, the song, vocals and all, showed up on YouTube soon after the Coke commercial—and within hours was "no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony/BMG." The Internet and the times being what they are, the comments ranged from "please tell me this is a joke" to "all the haters need to shut the fuck up." The song itself is slinky and big—and very Bond-y—with the requisite horn blasts and surf-guitar riffs over typically (for a Jack White composition) booming drums. White's fingerprints are easier to dust for than Keys', and the song title gets a little lost at the end of a long shouted chorus. But it's certainly got the slick, prowling feel you'd want from a number introducing Agent Zero Zero Seven.
Earlier this month, It Might Get Loud premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Davis Guggenhiem (who brought us Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth), the film looks at the history of the electric guitar through the perspective not of Les Paul and Leo Fender, who led the way in developing the instrument as we know it, but rather of Jimmy Page, The Edge and—you guessed it—Jack White, who brought the film's crew to Tennessee to capture blues man Son House and who eventually finds himself on a sound stage jamming with his loftily famous fellow ax men.
One assumes that some time after hobnobbing with his Loud co-stars and filming the "Another Way to Die" video with Alicia Keys in Canada, White made it back to Nashville in time to rehearse with that band of his—oh, yeah, them—The Raconteurs. Which is not a side project. Speaking (finally) of, while The Racs certainly benefit from White's careering through the spotlight, they'd probably be a hot ticket even without it. Their latest effort, Consolers of the Lonely, finds the band sounding remarkably like a band—more cohesively managing the Benson/White duality than they did on their debut, and gleefully pulling out the classic-rock stops.
Sure, when The Raconteurs take the stage Tuesday night at The Ryman, Jack White's celebrity will be on display, front and center. But mercifully—for us, his bandmates, and even for him—it'll also be beside the point.
Comments (1)
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You don't like Jack much do you? Tis' a shame since he is actually bringing some form of credibility back to Nashville. I'd rather be known as the home of Jack White than say Kenny Chesney, Tim Mcgraw, Aaron Carter, Keith Urban, or any other trashy and untalented pop, country, or TV star.
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