Eschewing the traditional rock’n’roll trappings of ego, sex and drugs (or even bass guitars), songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Jack and drummer Meg White have answered all the international acclaim by simply continuing to record cheaply and play loudly.
The White Stripes: 21st Century Blues examines the folksy ex-husband and wife duo who stunned the music world with the most powerful blues-rock since Led Zeppelin and the most haunting country-rock since the Byrds and Gram Parsons. Rock biographer Dick Porter analyses the quirkiness of their former claims to be a brother and sister from a family of ten, Jack’s austere puritanism and obsessions with ‘truth and death’, and the child-like innocence of the couple’s red-and-white matching colour schemes.
But most of all, he pays tribute to the minimalist ethic that informed their little-known second album, De Stijl, and is honed to riff-laden perfection on their hugely successful fourth album, Elephant – recorded for less than £6,000 at a cramped studio in London’s East End. Pegged as the unlikeliest saviours of rock’n’roll, the book considers Jack and Meg’s discomfort with their status against the claim that the next White Stripes album will be the last before they split.