JACK WHITE No Name Third Man

If I were in a popular rock band that sold a lot of records but didn’t get much critical respect, I would hate Jack White. Think about it: You pay your dues to the ZOSO Recreation Society on time, your bassist has an MBA from Nü Metal U, your drummer’s drum kit is made out of Mjölnir, and your singer has had sex over a dozen times just to be familiar enough with female genitalia to know which part is the lemon and which part is the moneymaker. After all that, do critics respect you? They do not. They call you “pastiche,” and “dead from the waist up.” Which would be fine (you are, after all, pretty rich), if the critics had stuck with what they used to do: praising punks, glasses-wearers, women, and people otherwise from England. And they still do that. But, for the past 25 years, they’ve also singled out for adulation an absolute unit of cis manhood, a lumbering gazpacho of guitar virtuosity (after your manager had assured you that critics just didn’t like people who could play), who has made a career of playing the most knuckle-dragging riffs imaginable, lifting Jimmy Page licks like he was the blues’ own repo man, and pretending he’s never heard of nil metal despite having an entire middle period where he did nothing but record variations on “Bulls on Parade.” Through all this, Jack White gets treated like three Elvis Costellos in a trench coat. And why? Because he’s “a singular artist”? So were Rush! Because he’s a blues scholar? What’s “Blame It on the Boom Boom" if not a modernist analysis of the works of John Lee Hooker? Because he’s “not gross about women”? THE MAN POPULARIZED FICTIONAL SIBLING PORN NEARLY A DECADE BEFORE PORNHUB. I mean, he’s not even scrawny. Dude could fold the Struts in two and put them in his lunch pail like they were the Von Bondies.