Yet, for all the self-imposed restrictions placed on the album, it managed to be surprisingly diverse. “This is the White Stripes album that doesn't fit in with the others, and is quite possibly so successful because of it.” “Far too often, it seems forgotten that White Blood Cells features no blues music, no guitar solos, no guest musicians and no cover songs,” Blackwell said. But with White Blood Cells, these influences, while still present, settled to the background. On their first two LPs, Jack and Meg played homage to their Chicago and Mississippi Delta blues idols, along with their Detroit heroes the Gories and the Stooges. “Coupled with the bombastic tunes that make their debut around this time and what you've got it what is essentially a perfect White Stripes record.”Ĭompared with 1999’s The White Stripes and 2000’s De Stijl, White Blood Cells represented a change. “To me, White Blood Cells was Jack finally wrangling in all of these loose, forgotten songs he had laying around from the previous couple of years,” Blackwell said in an interview. Renditions of the White Blood Cells tracks “I Can't Wait” and “Offend in Every Way” debuted in 1999 with another one of his short-lived outfits, Jack White and the Bricks, and “This Protector” and “I Can Learn” were played by the White Stripes at their initial shows in 1997. Indeed, according to Ben Blackwell, the band’s “official archivist” and Jack’s nephew, the Stripes’ singer had unveiled versions of the songs “Hotel Yorba,” “The Union Forever” and “Now Mary” in 1998 with another one of his then-groups, Two-Star Tabernacle, Blackwell said. But the band's shtick didn't develop in a vacuum. music press began to swoon as well, with Spin and Rolling Stone both calling them the “saviors of rock and roll.”Īt the time, though, Jack and Meg were viewed in the press as a novelty, in part due to the gimmick of claiming to be siblings (they’re actually a divorced couple), their red-white-and-black color scheme, their lack of bass guitar, and their professed adherence to the aesthetic philosophy neoplasticism.
In 2002, after the White Stripes signed a deal with the imprint V2 and White Blood Cells was subsequently re-released, their frenetic lust paean “Fell in Love With a Girl” became an unlikely hit, in part due to the track’s Lego-powered video, directed by Michel Gondry. It was English tastemakers who, by the end of summer of 2001, had formed the narrative of the “garage rock revival,” or “neo-garage,” or the “New Rock Revolution.” The praise for the White Stripes was lofty: The late, great BBC Radio One DJ John Peel called them “the most exciting band since punk or Jimi Hendrix.” Though well-received by critics, White Blood Cells initially sputtered commercially in the U.S.
The death and revival of rock is an old trope-a trope that itself is undergoing a revival this very moment. It’s a period worth looking back on now, and not just because Sunday marked the tenth anniversary of White Blood Cells’ release. Perhaps more significantly, Detroit garage-rock duo the White Stripes-composed of Jack and Meg White-started receiving similar enthusiasm for the self-conscious grittiness of their third studio album, White Blood Cells. New York's the Strokes started catching hype for their avant-punk pastiche on their debut EP Modern Age. On the artier end of the spectrum, Radiohead’s Kid A saw the one-time supposed saviors of rock abandoning the genre, and Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP was being heralded as hip hop’s arrival-of-Elvis moment.īut just when rock’s backbeat seemed to be heading for the archives, something changed. Nu-metal bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit dominated the modern rock airwaves, grunge’s illegitimate offspring Creed was moving millions of records, and boy-band *NSync had landed the fastest-selling album of all time with No Strings Attached. At the outset of the aughts, the conventional wisdom goes, rock and roll was hooked to its death-drip demise.