Who is the last great rock star?
This is a question worth asking, because rock – guitar-based music made by artists who write their own material and play their own instruments, in the tradition harking back to blues, country, and folk music – is no longer the youth-driven, zeitgeist-defining force it once was. Popular music’s modern superstars (Beyonce, Drake, Taylor Swift) come from the worlds of R&B, hip-hop and pop-country – not from the world of rock.
This is why I propose that Jack White might be the last great rock star. He is a larger-than-life trend-setting iconoclast, who writes, sings and plays his own material. From his breakthrough band The White Stripes, through his work with The Raconteurs and The Dead Weather, to his current solo career, he has amassed a sprawling discography that runs the full range of rock ‘n’ roll styles and sounds. Along the way, he accumulated significant sales, critical acclaim and a dedicated fanbase. Now, as the head of his own record label, he is able to sustain his career outside the mercenary demands of the music industry. This is all the more remarkable, considering he began in a two-piece garage blues band. Of course, alongside those achievements, he has garnered a reputation as a musical Luddite, who paradoxically champions the ‘purity’ of older musical styles and technologies, while being obsessed with his persona and aesthetics. But that is just like a rock star: they should be larger-than-life figures.
In this book, I will be going through Jack White’s discography album by album, track by track, in chronological order. All non-album songs – singles, B-sides, soundtrack contributions, etc. – I will cover in the ‘Non-Album Tracks, B-Sides And Rarities’ section after the main albums. I will also briefly cover Jack’s appearances on other artist’s songs and his production work. Jack is comparable to Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, in that while he rose to fame with an identifiable sound and persona, he challenged himself to try different genres and hybrid sounds, and his collaborations were an important aspect of his creative development.
This book is not a complete discography, so I will not be covering every edition of every Jack White album or single. That would take a whole other book! This is also not a biography, so I will not be covering Jack’s personal history in detail. Jack is not a confessional singer-songwriter in the vein of Joni Mitchell or Stevie Nicks, where their music is a thinly veiled account of their private life. He is more in the vein of Neil Young or Patti Smith, using extended metaphors and fictional scenarios to convey broader universal truths. But there is a lot to say about Jack’s personal philosophies and how they’re reflected in his music, so we need to first explore where he came from and the musical forces that shaped him …
Jack White was born John Anthony Gillis on 9 July 1975. Given his penchant for self-mythologising, it would be fun to say he was born in a remote log cabin while thunder rolled outside and a two-headed calf was born in the nearby cemetery. But no, he was born and raised in Southwest Detroit. But in a way, that itself was prophetic, for there are few cities in America with as storied a musical history as Detroit.
On the one hand, Detroit was home to artists such as The Stooges, The MC5, Grand Funk Railroad and the original Alice C
