Jack White is evil. He is just a weird, nasty, cold as ice, fuck who has wandered out of your nightmare to shake his skeleton in front of your face so you are certain you know you don’t matter. You know how there are some rock stars you just wanna be friends with, you know they’re gonna be cool and sweet and happening, well Jack is the opposite. If you met him on the street you wouldn’t ask for a selfie with him, you wouldn’t wanna be caught up in a scene. He wouldn’t be graceful, he’s all elbows. He’d be obnoxious and rude and look down at you and through you because you are irrelevant. The time I saw Jack before Friday night at Madison Square Garden, I was at the very front at Governor Ball and he was so rude to his band, especially the violinist Lillie Mae Rische, it wasn’t fun to watch. White is like a mix of Uriah Heep and the Scarecrow from the Wizard Of Oz’s evil twin.The man isn’t simply tone deaf, everything he says and does is like fingernails on a chalkboard, Man, he makes being a good father, with his “I would never let my children use the internet even though they’ll hate me for it” seem like an assault on good sense and a form of child abuse. The time I saw him before the time I saw him at MSG, he didn’t say one word for TWO NIGHTS STRAIGHT. Asking the audience last night to sing back “are you steady now” to his “steady, as she goes”, not an unreasonable request, he is bizarrely inappropriate and weird sounding. “I’d like to ask you for a favor, is that okay? I’d like to think that if we met on the street and you asked me for a favor I would do one for you and right now I wanna act like we’ve just met on the street OK?” Errrr. Earlier he had screamed “Are you with me or against me?” and towards the end of the night he repeated the question and the answer is: you’re a nutcase.
BUT, the thing about not being able to hide your hideous otherness is you are kinda really real. Like Donald Trump or Mariah Carey, there is nowhere to hide and Jack White is so much himself he even sounds like himself.On stage at MSG he has drained all blood (and all blackness) out of the blues, it is the skeleton of the sound, the deeper he gets the tinnier he sounds, whether he is singing “We Are Gonna Be Friends” or “Sixteen Saltines” it is all the same: it is all the sound of someone hitting the breaks on an icy road car and going into a long skid before smashing into a tree and right about now you’re thinking, so Jack White sucked but ask yourself this… if watching car accidents is so awful why is Vin Diesel rich? Jack invited Q Tip out for a couple of songs at the encore (really the halfway mark) and Q Tip sounded white, I got there late and missed Run The Jewels but I bet even Killer Mike sounded white. Jack White is all white heat, white light, tone shifting cruelty, but he is fabulous.
Like I said, I arrived at MSG late (watching the whitest comedian in the world at the Beacon by the way… see elsewhere) , but I only missed one song and arrived at the bathed in metallic white and blue stage with an energetic Jack center stage performing the instrumental “High Ball Stepper” with that great hook and from there till the end of the evening, a gigantic singalong to the “Seven Nation Army” hook, it was just a superb set. Like, it isn’t something that touches your heart, it is something that is both visceral and cerebral: it sounds like sleek metal on metal. Beyond enjoyable, it is actually the perfection of an extreme form of concentration on women, cool femininity, there is nothing liquid or watery about it, if water running underground is the image of femininity than this isn’t that: it is the female form and cold to the touch. He doesn’t have the hit of anger, he has the disquiet of paranoid: all wires and screws and metal parts clicking into place. It is music as architectural modern building of emotions killed by the coldness of women.
The pleasure of Jack White is unlike the pleasure of any rock or blues or hip hop -none of it does what he does. All of the best music, even EDM, even Diplo and Skrillex with their Pro Tools, has the heat of birthing and not creating. White foregoes sexuality for building from scratch and the result is a sound that isn’t distancing, but it comes to you from a position of power throttle whiteness: White will let you in but he won’t let you stay, you can consider his island Icelandic vision as a response to extreme aloneness. He plays metallic hard rock riffs (blues? where?) and the rest of the band? I bet none of them have ever sounded like this in their life.
The thing is, when the pleasures of rock are so contracted on structure and forms fitting in, you can invest pleasure in it without any pain at all at his pain. “Hotel Yorba” played as a Nashville waltz is just the same as “We Are Gonna Be Friends” played as an instant message. White keeps on claiming a luddite’s worship of the analog but really he just swaps one set of tools for another. He is a complete 21st century weirdo. A creeped out. cold as ice, asshole. How can’t you love a show with that?
Grade: A-
Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground
(The White Stripes song)
High Ball Stepper
Lazaretto
Hotel Yorba
(The White Stripes song)
Temporary Ground
Cannon
(The White Stripes song)
Broken Boy Soldier
(The Raconteurs song) (with “Cannon” reprise)
Love Interruption
We’re Going to Be Friends
(The White Stripes song)
Three Women
Top Yourself
(The Raconteurs song) (Black Math Intro)
Ball and Biscuit
(The White Stripes song)
Encore:
That Black Bat Licorice
(With Q-Tip)
Excursions
(A Tribe Called Quest cover) (With Q-Tip)
Sixteen Saltines
Astro
(The White Stripes song)
Steady, As She Goes
(The Raconteurs song)
Would You Fight for My Love?
Just One Drink
Blunderbuss
Seven Nation Army
(The White Stripes song)
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