In Garry Marshall’s 1999 film, Runaway Bride, Maggie had to eat eggs every way they could be prepared to isolate her taste buds from her resentful accommodation of however her man liked his eggs prepared. Songs that give us some of the most memorable music focus on a form of love-as-torture we typically hear about that are bound in the narratives of female protagonists, tragic romantic heroines. Because despite the vast individual-specific qualities that have been manifesting to sideline, overwhelm, combine unexpectedly with, stretch, extinguish, multiply, and most of all challenge gender roles for years now, you still primarily hear about violability-and with it the sense of needing to protect one’s core from one’s lover-being a woman’s cross to bear in romance. While at first he felt meh about it, the pluses have dawned on him-and appear in other songs like it. What is worth talking about in a career’s worth of contradictions across his myths and his music is that White, who looks exactly like whatever the hell we mean when we say all guy, was the engine behind the White Stripes’ “I’m Slowly Turning Into You”-which amounts to a man saying to a woman he is quite literally losing himself in her. Or maybe that’s subjective jibber-jabber? I don’t know. The lo-fi production feel of some of his early stuff, when contrasted to his literary, psychologically deep-diving, theological themes, floods the music with the paralytic peace of opposites canceling each other out yet also kinda not–and it just works. Other parts of the search for meaning in his music tap into such abstract territory that you reach meaninglessness from the other side. The only thing it “means” that he could make a two-person band sound like a brawl or parade is that he mastered the use of the whammy pedal to thicken up the sound of a single guitar, even live. And how he can put on a show that rivals ’80s glam in theatrics but in a way that relies on stripped instrumentation, facial contortions, grease, sweat, and primary colors. There’s that mythological-meets-barebones, Detroit-born-country-gentleman thing of his. If you’re so inclined-if you really like ambitious bluesy garage rock and don’t exhaust easily-it’s fascinating to consider. Contradiction is such a pillar of who Jack White is as a performer that it feels delicate to claim any of his thousand discrepancies “mean something”.
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