The White Stripes: Under Great White Northern Lights

Emmett Malloy's The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights (2009/2010) catches The White Stripes Canadian Tour of 2007, covering "every province and territory in Canada," as Jack White notes early on in the film. What one glimpses through an artful mix of red, black & white and full color scenes is how the duo relates to each other and to other people. Jack White, never at a loss for words, usually has something big to say; by contrast, every word muttered softly by Meg White usually renders a quiet revelation. They are like a Slim Harpo song made flesh: "Strange love . . . You remind me of something / That I have seen in a dream" ("Strange Love," 1957). For some reason, Jack still makes it seem as if Meg is his sister, rather than his ex-wife.

The tour scenes blend "side shows" in smaller offbeat venues with somewhat larger ones, mostly with a retro look and feel. There's some first generation style heavy metal a la Led Zeppelin, some sonic blues, some odd little ballads, some thrashing drums and some anarchic jangling guitar chords. It's all there, and best absorbed at a high volume with surround sound.

In the film, three songs best represent the band and the White-White relationship, I think: their covers of Dolly Parton's "Jolene" (1973) and Son House's "Death Letter Blues" (1930/1960) and finally, their own "White Moon" from Get Behind Me Satan (2005).

It does not come as a shock that The White Stripes broke up just days ago. Since the movie was shot, Meg White married Patti and Sonic Smith's son, Jackson; two years before the movie was shot, Jack White married Karen Elson in Brazil. Presumably, Jack and Meg remain "siblings" even if no longer halves of the same band.  

The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights takes us on a kind of backdoor tour of Canada, showing more good will between Americans and Canadians than I've seen in any other format. The music on this tour is almost as sprawling and daunting to absorb as Exile on Main Street (The Rolling Stones, 1972) and Physical Graffiti (Led Zeppelin, 1975). As Michael Angelo Tata puts it regarding Andy Warhol, so it is probably true of The White Stripes: "Consuming Warhol is an impossibility. There is always more Andy."*  There will always be more of The White Stripes, too, I suspect.

*Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality (intertheory press, 2010), p. 7.



Today's Rune: Flow.