Church's Fried Chicken now sits at the crossroads of Highway 49 and Highway 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi like an unaware, prefabricated neon mausoleum. While you can no longer barter your soul to Beelzebub for guitar-picking prowess, The Man will gladly exchange your eternal being for a place on the fryer and a hairnet. Or one may just opt for the Sweet Biscuit Crunchers and some Purple Pepper Sauce for a dollar. The tragicomic irony of a fast food joint squatting on the Valhalla of Delta Blues out-tarnishes our collective lore more than the Bus Stop of Gethsemane and adjoining Mount of Olives Hotel. And when you toss one of those sugary Sweet Biscuit Crunchers or gooey Honey-Butter Biscuits into your fat maw, you can let your mind drift to the thinly veiled sexual euphemisms of the blues, where biscuit almost certainly means "vagina."
The Blues had been raped, exploited, stolen, diluted, rediscovered, reforgotten, and rendered meaningless countless times long before the Russian Mafia kept hot on the heels of the Blues Brothers 2000 and the House of Blues primarily showcased Wu-Tang side projects and Godsmack. Now, nearly a century after its birth, a non-ironic, post-Jon Spencer form of the Blues has risen again, ever so stubbornly and somnolently-- and naturally, it's being led by a couple of white kids. Jack White ahem not only namedrops Robert Johnson, he covers him. Summons him. Wears the same little derby as him. And on "Ball and Biscuit", the album-stretching stomper of the White Stripes' fourth album, White moans, "Let's have a ball and a biscuit, sugar." It's all too plainly clear what he means.
What's less clear on the track (and the rest of Elephant), however, is just what Jack White intends. Certainly, one of his goals is to simply Rock, which his shit-hot guitar solos do bombastically; those Sears-Roebucks pickups buzz and screech like atomic harmonicas on the album's best songs. But beyond this, White struggles to tenuously weld a growing amalgam of contradictions and genre experiments with a veneer of schtick, persona and Fonzie cool, while Meg's pancake-handed drumming drips solvent over the whole experiment.
The problem is that Jack White aims to honor his diverse heroes with too limited a palette; it's like paying tribute to Edward Hopper, Ansel Adams, Robert Colescott, and Georgia O'Keeffe in mural with a foot-pump-operated Wagner Power Painter and buckets of red and white. "Hypnotize" valiantly strives for The Stooges, while "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" gives up four fingers to a butcher's knife on the altar of Led Zeppelin. But Jack White is no Jim Page (nor Osterberg), and suggestions to the contrary will earn you an explanation at the end of the Questionable Musical Taste line on judgment day. Meg White, meanwhile, pleads to her man on "In the Cold, Cold Night" like a coy Mo Tucker or Georgia Hubley-- more so than take-no-sass Patsy Cline or Dusty in Memphis. Linty in Arkadelphia, perhaps.
The White Stripes' two strengths lie in their understanding of the physics of "rock 'n' roll" and, on the opposite end of the spectrum, their ability to craft a beautiful little boy/girl ditty. As for the former, guitars kick in at the mathematically precise moment. Drums drop out of the atmosphere in their window of opportunity, only to knock you back like a returning pendulum. For the latter, "You've Got Her in Your Pocket", like "We're Going to Be Friends", makes one wish this whole new Foghat rock thing would blow over and make way for the Badfinger/Splinter/Fairport Convention revival that's been long overdue. And therein lies the contradiction of The White Stripes: How do you combine the shit-hot with the "twee?" Elephant's shortcomings suggests the enterprise is futile. Similarly, the naïveté of Meg's playing deflates any Big Rock aspirations. The child-like imagery of candy and Howdy Doody shirts renders Howlin' Wolf-like braggadocio transparent.
More importantly, the Stripes' multilayered, contrived personas-- both within individual songs and as the greater public face of the band-- fogs sincerity. The useless, cheeky album closer, "It's True That We Love One Another", sums up this last obstacle. Piling on the Meta like Charlie Kaufman scripted the lyrics, this hoedown toys with the Jack and Meg relationship "mystery" that was made abundantly clear in the 459 press articles on The White Stripes over the last two years, while throwing Holly Golightly into a threesome of unfunny winks. When Jack sings, "I've got your number written in the back of my Bible," a theoretically rich image from a much better unrealized song is wasted on an in-joke.
The album title refers to the endangered animal's brute power and less honored instinctual memory for dead relatives. Essentially, The White Stripes admit to the contradictions in their music, but run through their hall of fame like a mad pachyderm. In a climate of kitchen-tinkered, designer cuisine pop, the album offers buckets of batter-fried guitar crunch. On tracks like "Black Math" and "Little Acorns", the grease and grunge of cheap guitar ingredients cover slim-pickings from the songwriting chicken. People who just want some fried poultry can drive-thru and get a quick fix, but underneath, the spirits of the heroes wait for a true seance.
