Features The White Stripes: The Most Important Guitar Band Of The 21st Century

The White Stripes are easily the most important guitar band of the 21st Century. Or should that be were, after yesterday’s announcement that they’re definitively calling it a day. With their simple, stripped-down re-imagining of one of popular music’s oldest styles, Jack and Meg White proved you don’t need to do something entirely new to be truly innovative.

Breaking at the same time as The Strokes, The Hives and later joined by future headline-grabbers The Libertines, The White Stripes quickly asserted themselves as a cut above their fellow ‘garage rock revivalists’, and transcended all the previous decade’s musical trends in the process. They’d got a back catalogue: third album ‘White Blood Cells’ was no fluke. They’d got a theme: Jack’s obsession with the number three – three instruments at once, those now iconic three colours. They returned mystique to rock: they had a story we wanted to get to the bottom of.

Whether Jack and Meg were related at all, either by blood or wedlock was once the point around which ninety percent of conversations about the band revolved. Jack would introduce Meg as his sister on stage and in interviews – then in a turn of events Wikileaks would find of interest, copies of the couple’s marriage and divorce certificates surfaced online. If that wasn’t enough (and it wasn’t, we were still finding this fascinating in 2005) the details released of Jack’s marriage to wife Karen Elson specifically noted it was the first time for them both.

Then there was that drumming. Unsurprisingly, this was Meg’s first appearance in a band – Jack having been in various Detroit outfits for years previously – and following the band’s popularity boom, she was briefly the drummer joke of all drummer jokes. A ‘glorified metronome’, ‘out of time’ – and they’re just those this White Stripes fan is willing to repeat. She showed that you didn’t need to be the greatest musician to be in a great band, that chemistry and presence are far more important than intricate guitar noodling, six-string basses or the ability to play multiple drum kits simultaneously while hanging upside-down from a trapeze. Plus, she looked fucking cool doing it. She’s just as irreplaceable as her (former – sob) bandmate.

Jack, conversely, managed to cement his place along the all-time guitar greats impressively quickly, at a time when it seemed 90s greats like Graham Coxon or Jonny Greenwood were only just beginning to be considered. The White Stripes’ ascendancy to becoming ‘one of the greatest bands of all time’ was already well underway just five years after they formed. Who else has written a great bass line that isn’t even played on a bass? (Probably lots, but they won’t be as good.)

The White Stripes’ importance doesn’t end there: if it weren’t for them the ‘Jack White empire’ wouldn’t exist. What probably stems from his own love of vinyl records is helping the rest of us show that the increasingly widely-accepted idea that physical formats are better off dead is nothing short of horrific, terrifying and plain wrong. By releasing special editions, short runs and all their releases on vinyl, Jack’s Third Man Records is a million-dollar cottage industry, and to those running independent labels worldwide, large-scale proof that it’s definitely still worth it – people do still want neon green 7”s like in the 1970s. What’s more, by retaining all The White Stripes’ copyright via the label since the beginning – and through deals with major labels - he’s shown that mainstream artists don’t have to surrender control of their work.

Possibly even more importantly, as pointed out in The Guardian just this past weekend, Jack White has done more for women in music than many women in the past ten years: there’s bandmates Meg and The Dead Weather’s Alison Mosshart, producing records for returning icons Loretta Lynn and Wanda Jackson as well as wife Karen Elson’s debut last year – and that’s before counting the number of female artists released via Third Man. It’s notable because it’s not something Jack or the label shouts about. Which is just as it should be.