This was an unexpected pleasure: a new interview with Jack White, who is currently promoting his first book, Collected Lyrics & Selected Writing Volume 1. He has compiled thirty years’ worth of poems, song lyrics, random thoughts and more and put them into a book. I have to admit, Jack White’s art has aged well, and he’s aged well as an artist, if that makes sense. He’s selective and eccentric, passionate and judgemental. He apparently loathes the Black Keys and loves Beyonce. He’s a Detroit guy who has lived in Nashville for decades. He hates smartphones and he owns his own publishing house. I love him!! Anyway, he recently chatted with the Guardian and he made some minor news for a pretty gentle criticism of the Taylor Swiftification of pop music. Some highlights:
Whether he imagined this for himself when he formed the White Stripes in 1997: “Like a lot of people who are creative, I’m lucky that three people give a damn. It’s an honour that any other human would even spend a couple of seconds paying attention to something I put together. At Third Man we’ve put out so many other people’s books but it didn’t even occur to me to put out a book of my own stuff. I don’t know why. I own the place!
Whether he thinks his lyrics are overlooked: “For every singer the lyrics are overlooked in my opinion. A lot of people would never be considered poets just because they put those words to melody. That’s kind of unfair.
When he started writing poems in the 1990s, he practically lived in coffeehouses: “As a teenager. I started going to coffee houses in Hamtramck, a city in Detroit – the real European-style coffee houses, not the modern-day ones. It’s a bit irritating now to see 15 people on laptops, nobody speaking to each other. I almost want to open up a coffee house where that’s not allowed and you have to talk to other people. I was writing, performing folk music sometimes, learning about art from all kinds of artists. It was a pivotal moment for me. The coffee house needs to come back and be a sacred place where people can commune and don’t exploit it for social media content either.”
His recurring themes of birds and trees, broken bones and lonely ghosts, God and Detroit: “It’s like you can look at a painting and say: “Oh, that’s a Van Gogh.” Or you can hear a song and say: “Oh, that sounds like Trent Reznor.” As creative people we have these little comfort zones in our minds: this kind of melody, this way of ending a sentence. And that becomes your style. It makes you wonder about the words you find comfortable.
Whether his songs are autobiographical: “Not too much. Now it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself. Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.
It’s legitimately strange to watch Taylor Swift’s influence on two generations of pop stars, all of these young women who are singing variations of “my last boyfriend sucked.” The only one who tried successfully to put her own spin on the Swift method is, in my opinion, Olivia Rodrigo (but you can still really hear the Swift influence in so many of her songs). That being said, I feel like Jack is playing games here – of course some of his music is autobiographical, that’s the nature of art and artist. But I think he’s speaking more to the current trends of confessional pop, which he’s obviously not into. Anyway, my dream is that Jack is all over Beyonce’s Renaissance Act III, which many believe will be her rock album. After Cowboy Carter, she sent Jack flowers and a lovely note, thanking him for helping to inspire that album. Their collab on Lemonade (“Don’t Hurt Yourself”) is genuinely one of her best songs. Imagine a whole album of that.
PS… the Swifties came for Jack White and he responded on his Instagram, which has since been deleted:
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” wrote White in the since-deleted post. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together. What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry because I think that it could be repetitive for ME to always write about and It could be uninteresting for people who listen to my music to delve into, and that imaginary characters are more attractive to me as a writer.”
White went on to acknowledge the “tremendous success” of Swift and other songwriters who have their own process, while reiterating that just “because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way.” He added, “They should do what works for them, And they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
Man, I wish the Swifties would take a minute to read things in context and use their critical thinking skills. Then again… well, I won’t say it.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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