The White Stripes' debut album bridged beginnings and endings in 1999

If the Universe is taking notes, this is honestly a little on the nose.

The White Stripes, an album that’s a love letter to 20th century pop music’s foundational sounds and presaged one of the next millennium’s first big music trends really came out in 1999? Don’t get me wrong, it’s thematically strong, but just a bit too cute. Maybe in the next draft, cosmic forces could place the Detroit duo’s eponymous debut earlier on the timeline. Make it an artifact of the late ’80s to be cherished by the sort of crate-diggers who snap up releases by the Mummies or the Gories. Foist it upon the world in the late ’60s so it can form a cultishly loved, improbably hard-rocking proto-punk triad with Here are the Sonics and Black Monk Time.¹ Hell, you can even make it later. Drop it in 2011, so it’s a Midwest riposte to the West Coast garage rock shenanigans of Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin. Options abound, but if this reality is the final draft, I guess it’s fine enough. Real life is often hacky, and the White Stripes usually weren’t much for subtlety.

That’s especially true on Jack and Meg White’s first album, which in our timeline was released almost 26 years ago, on June 15, 1999.² The White Stripes, for the most part, is an onslaught of short, brutish rock with a heavy blues influence. Slide guitar credited to Johnny Walker and a piano number supply variety, but The White Stripes is most often dominated by the simple interplay between the band’s two members.³ Jack’s guitar is an open-tuned blunt-force instrument that spits out primordial riffs and blistering solos, and Meg bashes out bone-rattling beats that bring it on home.⁴

The White Stripes‘ history is fittingly spare. It was recorded across a single week in a Detroit studio, with some tracks getting extra attention at Jack’s home. The prehistory is a little longer, Jack and Meg met, married, made music, broke up as a couple but not as a band and continued making music over the back half of the ’90s. Jack, née Gillis, took and kept Meg’s last name. Before the White Stripes, he was an upholsterer with a penchant for poetry and she was a bartender.⁵

At the time of its release, the album was warmly received by the few people who heard it. However, the White Stripes’ Rock & Roll Hall of Fame-worthy, late-night show swan song-playing, stadium slaying future was not immediately apparent. They weren’t anonymous, but those in the know were either local to Detroit or John Peel levels of cool. A short feature in the Detroit Metro Times from just before the album’s proper release ends by imagining a world where the White Stripes’ rock revival fails to reach much further than Grosse Pointe.

What was immediately evident and noted, was the White Stripes’ fealty to the past. The White Stripes was dedicated to blues legend Son House, and his song “John the Revelator” is worked into “Screwdriver.” The album features covers of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down” and Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee.” There’s a version of a traditional song that Jack White picked up thanks to a Betty Boop cartoon that featured Cab Calloway singing.⁶ Goofy unlikely origins aside, the album’s covers and dedication signify Jack White’s inveterate interest in the history of rock music and desire to serve as a sort of custodian of its soul.⁷

The album’s sound speaks to that desire, too, but with a focus on different times and places. While The White Stripe‘s songwriting credits reach back to the earliest days of the 1900s and the very basis for American rock music, its sound was mined from a more recent vein. It’s easy to hear echoes of a who’s who of punk pioneers and cult acts. There’s high-impact guitar tone on loan from the Stooges, bluesy character work reminiscent of the Gun Club’s Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a soft-focus preoccupation with boyhood that recalls Paul Westerberg’s songwriting, and likely a lot of arrangements from the weird electric albums blues giants released in the late ’60s.⁸ The White Stripes is a feedback loop of guitar noise and influences that connects the music that would become rock ‘n’ roll with the sounds of the genre in both its nastiest and most thoughtful moments. The LP was also a bellwether, although that took a while to become evident.

A wider audience took notice of the White Stripes, and their earlier work, after their third album, White Blood Cells.⁹ That LP spawned some giant singles and fit in with the garage rock revival narrative. The White Stripes and bands superficially like them, including the Strokes, the Hives, and the Vines were suddenly mainstream. While the White Stripes predated this bubble by a couple of years, that wouldn’t be commonplace knowledge. In a pre-social media era, people wanted to know where the red-and-white-clad siblings(?), sweethearts(?), something else(?) came from.¹⁰ One day, “Fell In Love With a Girl” was all over the radio and its blocky video dominated music video blocs, and going back to the beginning made sense.

Listeners who did their homework in the ensuing years discovered the band arrived essentially fully formed, complete with Jack’s carnival barker tenor, a monochromatic look and turbo-charged blues riffs for days. It’s also easy to hear precursors to some of the band’s biggest songs on their debut. “Jimmy the Exploder” manages to at turns sound like “Icky Thump” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.”¹¹ The unbridled energy of “Broken Bricks” is a preview of “Fell in Love with a Girl. “Astro” showed that a badass riff and nonsense sung with intensity could be a winning combination, and what else is “Seven Nation Army?” Jack White’s songwriting foibles are present and accounted for, too. There’s the token acoustic song, “Sugar Never Tasted So Good,” allusions to childhood, and a song with “little” in its title.¹² The White Stripes is heavily indebted to the past, but it also charted a future for the band and the wider world of rock.

While the White Stripes would rework, refine and flesh out these ideas to bigger and better effect in the years after their debut, The White Stripes is both a fascinating and fun listen. It’s preposterously 17 songs long, and while not devoid of fat, it lacks any outright bad songs. In its day, it was viewed as a possible regional phenomenon that celebrated Detroit, the blues, rock ‘n’ roll and every space where those things intersect. Later, it could be contextualized and misunderstood as heralding a wave of guitar-forward, energetic music that would briefly emerge as profitable and cool. However, the White Stripes were always out of step with that scene. They both predated and outlasted it, and they worshipped at older, more weathered musical altars. It’s an album that can be heard as one of the last great rock albums of the 20th century, and an announcement of one of the 21st century’s defining guitar bands. In that respect, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

1. I don’t know how or if this would affect Bob Dylan. “One More Cup of Coffee” didn’t come out until 1976, and a cover of that track appears deep on The White Stripes. I think the probably just records the song, whether it’s a cover or he arrives at it independently, like Pete Campbell and direct marketing. ↩︎
2. As noted by the Detroit Historical Society, here. ↩︎
3. Walker was a member of the Soledad Brothers. His surname is actually Wirick. The stage name was a good choice. ↩︎
4. Discourse around Meg White’s drumming eventually became and remains insufferable. Not since Ringo Starr has such an obviously indispensable percussionist been so frequently maligned. At a time when Jack White had enough money and clout to hire any drummer ever and enough studio prowess to just play a part himself, Meg’s role within the band only grew. If you play drums on some of the most recognizable songs of the past 25 years, debating technical proficiency is a pointless exercise. The music exists. It’s good. Meg played drums on those good songs. Also, “In the Cold Cold Night” is the best Beat Happening song that Beat Happening didn’t write. ↩︎
5. Apparently, it’s something Jack White has recently enjoyed, too. ↩︎
6. Koko the Clown from that cartoon gets a shoutout in the White Stripes version’s opening seconds. ↩︎
7. There could be a whole separate essay that I’m not qualified to write about this impulse and Jack White’s commercial viability compared to the Black musicians that White celebrates. Playing Elvis in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is extremely meta in this context. As an extra wrinkle, White’s record label, Third Man Records, ensures that fairly obscure Black music stays commercially available. That’s a separate conundrum of preservation and profits. It all seems to come from an obvious bone-deep and abiding love for the music, but culture vulture concerns are a part of this band’s story. ↩︎
8. The Black Gladiator by Bo Diddley is the best, or at least my personal favorite, of those albums. Electric Mudd by Muddy Waters is fun. Howlin’ Wolf”s The Howlin’ Wolf Album isn’t great, but its album cover is an all-timer. ↩︎
9. Pitchfork reviewed White Blood Cells in 2001. The White Stripes’ first and second albums received a joint review in 2002. ↩︎
10. These days, we all know that Jack and Meg White are ex-husband and wife, but the pair obscured that at the time, typically presenting themselves as brother and sister. Their previous matrimony led to a pretty great tweet from Jack’s more recent ex-wife during the brief time when Will Smith slapping Chris Rock and a terrible take on Meg’s drumming were in the news. (https://x.com/jkac/status/1635788397636734977) ↩︎
11. Specifically, this bit of “Icky Thump” sounds like this bit of “Jimmy the Exploder.” The slower section of “Jimmy” sounds like a sludgy prototype for “Dead Leaves.” ↩︎
12. Jack White eventually released a career-spanning collection of acoustic recordings. It’s good! ↩︎