Is mainstream America primed and ready for some bone-shaking electric guitar? Are the pop charts eager for some seriously distorted rock riffs, double-tracked and mainlined into each one of your ear drums?
In previous outings, we’ve remarked on how the pop landscape of today has no time for guitar-centric rock; right now, the saxophone seems to be the organic instrument in vogue, the fashionably fetishized link with our non-synthetic, carbon-based past—a past we cleave to as we sink in a sea of samples and vocals, all time-aligned and pitched-edited to within an inch of humanity (“Thrift Shop” begetting “Talk Dirty”, which, in turn, begat “Problem”).
But are we about to undergo another shift in trends, one that favors distorted guitar—the kind cranked to eleven?
Right now, the charts suggest an initial change in the instrument’s favor. First off, “Brostep”—whose bottom heavy synthesizers all but replaced distorted guitars in the zeitgeist for a while—has departed from the mainstream: Skrillex’s Recess seems to have left the Billboard building; currently, there are no Dubstep-style “drops” on the Top Ten of the Hot 100 (the closest thing to such a drop, on “Turn Down For What,” has some of Dubstep’s circumstance, but none of its pomp). Indeed, Dubstep has been drifting further and further from the mainstream, suggesting that the trend may be over, leaving a sizable sonic gap for the guitars to come out and play.
Also, consider that the Black Keys recently occupied the number one spot on the Billboard 200 (however briefly) with their swampy blend of over-cooked, gluttonous axes to grind. Their album Turn Blue, though on the descent, still sits in the top twenty.
Then there’s the most recent indicator: the unexpected reentry of decades-old music into the charts—the inarguably seminal Led Zeppelin II and Led Zeppelin III, at positions 9 and 10 respectively.
Into this soundscape steps Jack White with his second proper solo outing, a blazing set filled with the guitar gusto of yesteryear called Lazaretto.
And how does this offering stack up with the rest of our recent guitar-friendly fare?
One only compares Jack White to the canon of riff-driven rock (The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath) at their own peril; however, one tends to compare Jack White to the Black Keys at the slightest drop of a hat, so let’s hop on that bandwagon:
Last month, I wrote a rather disparaging review of the Black Keys’ Turn Blue, comparing their governing aesthetic to an over-baked, overstuffed, overpriced farm-to-table concoction. Keeping that in mind, the biggest difference between White’s latest outing and that of the Black Keys can also be distilled into a cooking simile:
Lazaretto is what it feels/sounds/tastes like when you take your organically-grown, locally-harvested, hand-rolled, and ironically-iced cookies out of the oven just in the nick of time; this set isn’t over-produced—it’s just over-produced enough.
This pleasantly overcooked texture can be found in the sonic aesthetic of the record, a production style demonstrating just how scrumptious analog methodologies can sound when they aren’t overly hyped to the Nth degree (I.E.: when the engineer on hand doesn’t crank the pricelessly vintage tape-machine to its breaking point on every mix just because “it sounds cool”).
Indeed, a lot of the guitar tone we hear on Lazaretto falls somewhere between the classic tube-driven sounds of 70’s rock gods and the frighteningly modern, fuzzed-out squeals of someone like St. Vincent.
This just-over-done-enough aesthetic also applies to the lyrics: they’re witty enough to catch your ear, yet not too clever to induce an eye roll (example: “Quarantined on the Isle of Man—and I’m trying to escape anyway that I can, oh!).
The music itself, stripped of arrangement, still operates within the purview of this simile: it traipses through cherry-picked genres, recalling every kind of romp-stomper (and mellower B-side) from the greats to the alternative and the grungy (for all of Lazaretto’s nods to classic rock, one can feel Stone Temple Pilots’ specific interpretation of blues-based harmony hovering around these riffs; likewise, a song like “Temporary Ground” evokes Blind Melon’s “Change”); yet, White never lingers in any one realm for too long—or, I would argue, for long enough.
Indeed, if there’s a criticism here, it’s that this record becomes boring in its attempt to cram so much into the bill, which is, paradoxically, the complete opposite problem when it comes to Turn Blue; The Black Keys gave us too much of one thing. Jack White, on the other hand, gives us too much of too many things, so much so that after repeated listens, I don’t find myself identifying with the songs anymore than I did upon hearing them the first time around.
For all their lyrical dexterity, for all their inventiveness of arrangement, there is no emotional through-line to this record, no sense of a journey from A to B, which, I believe, separates the good records from the masterpieces.
But to be open and honest with you, I’ve never felt all that much of an emotional through-line in Jack White’s music; maybe that’s my problem, and mine alone–indeed, others have always seemed more forgiving.
For instance, in an excellent post for the Daily Beast entitled, “Is Jack White the Last True Rock Star?” Andrew Romano shows us exactly how emotional a crowd can become whilst fawning over Jack White.
He also, quite underhandedly (in the best sense of that word), makes a case for evaluating Jack White not as a rock star, but as something that holds much more currency in today’s music industry: a bona fide pop star.
I cannot tell you that I agree with him in either assessment, but only because I believe it’s too soon to tell—which brings us right back to where we started:
There are indications that distorted, guitar-centered music is making a comeback, but these indications are slight: four weeks of Black Keys sales does not a trend make, nor does the appearance of Led Zeppelin on the Billboard 200 signify anything except that American culture continues to fawn all over itself in a solipsistic glut of nostalgia.
However, if, in a year’s time, there is a resurgence of distorted guitar on the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 (as opposed to a corresponding number on the more ghettoized charts), we will know for sure that this little bubble of rock—this moment in which Jack White, the Black Keys, and Led Zeppelin took hold of our eardrums—really did matter, because we will have undeniably seen the influence.
It is only then that we will be able to say, with confidence, that Jack White and company have made the electric guitar “Pop” again, a feat unaccomplished since…
…Well, since the White Stripes exploded into full-fame with “Seven Nation Army.”
Okay, hold your horses, you twitter-haters and comment trolls. I know what you’re thinking: how can someone who calls himself a music critic put such a blanketed distinction on Jack White, when “Seven Nation Army” only reached number seventy six on the Billboard Hot 100? How could a critic worth his salt possibly discount or devalue The Strokes, The Hives, The Vines, The Killers, The Black Keys, Franz Ferdinand, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, or any of the guitar-friendly rock bands to grace the zeitgeist with their presence from time to time in the last fifteen years?
The answer is simple, and somewhat infuriating:
Because of the children.
To put it plainly, the opening notes from “Seven Nation Army” have become the last rock riff in recent memory to become iconic—to join the canon of muscle-based licks kids want to transmute into muscle-memory upon approaching guitar for the first time; this descending jaunt through the minor scale has joined the likes of “Smoke On The Water,” “Sunshine Of Your Love,” and “Stairway To Heaven” in sheer child-centric repeatability.
How do I know this? Both anecdotally and through hard research.
As a guitar teacher in private practice, I’ve seen “Seven Nation Army” requested regularly by children just beginning to learn the instrument. As a former studio-technician in a prominent rehearsal studio—one that serviced bands like Fun and Scissor Sisters alongside three distinct “rock schools” (something in between daycare and band practice)—the only recent, guitar-based song I’ve ever heard to come out of the rock school rooms was, in fact, “Seven Nation Army” (The other newer songs I heard in my time at the studio were MGMT’s “Kids” and Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep”—not exactly guitar-driven fare).
As for the research component of this informal survey, go look at the updated editions of the standard guitar-teaching books: you will find that “Seven Nation Army” has joined the pantheon of riffs in Hal Leonard’s well-known educational books (Rock Guitar Method, The Monster Book of Rock Guitar Tab); you will find that “Last Nite” or “All These Things That I’ve Done” have not.
Because a generation of kids have consistently requested Jack White’s riff for more than ten years (often refusing any other contemporary guitar lick offered to them, in my experience) he is one of the only known quantities in the music business to have a shot at making distorted, electric guitars go “pop” again; simply put, he commands the attention and interest of highly targeted demographics: children, adolescents, and that all-too-important 18-to-24 group.
So right now, the answer to the question of this article is, “it’s too soon to tell.” But wait a year and see what happens: if 2015 brings us students clamoring to learn the riffs of Lazaretto, coupled with a resurgence of guitar-rock on the pop charts, we will know the answer for sure. We will know if the electric guitar went “pop” again, and if we have Jack White to thank for it.