‘Icky Thump’ – The White Stripes, 2007
The White Stripes are one of the most consistent bands around today. Each of their albums contain at least three excellent songs, and at least that many slow burners.
Hello Operator’, ‘Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground’, ‘Fell In Love With a Girl’, ‘7 Nation Army’, ‘Hardest Button to Button’, ‘Blue Orchid’…and really, those are only the cream of the singles off of their first five albums. So I had high expectations coming into the Icky Thump album. Turns out they’ve trumped all of them.
Built over a lot of noodling, almost-out-of-control guitar set through a feedbox that would shatter glass, along with a thumping drumbeat courtesy of Meg White, the song comes straight from that late 60s/early 70s era where garage rock met the blues. Jack White is almost AC/DC-like in his pursuit of “the perfect riff”, and the riff to ‘Icky Thump’ is a stonker. Led Zeppelin themselves would have been proud.
The song is a lot more complex than their early singles, though it’s definitely a progression from the ‘Blue Orchid’ single. This time, however, the tempo changes are more noticeable, and are driven more by Jack’s guitar playing. Several times, the song slows down to draw attention to a change in the riff, while the drums underline what’s being said.
What is being said? My understanding is that the song is about the eternal US-Mexico border debate, and how a drunken, ne’er-do-well protagonist (possibly Jack White) can barrel into Mexico on a Tequila-fuelled lost weekend with relative ease, while salt of the earth, hard-working, God-fearing Mexicans can’t get a ticket in the opposite direction.
That said, the lyrics are hard to make out, and seem a bit stream-of-consciousness. But a key line here is:
White Americans, what, nothing better to do?
Why don’t you kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too?
Who’s using who? What should we do?
Well, you can’t be a pimp and a prostitute too
As with all the best White Stripes songs, the initial focus is on the top-class guitar work and the overall sound, but the song then stands up to lyrical inquiry.
Any time the song feels like it’s about to break down under the weight of such heavy riffage, or the drums feel like they’re kiltering off, bursts of feedback and slashes of a very trebly, distorted synth come to the forefront, almost like a migraine headache. This is directly lifted from early Velvet Underground (see our post on this) and The Who, and has long been a part of The White Stripes sound, but for the first time they’ve really let rip with a single that veers between guitar-hero riffage and freakish atonality.
Here’s the video for Icky Thump, and here’s a blistering performance of the song on Jools Holland. It’s testament to this band that they can make music like this and still have it played on MTV (when they’re not showing vapid Californian reality TV shows) and on mainstream radio.
