BOSTON CALLING 2018: Jack White
Jack White used to be a minimalist. His two-person band, the White Stripes, blasted to alt-rock stardom in the 2000s, winning Grammys and producing the banger-turned-stadium-chant “Seven Nation Army.” Every kid who’s picked up a bass since knows how to pluck out that famous riff.
But White Stripes Jack White is not the Jack White who headlined Boston Calling on Saturday night. Present-day, solo career Jack White has lost the simplicity that made him famous. He brought his new bloated style and lots of baggage.
White isn’t the zeitgeistiest choice to headline a music festival, as WBUR’s Amelia Mason notes. His latest album, Boarding House Reach, isn’t a musical game-changer or a culture shifter–it’s a mess. That said, he’s part of a larger set of headliners (The Killers, Paramore, Eminem) that shows some serious nostalgia for the 2000s.
White was happy to indulge that nostalgia, zig-zagging between his more recent solo work and favorites from his White Stripes days. With five band members instead of two, the audience heard fresh, fleshed-out versions of those songs, and the change was fun. “Hardest Button to Button” became a heavy metal, punch-you-in-the-face wall of sound. “Hotel Yorba” got countrified, with White joining the keyboard player on an upright piano for a quadruple-hand honky-tonk jam.
But no amount of good White Stripes songs could cancel out how bad some of the tracks off Boarding House Reach are. Not even the energy of a live show could save them. “Connected By Love” featured a space-age vocal filter, a cheesy Hammond organ and a canned gospel choir repeating “We’re connected” as White preachified, one melodramatic hand shaking at his throat. The level of distortion on his voice on that track and others goes beyond the White Stripes’ low-quality-on-purpose sound. The crunchy, wobbly filters White uses distract from the songs and are genuinely annoying.
After that song came an anticlimactic intermission. The band walked off at 10:13, but the festival schedule said White would be playing until 10:50. There were a few cheers for an encore until the audience realized White would come back on regardless. He did, after four minutes of non-suspense.
Afterwards, White became the oblivious uncle that shakes his head at the youth of today. In “Ball and Biscuit,” he substituted the original lyrics to either make himself sound hip or mock young people. “Now read it in the newspaper/Ask your friends to see if they’re woke,” he sang. In the recorded version, it’s “to see if they know.” Just as corporations kill memes when they start using them in ads, White did his part to kill the word “woke.”
Artists can use their art to fight for their causes, but it should still be good art. White’s wasn’t. His lack of subtlety extends to his political statements, too. A video on the screens behind the band showed his drummer throwing a dart at a Trump face dartboard. He dug at the president again when he switched out a line in the set closer “Seven Nation Army” for the sentence “I wanna build a wall.”
These moves are especially strange considering he already has an excellent pro-immigrant, anti-Trump anthem. “White Americans, what, nothing better to do?/Why don’t you kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too,” White sang in “Icky Thump,” all the way back in 2007. That song didn’t make it into Saturday’s show.
-Miranda Suarez
SET LIST
- Over and Over and Over
- Lazaretto
- Wasting My Time
- Corporation
- Hotel Yorba
- Love Interruption
- Hello Operator
- I Cut Like a Buffalo
- Black Math
- Steady as She Goes
- Freedom at 21
- Hardest Button to Button
- Connected By Love
- Little Bird
- I’m Slowly Turning Into You
- Ice Station Zebra
- Why Walk a Dog?
- Sixteen Saltines
- When I Hear My Name
- Blunderbuss
- Black Bat Licorice
- Ball and Biscuit
- Seven Nation Army