Editor's Note

If I could just somehow transcribe, convey in words, the guitar riffs and solo from “Ball and Biscuit,” then I would. That’s all this column would be. Those bluesy, cascading parts, the stop-start bedrock holding patterns and, above all, the hollering solos, bursting out of mossy effects and then slowing right back down again.

But I can’t. Instead, it is worth considering the band behind that fretwork, the White Stripes, which a week ago announced its dissolution. The Stripes were something of a force, to put it mildly. Jack White seemed always to be in Robert Johnson-level throes of possession, Meg White’s bare automaton drumming only enhanced the band’s weird chemistry and there was that myth about them being siblings, when they were actually a divorced couple. Also, the red, white and black. And, oh, that guitar.

The Stripes were a force of both God—some sort of God, anyway—and history. Their fourth record, Elephant, was the first legitimate album I ever purchased. I remember hearing “Seven Nation Army” on the radio, driving home with my dad, and needing to find out what that song was, because it sounded different than anything I’d ever heard on contemporary radio. It sounded like classic rock, but new, and—restrained. It was that cool restraint.

And then I picked up Elephant, and I looped “The Air Near My Fingers,” and I used quotes from the tracks in my AIM away messages, because Jack White’s lyrics hung in your head like birds and you’d think about them and wonder how they worked, why they worked so well.

As I got progressively more into music, I got progressively more into the Stripes. The White Stripes gave me as good an education as a white suburban kid might hope to get in the blues before pressing the issue on his own. De Stijl exploded and crawled and gloated all at once (good example: “Hello Operator”). White Blood Cells remains a stellar collection of pop songs in rock-and-roll clothing. And with Get Behind Me Satan, I was old enough to start proselytizing, and I got my dad into the Stripes, and any son remembers the first time he gets his dad to listen to his music and actually enjoy it.

Reading Jack White’s announcement of the end was more disheartening than heartbreaking. It’s been three years since Icky Thump, which was solid but hardly revolutionary, and it’s not like Jack’s been stagnant lately. He’s producing, he’s got a label, he’s even in two bands, the Dead Weather and the Raconteurs—though neither comes close in craft or execution to his old duo. But as long as the band continued, there remained hope that we’d get another lethal batch of songs, one that would push the blues farther to the foreground of contemporary rock.

So, the industry will wait for White’s next act, which, at the very least, should be a nice surprise. And with the Strokes releasing a new album in March, it’ll be hard for me to forget about the White Stripes too soon; both bands played a similar role in my development as a consumer of music, along with the Hives and Modest Mouse. Out of those four, the only one that’s now defunct is the Stripes, though the Hives and Modest Mouse might as well be. More pressure on the Strokes, then.