The White Stripes
Get Behind Me Satan (V2)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Amplifier, September-October 2005

Context is a funny thing. Get Behind Me Satan would be of absolutely no consequence if it were released by anybody but the White Stripes. But by the very dint of who Jack White is, both in reality and in our minds, we are forced to take seriously an album that, more than anything, seems self-consciously, almost explicitly designed to do nothing more than make people ask one another, “So what do you think of the new White Stripes record?” It’s an album that’s meant to be talked about more than listened to.

That’s a shame, because Get Behind isn’t half the record it could be if Jack would stop being a theoretician in primitivist’s clothing and just get over himself. Big Star fans know of Alex Chilton deliberately sabotaging “Downs” to thwart the song’s commercial potential; Get Behind captures the same phenomenon writ large. A couple of songs are interrupted (or “interrupted”) by ringing phones or studio mishaps, while in “The Nurse,” a marimba already ill-suited to carry an entire song is punctuated by crashing guitar/drum blats. Even some of the more straightforward songs are selfconsciously quirky: “Red Rain” throws a toy piano onto an electric slide-guitar throwdown, and the “The Denial Twist” and “My Doorbell,” though driven by piano, are clearly guitar songs. “Doorbell” in particular suffers, straining against the limits of its arrangement’s dynamics, thus failing to become either of the two things that it wants to be, an innocent bubblegum tune or an innuendo-laden blues number.

Not every changeup fails. Piano and marimba get used a hell of a lot more sensibly in “Forever For Her (Is Over For Me),” a slow-build ballad with all of its pieces in balance. The stomp-folky “Little Ghost” seems a little facile, like an O Brother Where Art Thou? reject, but it and the gospel-country piano lament “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” show that Jack picked up some ideas worth exploring from his stint with Loretta Lynn.

Ultimately, though, Jack’s love of affectation might just be a distraction from a general lack of inspiration this time around. “White Moon” is comprised of lovely parts but is too aimless to go anywhere, and it’s built on head-scratchers like “Proto-social’s the word/And the word is the bird/That flew through the herd and the snow.” The opening “Blue Orchid” finds Jack singing in a hyperactive falsetto over a riffy, processed guitar while Meg, God bless her, tries to keep up as she always does. It’s kicky enough, but it sounds perfunctory, lacking the forceful momentum of Elephant’s rockers.

The album’s best song is its most stereotypically White Stripean cut, the magnificent “Instinct Blues,” in which Jack rewrites “Let’s Do It” as a grunting electric blues that could’ve come from Led Zeppelin III, as he howls and whoops in his best Robert Plant impression and Meg pounds out an urgent beat through sheer force of will. It puts the rest of Get Behind Me Satan into sharp relief, recalling how Jack’s ideas fully gelled on Elephant. On Get Behind Me Satan, they fly apart into a thousand different directions.

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