THE WHITE STRIPES

Formed: 1997, Detroit, Michigan

Members: Jack White, guitar/vocals (born John Anthony Gillis, Detroit, Michigan, 9 July 1975); Meg White (born Megan Martha White, Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, 10 December 1974).

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: White Blood Cells (2001)

Hit songs since 1990: "Fell in Love with a Girl," "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground"

With just a guitar, drums, and a stripped-down rock sound, the Detroit duo the White Stripes unwittingly launched the garage-rock revival of the new millennium. The media-baiting duo became music industry darlings with their third album of gritty urban blues, White Blood Cells (2001).

Formed on Bastille Day in 1997, the White Stripes had all the markings of an art project gone punk rock. Guitarist/singer Jack White and drummer Meg White decided early on that their conceptual band would dress only in white and red and that they would not fill out the lineup with the third traditional rock element, a bass guitar. Drawing from a range of influences, including folk and country blues, 1960s British pop, and punk rock, the pair made their debut with the 1997 single "Let's Shake Hands," released on Detroit's Italy Records imprint. A second single, "Lafayette Blues," was released on Italy and was followed by their self-titled full-length debut album, which combines distorted Detroit punk and thundering Led Zeppelin–like blues with Jack White's high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals riding the crest of the noisy wave.

Songs such as "Stop Breaking Down" take the rural country blues of the South and plug them into the energy and urgency of late-1970s punk rock. The duo show their love of both blues and folk with a pair of covers: Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down Blues" and Bob Dylan's "One More Cup of Coffee." With Meg White's bash-and-clatter drumming and Jack White's reverb-soaked slide guitar, the lack of a bass is scarcely noticeable.

The band's second album, De Stijl (The Style) (2000), was warmly embraced by American and British critics. Adding piano, harmonica, and electric violin to the mix, the album relies on the same combination of primal, rattling drumbeats and oddly tuned guitars. With a touch of the absurd, the album ping-pongs from the sugary pop of "You're Pretty Good Looking (for a Girl)" to the gritty slide blues of "Little Bird" to the player piano-driven "Apple Blossom," part Broadway show tune and part Neil Young blues. The album also features a cover of "Death Letter," by the blues legend Son House, and "Your Southern Can Is Mine," by the blues man Blind Willie McTell, to whom the album is dedicated.

The duo prefer to keep their private lives a mystery aside from the claim that they are siblings—an intentional falsehood that was exposed when the mainstream media dug up a marriage license that proved that the two were married in September 1996 and divorced in 2000.

Their next album, White Blood Cells (2001), was recorded in Memphis. This was the album that earned the band mainstream attention and helped to launch the garage-rock revival of 2001. It is the most refined version of the group's sound, with a hit single ("Fell in Love with a Girl") that is both mindlessly poppy and speedily punk. The accompanying video, in which the acclaimed director Michel Gondry cast the duo in animated Lego blocks, won three MTV 2002 Video Music Awards.

Jack White's lyrics, always on the elegantly simple side, were even more artful in White Blood Cells, as in the spare blues song "I'm Finding It Harder to Be a Gentleman." In his strained alto White sings, "Well I never said I wouldn't / Throw my jacket in the mud for you." The pair recorded their fourth album, Elephant, in London in two weeks in mid-2002; it was released in April 2003.

Just as the fifteen minutes was winding down on such teen pop acts as the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears, in stepped Detroit's White Stripes to unleash a fresh burst of energy on a moribund, overly manicured music scene. With a style predicated on passion over fashion and jagged blues over slick pop, Jack and Meg White helped revive the blues for a new generation of punk-rock-loving fans.

Spot Light: White Blood Cells

The White Stripes' third album, White Blood Cells (2001), was hailed as a masterpiece and tagged as the shot that started the garage-rock revolution of the new millennium. Garage rock, an umbrella term for the short, energetic, often distorted songs created by backyard rock bands in the mid- and late 1960s, had been around for decades, but in early 2000 and 2001 the mainstream media finally caught on to some of the genre's leading lights. Seizing on the White Stripes for their combination of gritty blues, personal eccentricities, and striking color-coordinated style, the press lumped the pair in with a number of disparate bands. Among them were Australia's the Vines (more pop and grungy rock than the Stripes), New York's the Strokes (also a bit refined to be considered garage), and Sweden's the Hives (who channeled a jittery version of the Rolling Stones via 1970s punk).

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

The White Stripes (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 1999); De Stijl (Sympathy for the Record Industry, 2000); White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry/V2, 2001); Elephant (V2, 2003).

gil kaufman