The Battle For the Title of the Great White Hype…er, Hope

Now on to this hype thing. It’s the White Stripes. Are they married? Divorced? Siblings? Married cousins? Divorced siblings? DOES ANYONE CARE? It’s a guy with a guitar and a girl with a set of drums. They look strangely related. The guy sings and plays his guitar. The girl plays the drums. And that’s all, folks. I find the first track memorable, the rest of it not so. They’re like Led Zep with no gas, what with all of their rootsy songs.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that Robert Plant should jump in and start caterwauling, or that something weird might happen, and nothing happens. Unlike Jonathan Richman, who can play his guitar and sing songs with one snare drum as accompaniment, the White Stripes aren’t clever enough to pull this act off. JoJo writes clever, funny, weird songs. Jack White stalls after the first track and it loses velocity and starts to nosedive and hits the ground with so little speed that the record can’t even cause any injury.

Worse, this has all been done before, at least thirty five years ago, and Page was a better guitarist, as was Clapton, and Hendrix was using the lot of ‘em to clean his sweat up off the floor. Two words: don’t bother. Throw the garage band back in their garage and give them a few years. Maybe there’s some growth potential. One can only hope.

The other piece of the hype puzzle is the part where there actually is some hope. There has been so much bitching and whining and carrying on about the Strokes that I don’t even want to bring them up. However…

This is how bad things can get: everything I’ve heard about this band has been negative. Everything I’ve read about them in the press (at least the UK music press) has been positive. By the time I throw up my hands and get the CD, titled Is This It (no question mark), I believe that I have caught fleeting bits and pieces of them on the radio (I had); and that they were nothing like the Ramones, whom people kept comparing them too (they’re not, except their clothes).

The bitching and whining comes almost exclusively from people who don’t think the Strokes deserved a record contract and that Julian Casablancas’s dad, John, founder of Elite Model Agency, and very, very wealthy, bought the boys their contract. We’ll never know.

For anyone reading this who may have taken place in the kvetching: Wow, this must be the very first time in the history of recorded popular music that a bunch of cute, somewhat dangerous looking (if you’re a fifteen year old girl, say) barely legal boys who wear leather jackets and ripped up jeans and play guitars have ever been signed to a record label. How did that happen?

First off, the Strokes, appearances aside, don’t compare a whit to the Ramones----no one ever has nor will again.; the Strokes sing intelligibly. We all learned Ramones songs by rote, at drunken parties. (Alright, maybe you didn’t, but I know how I learned Ramones songs and it was somewhat unsavory: it involved my stoner brother, his pot head friends and an endless repetition of the movie Rock n’ Roll High School on HBO, when there wasn’t really cable, only WTBS, two movie channels, and that station from Chicago). There’s a reason that my daughter could sing Ramones’ songs at age two, but not now at age eight. It’s either because she lost that primitive part of her speech center, or because I started to discourage her from singing “I Wanna Be Sedated” in public. Secondly, Strokes’ songs seem to run around three and a half minutes long, so again, no Ramones comparison. I’ve never timed a Ramones song, but I never thought if I stayed in the car to listen to one that I would be late for something.

Most of the songs on the Strokes’ debut sound almost identical---a strong cross between 1978 era Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers crossed with a little bit of Cheap Trick. The ones which don’t sound like the previous sound very skinny tie new-wavish.

Aside from the songs all being so very samey-sounding, it’s not a bad record at all. The album does in fact possess a lot of f**k you attitude, which is always good in a rock record. The guitars are chimey, the overall production sounds poor and likely isn’t. It sounds like it was recorded inside a mattress or something---like it’s been buried.

The title song is completely listenable in a winsome kind of way; “Last Nite”, the single that’s splashed all over the radio between Korn and Incubus songs, stands out like a sore thumb when it’s on.

What, if anything, is so ungodly bad about this band and about their record? I have tried and tried and tried to hate the record and I can’t. It’s just a record. It’s not great, it’s not bad; I don’t think it’s particularly mediocre. Certainly both better and worse pop records are made and released every day, and everyone who reads this site knows it. The cool thing about the Strokes is that they made a pop record and it is really being played on the radio, sandwiched between Kid Rock and a six year old 311 song.

I’m not about to bitch about this. Just as I’ve never been one to bitch about the likes of Third Eye Blind, Blink 182, Goo Goo Dolls, Lit or Smashmouth turning up on the radio, the Strokes appearance on the music scene has only made me smile a lot.
If these bands are the best hope power pop has of any public attention, so be it. Things could be so much worse. Besides, there hasn’t been one time yet that I haven’t turned on my car radio to stick in a CD and listened to “Last Nite” play through if it was on the radio. Hooks’ll get ya every time.

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