The White Stripes in tier list
might grow on me? Who knows. A couple classics, but otherwise feels to me like pretty standard rock, doesn’t grab my attention, songs aren’t different enough from each other yet
RELISTEN1: they’ve grown on me massively. They’re really simple, yes, but I think it’s in a good way. Lots of well spent focus on performance and experience, stuff that works and is engaging prioritized over what’s elegant. Or maybe none of that’s true and it’s just grown on me for whatever arbitrary reason. I dunno. Moral of the story, now that I’ve got more exposure, more listens, I like it more, I think it’s quite quite good, happy with the new A placement
RELISTEN2: guuugh this is a tough decision to make. This is enough of an edge case that my decision here is almost less about The White Stripes than it is about how I want to go about making these decisions and organizing the rest of my blog in the future. I can only rank artists on my blog at all because I have given myself the tiers as a set of pretty well defined conceptual frames to get started with. I can’t always just say, “I like you worse than all of these people but better than all of those people.” That just doesn’t make sense. There’s always going to be some kind of rock-paper-scissors type of situation going on because I don’t like artists in the same ways. I’m gonna like A more than B more than C more than A, because there are so many distinctions I can make within my listening experience and I’m going to like different people for different parts of that experience. The pleasant/interesting distinction is one I’ve talked a lot about, and that one is very significant. There’s also the more obvious (I think) but less talked about (by me) emotional connection/intellectual connection/experiential connection distinction, or the lyrics/music distinction, or the thematic content/lyrical flow distinction, or whatever other whatever. There’s lots of ways to like music! Music contains multitudes!
The way I have chosen to handle this thus far, generally, is by ranking based off of some very rough average of my personal feelings toward all the things within general categories. This means I get to be very precise, because every artist gets its own unique position in an ordered list. It also means I am being very inaccurate, because duh. If I wanted to be accurate, I would have to forego precision entirely; I think the most viable option for that would be to generate a set of tags that offer some connecting trait that multiple artists share. “This general group contains artists I have a strong emotional connection to. This general group contains artists that discuss topics I am invested in. This general group contains artists that consistently put out music I like.” And on and on and on. It would be endlessly messy, with huge amounts of overlap between categories, with no clear one way to organize and visualize the data. Frankly, I think that is the direction I am moving more toward in my heart, idealistically. Practically, it would just be a ton of work to log that data and make it presentable. Maybe one day I’ll get to it, I dunno.
For now, I’m stuck working within the bounds of my ugly, hideously precise compromise, because I still think it’s better than saying nothing while I wait to figure out the right things to say. Well, I don’t even think that’s true, I don’t think it’s better. I think that in most other places in my life I do choose to say nothing; this is an avenue in which I have chosen to make a habit of saying something, even if it’s not right, even though it’s not right, and I think that having spaces to do that is useful. So it’s not better to say something over nothing, but it is different from how I typically operate, and giving space and allowance to that difference is something that I think has been useful for me, as an experiment for myself if nothing else. I don’t think I’m actually going to go ham and make this a decision about “…[how I] organize the rest of my blog in the future”, just because that’s too big of a thing for me to do and put in motion right now, but I do think it’s worth being transparent about the fact that it is a problem I’m facing, it is something I have a lot of internal conflict about, and this particular relisten of this particular band was effective at drawing that internal conflict to the forefront of my mind.
All of that to say, The White Stripes is tough because I like them a lot, and I also like the sound of them, I like listening to them—but I don’t like listening to them that much. Not as much as the other As, not really. Taken as a whole, I just don’t like listening to them enough to warrant a full A. But I am attached to them in other ways and hold different kinds of admiration for them that absolutely are at the level to warrant a full A. They’re tricky because it’s not like I don’t like them, I do, I very much do. Therefore, it’s tempting to let my admiration for them paint over the fact that I don’t always get excited when a White Stripes song comes on, even if it’s a song I like and appreciate deeply in its own context. That’s tough, man. I feel like if they’re an A, I should get excited when they come on, almost without qualification.
I feel like that has to be important, because respecting that kind of feeling is the only way I’ve managed to feel comfortable with my ranking scheme at all. That’s what lets me first say, “Okay, I know that I’ve said A rank means I’m a fan. Would I call myself a fan of this? No, okay, then it can’t be an A, let’s keep looking.” That’s what I mean by “the tiers as a set of pretty well defined conceptual frames”. They’re not actually different from each other because they’re better and worse than each other. They’re different from each other because they serve as markers for qualitative differences that I do feel, qualitative differences that I’ve named and can refer back to. They are a qualitative connecting traits between artists that I can check off before I have to start asking myself the stupid question that is, “Okay, but how much do I like them, though?” The White Stripes is tough because by a lot of the metrics I’ve decided on that are important to indicating an appropriate ranking, by a lot of those qualitative traits, they do fit in the As. Yet, by others they don’t, and it’s hard to determine which of those competing factors to give more weight to.
I think in this case, what I’m leaning toward more and more as I write this, is that I really do feel like if I don’t get a little excited when a song comes on from an artist I have as A or higher, something’s up. I should get excited. That should be a guaranteed fun time. I don’t have to get crazy super duper excited, but there should be some moment, some fraction of a second, where I light up with recognition and start looking forward to what I’m about to hear. At the end of the day, I don’t have that for The White Stripes, so despite it all I think I have to move them down to an A-.
That was a lot about whatever, sorry. I do think it’s important, it’s stuff that’s been on my mind. I dunno that this is really the right place for it; probably I ought to polish this up and think about it some more and make it into its own blog post. But then, that’s something that I feel like I shouldn’t do until I’m ready to actually implement greater structural changes in how I organize everything on the site. But then but then, I can’t wait until I do the big things to start thinking about and writing about and communicating the small things, or else I’ll never get to the small things, and that’s not useful. So maybe this is the perfect place to get out some of these kinds of thoughts. I dunno.
Anyway! I already said a lot, I already went over a lot of abstract thoughts about why I’m moving The White Stripes down to an A-, but I haven’t actually said anything concrete about how I feel about the band, and I think I should do that because I have those thoughts. So. Here they are.
I started this relisten planning on moving The White Stripes down the list because I really have them up high and so many of their songs play and I don’t love them. At least, I don’t enjoy them in the same way I do my other bands ranked like that. But then, I listen to the albums as albums and I can’t deny that, as albums, this music is so much what it is, and it is that so well. I dunno quite how else to articulate that. It doesn’t always sound good, per se. Or, it does sound good, but not necessarily in a way that’s super fun. Not always super fun, but always compelling. And a little tricky, because I think a fair bit of that compelling nature is lost when the songs come up as one-offs instead of being heard in the context of the album.
I think the most concrete thing I felt about the band while listening is that it feels so much like a piece of history. I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s crusty or outdated or old. It feels like a piece of history in that it feels like such a definitive, “pure” piece of music. It so much is what it is. I feel like lots of the rock that came before was aiming for this but didn’t get it, and then the rock that came after was trying to emulate it or pull from it. I don’t even love it all the time. Elephant is my favorite album of the lot because, yes, I do like it a lot and yes, it has songs I love, but on a pure enjoyment level it’s probably closer to a 7.8, 7.7. It just so much feels to me like what it is, more than maybe any other “classic”, more than any other “genre defining” stuff I’ve listened to. I dunno why. I’m sure that says more about me than anything else, but it is what my experience is. Pretty neat.
Jack White pretty consistently turns what he touches to gold, I think. He has such an interesting and interested ear, and there’s not a thing that he’s been attached to I’ve ever heard and not liked, or at least found deeply engaging. White Stripes isn’t the project of his I most enjoy listening to, or even really what I think sounds most like him, but it is, again, the thing I feel sounds the most like what it is. It feels so definitive to me, I really don’t know how to say that. So yeah, my feeling of respect and admiration for it is super strong, I have strong strong positive feelings about it—and also, I’m gonna move it down to an A-
tunafruitsandwitch 