Jack White: "Sixteen Saltines "

Whether you, as Music-Listener – 2012 Edition, will dig Jack White’s upcoming solo album, Blunderbuss, is going to be determined entirely by whether you dig Jack White’s Whole Thing. Admittedly, this question has become dramatically harder to answer since about 2005, as Jack White’s Whole Thing has experienced a pretty severe bloat over the past half decade. Whatever your opinion of White’s step-children, the workmanlike Raconteurs and the off-puttingly moody Dead Weather gone are the halcyon days of bichromatic simplicity embodied by the White Stripes, when forming an opinion on Jack’s whole thing was as straightforward as sucking a peppermint. The thing was the thing was the thing. You liked it or you didn’t.

Because make no mistake, while Brendan Benson and Alison Mosshart are respectively charter members of the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather, those are Jack White bands. The albums those bands put out are Jack White albums. They’re all bound up and subsumed in Jack White’s Whole Thing, and this makes former White acolytes scour his new output for flaws with the suspicious fervor of a cuckold scrolling through his lovers’ incoming texts while she’s in the shower.

Our fear (yes, I’m one of them) is that the outward creep of Jack White’s Whole Thing may have hopelessly obscured the pallid, single-minded, blues revivalist auteur whose first three albums managed to be whimsical while containing the force and economy of a sledgehammer blow. Josh Eells captured the root of this anxiety in a recent profile of White for the New York Times: “It’s easy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso—possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation.” There. Right there. Did you catch that? “It’s easy to overlook…”

Pre-2005 Jack White’s virtuosity was decidedly not easy to overlook. It peered right out at you through every White Stripes song, black-eyed and straight faced like Jack himself. Pre-2005 it’s fair to say that virtuosity was Jack White’s Whole Thing. And now we worry that thing—that ineffable thing—will become such a small fraction of Jack White’s whole thing that it will dilute among those stylistic trappings and vanish completely. The first single from Blunderbuss, “Sixteen Saltines,” goes a good long way toward reassuring us that it won’t. The song sounds like White in a way that we haven’t heard in a long time. There’s hyper-compressed production on the riff reminiscent of “Blue Orchid,” minimalist phrasing in a squealing falsetto a la “Black Math,” and even the trademark yelp at the beginning of the song announcing the arrival of the verse.

There’s also another part of that New York Times piece I found interesting. White describes a dream he had in which a beautiful woman starts to grow into a giant before his eyes, swelling to the point where he’s afraid she’ll crush him, her outline blurring as if she’s come too close into the foreground. White opines that this vision may have something to do with his inability to connect with women, but I’d suggest a more simple interpretation. Sometimes the bigger a thing gets—or a Whole Thing—the more it has a tendency to lose its focus. It can start to look like something different than it actually is. This is not a proclamation about how White has reclaimed his former glory, complete with some canned pigshit headline like, “Jack’s Back!” This is a statement along the lines of, “he’s still in there.” Somewhere amidst the side projects, and divorces, and all that Third Man madness, early-millennial Jack White pulses within Jack White’s Whole Thing, tucked away like a nucleus, shrouded but essential.