There are some artists that are so prolific that a single band can’t contain their many musical dimensions. And then there’s Jack White, frontman turned solo artist, and vinyl evangelical whose Third Man Records is fighting against the increasingly “plastic” nature of modern music.
White has been causing all kinds of stirs throughout 2014, attempting the world title for the Fastest Record Ever, the invention of the gimmick-laden Ultra LP for the vinyl release of Lazaretto, which went on to smash a 20 year old sales record (set by Pearl Jam) in the its first week of sales, and even inspiring an Australian gelato vendor to concoct a Jack White ice-cream flavour.
On top of the media controversy he stirs over beefs with other musicians, it’s pretty clear that these 12 months may be regarded as ‘2014: Year of the Jack White’.
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As Wandering Sound reports, in a recent television appearance with Dan Rather in the US, White details that much of his drive comes from his drive to overcome a generation of both the public and his fellow musicians which he views as “entitled”.
“I hate to label a generation entitled,” he says. “But it feels a sense of entitlement that’s around nowadays, seems to be something that sort of bugs me enough to want to try to overcome it.”
“I don’t see beauty in teenagers all sitting next to each other texting without talking face to face,” he continues. “I don’t see that beauty in the way that music is all recorded on computer and auto tuned and presented in that really plastic way.”
“And I guess I just do my best in doing whatever I do to try to defeat those ideas and present something that I think is at least an attempt at getting at truth and getting at beauty.”
White admits that his Third Man Records is central to that attempt, but that he laments the idea that in this century “I have to sort of be a hustler now just to be a musician.”
“I have to sort of be a hustler now just to be a musician.”“You sort of have to sell yourself all the time now. I think you could have just been a songwriter at a certain time and everyone else would do that around you. I doubt Frank Sinatra cared about what was on his album cover.”
When questioned by Rather is White picks his covers because he feels he has to, White responds: “I think you have no choice, and since you have no choice if I’m going to do it I’m going to do it the way I think we should do it, and if we’re going to do it a certain way then we’ve got to at least attempt at beauty.”
But it hasn’t always been this hard to create art, at least, as far as Jack White is concerned it hasn’t always been this hard, as he reveals that he is jealous of the artists from earlier decades like the 60s.
“It seems like you could just do your job and not have to worry about this periphery of stuff,” he explains.
“One time when I was talking about Dylan, and I said you know in a lot of ways you guys had it so lucky in the 60s. All these recording techniques had never been tried before, no one had even tried.”
“The civil rights movement was coming to a head, you had that to sing about. Vietnam war, you have the whole world was changing and it was first finally being brought into peoples homes were teenagers were having their own opinion now, they were breaking free and running away from home, the whole world had a whole different outlook on it.”
“So much to sing about and so it was like shooting fish in a barrel. To sing about those kind of songs.”
You can watch the interview below.
