If you’re way too online, which in the year of our Lord 2023 is just about all of us, you may have noticed that people on social media have spent the past several days discussing the drumming of Meg White — whose raw, unschooled style helped make the White Stripes one of the biggest rock bands to ever come out of Detroit.
We’re seriously talking about Meg White’s drumming again? What is this, 2003?
To recap as succinctly as possible: According to band lore, the White Stripes formed when Meg and her then-husband Jack White formed the group on a whim after she decided on a lark to sit behind his drums. Thanks to their chemistry and visual style (and despite the fact that they divorced just as the band was taking off), the White Stripes’ trajectory was basically a straight line pointing upward ever since, but debates about Meg’s drumming skills followed, at least in some snobbish Guitar Center-guy circles. There was even a joke about it in the movie The School of Rock.
Last week, the conservative magazine National Review (of all places) published an article commemorating the 20th anniversary of the band’s hit album Elephant, declaring its lead single-turned-improbable-sports-anthem “Seven Nation Army” the “best song of this century thus far.” In response, some journalist named Lachlan Markay (who?) tweeted his disapproval. “The tragedy of the White Stripes is how great they would’ve been with a half decent drummer,” he said. “Yeah yeah I’ve heard all the ‘but it’s a carefully crafted sound mannnn!’ takes. I’m sorry Meg White was terrible.”
That very tired opinion somehow sparked three days of discourse, with fans rushing to Meg White’s defense, accusing haters of misogyny and using the opportunity to share fun early 2000s rock ’n’ roll trivia. Meg’s defenders included Jack White’s second ex-wife, Karen Elson, who quipped, “to the journalist who dissed her, keep my ex husband’s ex wife name out of your f*cking mouth. (Please and Thank You).”
The Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson also weighed in, saying, “I try to leave ‘troll views’ alone but this right here is out of line af,” and denouncing “people choking the life out of music like an Instagram filter — trying to reach a high of music perfection that doesn’t even serve the song (or music).”
He added, “This is why I walk that Dilla path and play like a drunken sloppy af amateur because them flaws is the human element in music that is missing,” he said, referring to the late, great Detroit hip-hop beatmaker J Dilla.
That was a point echoed by Jack White’s new drummer, Michigan native Daru Jones, who told Metro Times last year that he was a White Stripes fan and said Meg’s drumming “reminds me of a Dilla vibe.” He added that he consciously tried to imitate her style when he played songs from the White Stripes catalog.
On Wednesday, Jack White posted a poem in tribute to Meg on Instagram, pining “to be born in another time … one without demons, cowards and vampires out for blood … where no tall red poppies are cut down.” He included a photo of Meg appearing to stare at him from behind her drums, in the throes of a rock ’n’ roll performance.
Anyone blessed to have ever seen the White Stripes perform live knows that the key to the band’s success was Jack and Meg’s seemingly telepathic bond, perhaps due to their romantic connection, perhaps due to their shared love for old rock and blues. Their gigs were electric, improvisational, dangerous-feeling, subversive, and unlike absolutely anything else going on in popular music in the early 2000s, especially the other so-called “garage rock” bands they wrongly got compared to.
On top of her unschooled drumming style, Meg was famously shy when not behind her drums and never spoke much during interviews, which just made her seem even more cool and mysterious. But she didn’t seemed to have the same drive for rock stardom as Jack, and in 2007, the band broke up in mid-tour, citing Meg’s “acute anxiety.” (According to our sources, she still lives in Detroit and has been laying low ever since.)
So why all of a sudden are we talking about Meg’s drumming — again? Well, earlier this year, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominated the White Stripes for induction, the first year the band was eligible. But a crucial component of what one fan jokingly referred to as a 20th anniversary “deluxe edition of Is Meg White a Good Drummer discourse” is the simple fact that Twitter did not exist back in 2003. In the old days, nobody would know who Lachlan Markay was or his opinion on music.
Contrary to new owner Elon Musk’s stated vision of Twitter as a “global town square” that will somehow help humanity by fostering connection, the app is really just designed to do one thing, and it does it very well: make us mad and argue with each other. It primarily does this by algorithmically boosting the worst takes by the worst people — what Twitter users refer to as the “main character of the day,” something no sane person would ever want to be. More insidiously, bad actors are able to game this system. That’s how Donald Trump was able to hack his way into the White House by tweeting racist, false claims about Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and why Musk ordered the company’s engineers to boost his own obnoxious memes and monomaniacal ego.
But lost in all the noise about Meg White’s drumming is the original context in which Elephant was created. The band recorded it at Toe Rag Studios in London, and boasted that it was made without the use of computers, instead utilizing an eight-track tape machine and other antique gear made no later than 1963. Its liner notes dedicated the album to “the death of the sweetheart,” and Jack and Meg appeared on its cover dressed in unstylish Western wear, looking like a gothic country band mourning a bygone era.
The White Stripes’ post-Y2K, pre-social media age crusade against computers seems almost quaint now, compared to the horrors that the internet would soon bring. At the time, the band was protesting the proliferation of sterile ProTools technology in rock music and Photoshopped magazine covers. Facebook was just a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and the iPhone wasn’t even a prototype yet, but even then the White Stripes saw where a digitized world was taking us.
Markay has since apologized, deleting the initial tweet and calling it “an over-the-top take” and “just plain wrong.” He also changed his Twitter bio to “Bad music take haver.”
In 2003, the Whites Stripes said to log off. It’s high time we do.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)