One of the best bands of the last decade is parting ways – The White Stripes are breaking up…breaking the hearts of a thousand rockabilly hipsters along the way.
The White Stripes were the brainchild of Jack and Meg White – a couple who posed as brother and sister and played gritty, stripped down, dirty blues better than anyone on the face of the earth. If you’re one of those people who were like, ‘They didn’t have a bassist. They sound boring,’ you’re missing the entire aesthetic point of The White Stripes. The duo formed in Detroit in 1997, and between releasing six great albums, calling in to berate radio hosts in Chicago, performing exclusively on Conan for a week, and hiring Michel Gondry to do most of their videos, they were always entertaining; maybe more importantly in this culture, always self-aware. How often can a blues duo muscle their way into a hip-hop saturated MTV culture the way Elephant and White Blood Cells did?
Next to never.
Health problems and internecine conflicts aren’t the reason they’re splitting…instead, they want to preserve the musical legacy they’ve left behind, claiming, ‘The White Stripes do not belong to Meg and Jack anymore. The White Stripes belong to you now and you can do with it whatever you want. The beauty of art and music is that it can last forever if people want it to. Thank you for sharing this experience. Your involvement will never be lost on us and we are truly grateful.’
