Music: The White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

February 2, 2006

Title: Get Behind Me Satan
Artist: The White Stripes

Their fifth album, Get Behind Me Satan is the strangest and least focused effort by these unlikely garage rock superstars to date. It's also their finest, an Exile on Main Street-ish mish-mash where the sum is greater than the parts. In a market increasingly driven by singles and downloads, it's nice to be reminded how exciting an album can be, especially one where you really don't know what to expect next. There are a lot fewer pounding guitars on this album. They've largely been replaced by pounding pianos. Most songs sound like rough mixes at first; almost every song has something exceptionally loud in the mix--the guitar solo in "The Nurse," the drums in "Doorbell," everything in "Blue Orchid." After a few listens, however, it becomes clear that the group is not using the studio as an instrument so much as exposing the nuts and bolts in the process along the way.
There are some duds; the wanky blooze-rawk number "Instinct Blues" goes on way too long and it would be nice if "The Nurse" had a real chorus. Whether "Passive Manipulation" is about the wife-or-sister schtick, if the cover artwork indeed has Jack and Meg calling each other devils, and which scripture is referred to by the album's title (Matthew, Mark or Luke?): none of that matters so much as the fact that this album is strangely sprawling and obliquely ass-kicking at the same time. "Orchid" is a rockdisko sonic smash that shows how to really get rock kids on the dancefloor. Meanwhile, "Doorbell" sounds enough like the Jackson Five to totally rule, and "Forever for Her" is the best ballad Jack's written in years. The fact that some marimbas provide the driving force to "Forever" makes it all the better. --Mike McGonigal

Review by
MATTHEW HILL

Get Behind Me Satan is elemental. Natural. It’s about the most simple, most primordial, most universal, most basic, yet most personally dramatic experiences that people can have: love, betrayal, longing, reversals of fortune, frustration, death, coming to terms. The album’s minimalist approach to instrumentation matches its minimalist approach to theme—its eccentric approach to style and arrangement matches its eccentric way of presenting theme. And the result is Beatlesesque. Poe inspired. Robustly human in a big, biblical way. The result is a great album, even without the White Stripes’ history of great albums.

Like later Beatles music, the Detroit-based White Stripes have always had an aura of “artsiness” and meaning about their music. “What do Jack White’s mysterious, childlike lyrics mean?” we ask, much as people used to ask, “Who is the walrus?” “What does this cover artwork mean?” we ask, much as people did with Sergeant Pepper. “What are they really like?” we ask of the band—Jack and Meg White, who have variously been thought to be brother and sister, husband and wife, or not related at all (turns out, they’re ex-husband-and-wife)—much as the personal lives of the Fab Four have always intrigued. There’s an enjoyment that comes from the apparent symbolic meaning of the music, the lyrics, the artwork, the color-coordinated costumes, the lives—an enjoyment that can definitely be had with GBMS. It’s enjoyable to wonder why, for example, Jack does things like adding the sound of a phone ringing over a line in “Take, Take, Take”—my personal favorite track. Or why the songs end the way they do, begin the way they do, feature particular instruments, become exercises in stereo panning or using chorus and reverb. Everything, the aura of the band gives the sense, is there for a reason.

And many times on GBMS, this sense of symbolic meaning facilitates songs that are dark, Edgar Allan Poe inspired narratives. “The Nurse” is a tale of danger, where the one you trust is exactly the one you shouldn’t. In “Little Ghost,” the storyteller is in love with an “apparition” that only he can see. “Take, Take, Take” finds its narrator in a “seedy” bar, where he encounters 1940s actress Rita Hayworth. Is it really happening? Is she a ghost? Is this the past? “Red Rain” has the same feel: the speaker stands in the “red rain” (blood?), calling for a girl who never answers. All of this has shades of Poe’s obsessions with betrayal, with unattainable or dead women, with fixation and love. Shades of “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee.” And don’t forget that Poe married his cousin and wrote about incest—here the White Stripes toy with the idea of incest in “Passive Manipulation,” as they have in the past.

Like the Beatles did with the White Album, the White Stripes have created their most eclectic album with GBMS. “Blue Orchid” reprises their common guitar-plus-drums sound, but after that, everything is in play. Piano dominates many tracks, marimba two. The guitars are sometimes acoustic, sometimes played with a slide, sometimes sped-up with effects. Tambourine? Check. Fiddles? Check. Mandolin? Check. Depending on which song you hear, you might call this album folk, blues, country, rock, pop, soul, etc. The arrangements on GBMS are also unique, with not a traditional, verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus arrangement in sight. If you’ve listened to previous White Stripes albums, it’s probably enough to say that this album is lighter and different—not as “rocking,” but in an interesting, “experimental,” and good way.

Thematically, lyrically, Get Behind Me Satan is about those elemental experiences. Nearly every offering involves love and its accoutrements, usually negative ones. “Forever for Her (Is Over for Me)” is about losing someone, that someone being with someone else, and wanting that someone back. In “My Doorbell,” the singer is wanting someone to come back, yet wanting to be strong enough to not want that person back. “The Denial Twist:” infidelity, denial, moving on. “Take, Take, Take” and “As Ugly as I Seem,” to me, create a two-song suite about fame and the love of fans—a fan ambushes Rita Hayworth in a bar, Jack pleads for us to let him be him—but this is still riffing on love. “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)” finishes off the album with some humor, the same bitter-sweet longing for companionship, love, and family, yet a headstrong attitude.

Given all of this, is there a grand, overarching meaning to the whole of GBMS? A theme that would encompass, perhaps, the album cover, title, and lyrical content? I think so—at least, I have a theory. Starting with the cover: obvious religious references, Meg holding an apple like Eve, Jack holding something (is it supposed to be phallic?), with their backs to each other, fingers almost touching a la DaVinci’s Cistene Chapel, all under the ever-listening microphone (God? Fans?). Okay, we’ll come back to all that. The title: Get Behind Me Satan—another biblical reference. Jesus says, “Get behind me Satan” to Peter when he tries to stop Jesus from the course of action he’d chosen. Okay, I see a theme of moving on. Getting past someone else’s issues, even if that person doesn’t get their own issues. Doing what you have to do.

Does any of this fit with the actual lyrical themes? Definitely. Looking at each song, nearly every one features some kind of reversal or juxtaposition—a way it was and a way it has to be now. Each song features something to move on from. And it all kicks off with “Blue Orchid,” the only song to refer to the album’s title. Someone (Satan?) has “took a white orchid, turned it blue.” To me, this bespeaks the ultimate reversal, juxtaposition, betrayal: the biblical fall from innocence—definitely a theme Jack White is interested in. And, Jack is saying, this is the kind of thing, the kind of person, to “get behind” you. To move on from. On the cover, Jack and Meg have embraced their respective “things,” but have put each other behind, in the past . . . though the fingers betray that painful connection that’s still there, that requires songwriting.

So is it all just specifically about the Whites themselves? Is this an album about Jack and Meg splitting up? Moving on? I can’t say for sure, but I can say that the album applies to us all. Like the Bible itself, this is a big, eclectic collection of songs about the human experience, all circling around the theme that’s most central—conflict and resolution. Getting Satan behind you. And, like reading the Bible, listening to Get Behind Me Satan is like seeing yourself, and everyone you know, through a really interesting microscope. It magnifies, tells the truth, focuses on what’s important, gives insight, identifies your place, suggests future action. Like reading the Bible, listening to this album is a distinctly human activity, and definitely worthwhile.

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