Jack White: “I’m not going to put something hurtful for some idiot on the Internet to trample all over the place” | culture

HeyIn Jack White’s Jacket: Collected Words and Selected Writing Volume One, poet and critic Hanif Abdurraqib writes: “I wish I had read more people who talked about Jack White as a writer of words.” He makes a good point. White is celebrated as a singer, guitarist, producer, and generator of indelible tunes but not as a wordsmith. His new book, edited by official archivist Ben Blackwell, sets the record straight. Following The White Stripes’ Complete Lyrics for 2023 1997-2007, it covers every song White wrote outside of that band, along with numerous poems, Instagram musings, and scans from his notebooks.

White, 50, thinks fast and speaks fast. He sits at the Nashville headquarters of Third Man, a record label, recording studio, pressing plant, publishing house, shop, and ever-expanding vessel for White’s vision of what is worth valuing and preserving in American culture. He is a historian of sorts of the American vernacular, drawn to the relationship between pop music and the avant-garde, between dissident auteurs and the collective imagination. His work proves that his defiant eccentricity is no barrier to stadium shows and Bond themes, and that being prolific has not diminished his mystique. With this book, he turns his organizational focus to himself.

This book represents a large body of work over 30 years. When you formed the White Stripes in 1997, was this what you envisioned?
Like a lot of creative people, I’m lucky to have three people who care. It is a great honor for any other human being to spend a few seconds paying attention to something I collect. At Third Man we’ve released a lot of other people’s books, but it hadn’t even occurred to me to do a book of my own stuff. i don’t know why. I own the place!

So what made you think about it now?
I wanted to test the waters about doing a full book of my poetry and writing. I was a little worried about this being taken the wrong way. It’s hard when you say the word poetry out loud. People can immediately think that there is a pretense to it.

Do you agree with Hanif Abdel Raqeeb in ignoring your words?
to all The singer’s lyrics are overlooked in my opinion. Many people will never be considered poets simply because they put these words into melodies. This is kind of unfair.

When did you start writing poems?
As a teenager. I started going to coffee shops in Hamtramck, which is a city in Detroit – real European style coffee shops, not modern coffee shops. It’s a bit annoying now to see 15 people on laptops, and no one talking to each other. I almost want to open a café where it’s not allowed and you have to talk to other people. I was writing, occasionally performing folk music, and learning about art from all kinds of artists. It was a pivotal moment for me. The café needs to come back and be a sacred space where people can connect and not be exploited for social media content as well.

Who influenced you as a writer at that time?
Musically, all the blues musicians were: Charlie Patton, Son House, and Howlin’ Wolf. Frank poetry, it was the sonnets of William Blake and Shakespeare. There were times when Shakespeare would make me cry and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t believe how beautifully built it was. It’s as if no human being wrote this. It’s like Isaac Newton: someone happened to have an IQ of 290 and changed everything.

Seeing all of your writing together, I can recognize some recurring themes: birds and trees, broken bones and lonely ghosts, God and Detroit…
It’s as if you could look at a painting and say, “Oh, that’s a Van Gogh.” Or you can hear a song and say, “Oh, that sounds like Trent Reznor.” As creative people, we have these little comfort zones in our minds: this kind of melody, this way of ending a sentence. This becomes your style. It makes you wonder what words you find comforting.

So do you differentiate between words and poetry?
It all felt right to me. I think all music is blues and I think all words are poetry. When I hear a song, it bothers me not to hear what they’re saying.

like?
The word “home” comes up a lot. This word is very heavy on my mind. We just had this ice storm in Nashville and were without power for two weeks. Walking around the house you live in with a flashlight is very strange and frustrating. You feel like this is what someone might do 50 years from now: might walk into my abandoned house. Growing up in Detroit, we would often walk past abandoned houses, and occasionally come across something really sad like a family photo album. This can make you cry. It makes you wonder about many things. How do we hold on to anything important for more than five minutes?

I used to keep a dream journal. How are your dreams?
My dreams are very funny and irregular. I rarely hear people say, “Oh, this is what my dreams look like.” They always say, “This looks like when you dropped acid.” So maybe my brain is tapping into those synapses.

Do they make their way into the songs?
I always felt that my subconscious mind was smarter than my conscious mind. But when I write, I don’t like to have a big stream of consciousness. I want people to have things they can sink their teeth into. So I let it go for a bit and then come back to it. I usually try to catch a character facing a situation and try to escape or solve it.

Are any of your songs completely autobiographical?
Not much. Now it’s so common in a Taylor Swift way that pop singers write about all their publicly aired breakups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a bit boring for me to write about myself. Even if I had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived through it, and I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it was really painful, I wouldn’t put this important and painful thing I went through in front of some idiot on the internet to trample all over it. So I put a percentage of that into what I do and then turn it into someone else’s character. I can’t really recognize myself until I put myself in someone else’s shoes.

Are any characters recurring in the different songs?
Yeah, I don’t give them names or anything but I have these imaginary people that come to mind while I’m doing it. You can learn by asking: What would this other person say? This is more interesting than preaching to people, here’s the problem and here’s how to solve it, as if you were very smart and very wise. True wisdom comes from admitting that you don’t know anything and that others may have an answer that you haven’t thought of before.

You like ambiguous vocabulary. There’s a line in What’s the trick?? Which comes directly from Orson Welles’ movie The Magnificent Ambersons: “Two elegant looking gentlemen in a state of statue“.Is this a form of sampling?
I wish I could write a whole book of poetry where you attack it in the hip-hop and pop traditions of building on the people who came before you and making something new out of it. Composing poetry from clips and audio clips. I write to them all the time.

Highlight 2024 without a name It was the album Archbishop Harold Holmesdelivered in the voice of an old preacher who makes strange promises. The book reveals that the lyrics are based on a letter from a traveling missionary in the 1970s. He really existed!
When I learned to reupholster furniture as a teenager, I didn’t learn how to build a chair from scratch; I learned how to take an old chair and bring it back to life. I realized I was doing that with music, sculpture, poetry, and with what we do at The Third Man. Archbishop Harold Holmes is perhaps the definitive version of this. It’s someone else’s message. Basically a religious imposter – a trickster. What if I became that guy for a minute and added more neologisms? I used it as a starting point to talk about the kind of personalities who are alive and well right now in our government.

You recently posted a fierce diatribe against President Trump on Instagram, and it wasn’t the first time you’ve done so. Why do you never write explicitly political songs?
Well, when Dylan said the answer was blowing in the wind, he didn’t tell you what the answer was He was. I think a lot of people in the days of protest were torn: You want to make a statement but the speaker can be chewed up and spit out. The search for hypocrisy becomes intense once someone steps up to the podium and condemns another person. When it comes to the president, I know a lot about him, so I feel comfortable saying that. But if I were to put it into an art form, I don’t think I would say these things directly. I won’t say names. I would like to create a character.

Have you kept an archive of your notebooks and other ephemera?
Ben Blackwell and my brother Stephen have saved a lot of stuff for me. I do a better job of preserving other people’s stuff than my own. I was recently looking for something to write on in my house, and it was a book from 1997 and I thought: Oh, I shouldn’t have left that book lying around. I think I should care more about my own things.

Do you enjoy looking at your work and evaluating it?
decent. I don’t know, there’s a part of my mind that longs for all the things, and there’s a part of my mind that wants to erase it all and move on. I live somewhere between those two things. I believe my mind is trained to find beauty where others ignore it. If you can figure out a way to trick people into paying attention for a second, you’re on to something.

There’s an interesting passage in one of your poems: “To be born in another time/Any age other than our own would be fine.” Do you feel like a man outside of time?
I remember that 20 years ago I didn’t know what obsolete meant. I looked up the definition and thought: wow, that sounds like me! It’s not exactly a compliment. It means out of place and incompetent. It’s a blessing that I’m neither an insider nor an outsider. If I was an insider, I would play by the rules and do the thing people do that generates success. And if you’re weird, you try to break these rules all the time and burn the place down. If I were on either side of that needle, I don’t think I would be very creative.

Jack White’s Complete Lyrics and Writing Selections Volume 1 is available now.