The Nuclear Family

As I approach Starlight Theatre on the evening of Tuesday, August 23, for a concert featuring the White Stripes, I wonder who will be there. The tickets are expensive, the opening act (the Greenhornes) is virtually unknown, and the Stripes get tons of commercial radio play, so that rules out hipsters.

The first stock-concertgoer-type I notice — after the parking attendants (unlike Verizon, Starlight hasn’t gotten the memo that people are sick of paying parking fees in addition to stiff ticket prices) — is the Urinating Fratboy. As soon as I step out of the car, I see him, one car over, pissing with his back to his buddies and his front to everyone else. Urinating Fratboy could have been arrested for indecent exposure to a minor, because easily half the crowd has not driven itself to the show.

Kids are everywhere. And their parents, too. The closer I get to the front rows, the more it looks like the audience at a high school play. And therein lies the answer to the White Stripes’ almost inexplicable success.

It’s been fun watching critics wring their overearnest hands over the mystery to the White Stripes’ rise to fame. After all, this band consists of a guy and a girl in goofy clothes playing ragged, blues-influenced garage rock. What’s more, the guy and girl, Jack and Meg White, are pretty much blank slates personalitywise. The duo has spent its entire career attempting to perpetuate the myth that they’re brother and sister, when, in fact, they are hyper-evolved lab mice genetically engineered by scientists in North Korea. This explains Jack’s mustache, Meg’s rodentlike teeth and the fact that the two always look frightened in photos. Just kidding, folks. Jack and Meg once were married and now they’re not, or something like that. The only important question is whether they still have sex.

Yet it’s been entertaining to watch serious rock critics ponder the irrelevant and tedious question of their success. New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones thinks it’s because Jack White is a great songwriter and as good a guitarist as Jimmy Page. “Get Behind Me Satan is like a Led Zeppelin album without the pleasure principle,” Frere-Jones says of the new Stripes album.

“True enough, but it’s not really pertinent,” responds crosstown critic Timothy Finn of the The Kansas City Star, who took on Frere-Jones in an essay previewing the August 23 show. (In the piece, Finn referred to the male Frere-Jones as a she — a mistake the Star has corrected. But that’s OK, because I committed the equally embarrassing mistake of editing a Pitch freelance writer’s blurb to indicate that White Blood Cells was the Stripes’ first album when, in fact, it was their third. Actually, that’s less embarrassing than calling a famous male critic a girl, but I digress.) Finn continues: “The Stripes are a phenomenon for reasons that have little to do with who they sound like or don’t sound like or which eras they draw their sound from.” He goes on to discuss the charisma and talent of Jack White, whose guitar prowess he agrees (with Frere-Jones) is as good as Jimmy Page’s.

I’d like to ask both these guys when was the last time they heard “Communication Breakdown”? “Rock and Roll”? “Stairway to Fuckin’ Heaven”!? Jack White is not Jimmy Page. He can tear it up, to be sure, but there’s a difference between putting on a pinky slide, stomping on the octave booster and jacking off the guitar, and actually playing a solo.

Returning to the dialogue, Frere-Jones thinks Meg sucks and Jack should replace her with Lenny Kravitz‘s virtuoso babe drummer, Cindy Blackman. Finn says this doesn’t matter, and he pretty much hits the nail on the head as to why the Stripes are famous: It’s their originality — their crazy sound, their crazy look and the crazy lies they tell about their origins.

“That fiction adds nothing to their music,” Finn writes, “but it helps in the suspension of reality, an act of faith between band and audience that lifts the music out of the here and now into another time, into another imagined realm, one that evokes nostalgia for another era [Delta blues, ’70s rock] as much as it ridicules prevailing trends and fashions.”

Well said, Timmay!

The kids at the show, however, would have no idea what any of that means.

Nor would they agree with Frere-Jones’ prescription for further Stripe success: “OK, Jack, you’re a genius … You could write a hit underwater. But why not bring in a producer like Rich Harrison, write a killer bridge, and get Christina Aguilera to sing the chorus with you?”

At least four girls at Starlight would have laughed in Sasha’s face, just as they do to me when I ask them if they like Christina, Britney and the rest of the pop music that the radio constantly targets toward them.

“[I like the White Stripes] because they’re really cool and their songs have meaning — not like the songs on Z95.7,” says 13-year-old Lauren, dissing the local FM station that plays “All the Hits!”

These are savvy chicks. One of them breaks off to talk into some kind of cellphone-PDA device that looks like it could crash satellites. Two have iPods. They all love Jack and Meg.

However, Katelynn, 13, openly admits to not caring much about the band’s supposed profundity. “Their songs have a good beat,” she says, giving the Stripes the ultimate American teenage blessing.

It’s girls like Lauren and Katelynn (and, not to leave anyone out, their friends Jessie and Keely, 14 and 12) and their entire swingin’ families that have made the White Stripes famous They are the ones buying the iTunes downloads, the front-row concert tix, the T-shirts — stuffing their money into every slot of the thundering White Stripes’ marketing machine.

But when the Stripes take the stage — Meg’s hair whipping as she pounds the skins with as much brio as Bonzo, Jack wielding his guitar like a mad matador’s red cape — all bets are off. Not only is the sound raucous and raw, but the style is sexy and, best of all, it gets hundreds of parents and kids dancing to the blues together. What next? World peace?