It’s their best album, and more to the point, their hugest, the apex of both their sonic enormity and our fascination with the public eccentricity that drove it. Yes, college football, speaking of virility, of violence, of color-coordination, of America, of capitalism, of war. (Hopefully, at least one pre-SEO-awareness reviewer got away with the headline “Shock and Awe.”) It is permanently canonized, if only for the opening seconds of its opening track, “Seven Nation Army,” a seven-note melody you will remember until the day you die, surviving now primarily through the bizarre medium of college-football marching-band chants, floating en masse in the a cappella ether amid another Alabama-Arkansas shellacking like the ghost of the monoculture. It is 12 days younger than the Iraq War, outlandishly violent and luridly mesmerizing and visually monochromatic (red and white and black as opposed to night-vision green) the way the Iraq War initially was, beloved and decisive the way the Iraq War was/is not.
![the white stripes elephant the white stripes elephant](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/13/43/701343567a4aa6db79840b048326fb30.jpg)
![the white stripes elephant the white stripes elephant](https://www.vagalume.com.br/the-white-stripes/images/100338.jpg)
The White Stripes’ Elephant came out a decade ago.
#The white stripes elephant free#
(Was it our generation’s version of “Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home”?) Feel free to cut and paste to create the world’s most devastating and debonair yearbook quote/sext/tweet/away message/status update: “Right now you could care less about me / But soon enough you will care by the time I’m done.” Or, slightly more succinctly: “Read it in the newspaper / Ask your girlfriends and see if they know.” It is a song to repel interstellar invasions, to vaporize asteroids, a preemptive strike so comically priapic it renders everything in its path limp and docile. “Ball and Biscuit,” all 439 stomping, seething, snarling, Sam Ash-smiting seconds of it, is what we should broadcast out into deep space if we wish to communicate to uncouth aliens the idea that they should not fuck with us, ever.
![the white stripes elephant the white stripes elephant](http://www.jamspreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wselephant600.jpg)
Did the electric guitar even exist prior to “Ball and Biscuit”? Did distortion? Did hype? Did critical praise? Did the colors red and white? Did outlandishly oversize declarations of virility? Has there been a single memorable guitar solo performed anywhere, by anyone, in the decade since its release? It begins and ends with “Ball and Biscuit,” and by “it,” I mean “Western civilization.” The 21st century’s most astounding, most wryly pornographic, most brain-meltingly electrifying blues song.