Get Behind Me Satan

Not even my favorite White Stripes album. Still an easy 5 stars

While I do like the White Stripes, this one falls a little flat for me. Their other albums are driven by the iconic, brash, feisty singles. This album is mostly potatoes and no meat.

Love Jack White, maar geen idee wat het minst boeiende White Stripes album in deze lijst doet.

Sometime around the end of the 60s, "rock n roll" became "rock." This change wasn't a naturally occurring abbreviation, it signaled actual shifting values in pop music and the recording industry. Rock n roll had immediate, discernible links to blues, r&b, and country music. Rock was also clearly indebted to these traditions, but obscured them under pretensions to "high art," arena-ready anthems, and overt performativity (as opposed to the older style of rock n roll "authenticity"). If the first 4 White Stripes albums are rock n roll, this is their first rock record.

Jack White's voice is in full Robert Plant-mode here, and most of the heavy guitar songs have a "hard rock drinking beer on the hood of a Chevelle" vibe rather than their earlier "paying 5 bucks to see a band in a basement" vibe. The piano/marimba songs veer closer to Queen than Fats Domino. Everything about this album feels extremely 1970s.

This is basically where I get off the train with the White Stripes. They were one of my favorite bands when I was 15, and I hated this record by the time it came out when I was 17. The first 2 singles were exceptionally cringey to me then, and I still hear a certain "gloss" (as much as one can on an album recorded to 8-track tape) that signifies Jack White's readiness for ultra-mainstream media. JW was determined to find a place in the rock canon, and he has since cemented himself (along with Dave Grohl) as one of the last true torch bearers, as if he was the final surviving veteran of WWI. Good for him, I guess, but the White Stripes weren't ever great because Jack was some guitar hero who could hang with Jimmy Page and The Edge. The White Stripes were once great because they made insanely good rock n roll.

I had a pretty healthy obsession with Jack White for a long time, but I kind of skipped over this album, likely because it didn’t have the same guitar riff focus of previous albums. Listening to it now and I’m surprised at how weird and experimental some of these tracks are, especially those featuring the marimba.

Hier keek ik een beetje tegenop. Niet omdat de White Stripes zo slecht zijn, ze kregen van mij al een 3 en een 3,5. Maar omdat je ze al vrij snel wel gehoord hebt.

Het boek maakt een uitzondering. Dit is het album mét de hit. Ach, die klinkt prima. Maar wel veel te vaak gehoord. Verder wisselt de band kwaliteit af met experimenten (of is het bedoelt als grollen?). Bij een ander album, noemde ik het nog punk / het verpesten van je eigen muziek. Daar is nu geen sprake van. Maar waarom dan toch zo'n draak als Little Ghost op je album zetten? Willen ze zo graag samen zingen? Dat was op een eerder album ook al zo'n afknapper.

Ik middel alles maar weer uit. 3,5 ster.

I like the white stripes well enough, but this isn’t my favorite album I’ve heard from them.

white stripes made one good song and decided to make spongebob music before breaking up

Do we really need 2 White Stripes album on this list? This one seems to be the more interesting of the two

Such a weird choice for the list. The whole album feels uncomfortable. Like they’ve had an identity crisis and are trying to prove that they’re more than the white stripes. Despite the whites stripes being awesome.

I was 16 when this came out and loved White Stripes.
De Stijl, White Blood Cells & Elephant were all 10/10 to me.

I taped the first radio play of Blue Orchid off the Zane Lowe show and must have listened back to it a hundred times before the album came out. It might be one of their best songs ever. I was psyched.

Then I bought the album and found out 10 of the 13 songs here are meh.

2 stars because the good songs are very good.

They got weird on this record and I'm here for it.

Overhyped

One banger after another. Sounds like nobody else. Lyrically and musically interesting. Towards the end are there a few tracks that don’t hold up quite as well? Yeah I might take off a half a star for that, but I can’t so I’m In for all five.

I like the White Stripes, but I feel like this is their weakest album. I prefer their first three albums to their last three. They feel a bit more homemade and less produced

I love The White Stripes, but this album is just okay.

Help. They have one good song and it’s not in this album.

3/5. My least favorite white stripes album (which goes to show how consistent their discography is.) starts off with a the type of rocker you’d expect from the band (Blue Orchid) but after that the album shows its true hand, bringing in more piano and acoustic instrumentation. And the first half of this album is some good stuff whether it be the tense buildup of “the nurse”, the earworm “my doorbell” or the fun “little ghost.” but it begins to lose me a in the back half with a series of more meh stripes songs. Not bad by any means, but not my go-to stripes album.

While I am not particularly passionate about the White Stripes, I always enjoyed Get Behind Me Satan a lot. It’s way more restrained (in a good way), mature, cohesive and ahem… “experimental” (in a non-experimental way I guess) than what they had done before. These songs are given time to develop, and many of them are built around stirring motifs.

Meg White’s drumming has never made more sense to me than on this record - it’s just fantastic, and the album wouldn’t work the same without her sparse backdrop, which allows the melodies and guitar licks to shine. I just love how intuitive her drumming is. Their symbiosis on this one - I think - is complete.

Unfortunately though, they lose a bit of this momentum on the record’s B-side, where the songs tend to blend into each other.

No one can convince me this belongs on the list