TY - JOUR
T1 - “There's No Home for You Here”
T2 - Jack White and the Unsolvable Problem of Blues Authenticity
AU - Mack, Kimberly
N1 - Funding Information:
Kimberly Mack is a PhD candidate in 20th-century American literature at UCLA. Her dissertation, titled “The Fictional Black Blues Figure: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention,” examines representations of the black American blues musician in contemporary American literature, drama, and popular music. Research for this article was supported in part by a grant from the Institute of American Cultures and the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Taylor & Francis.
PY - 2015/3/15
Y1 - 2015/3/15
N2 - Jack White, a white singer and guitar player from Detroit who came of age in the 1990s, has frequently discussed the anxiety he felt during the White Stripes' infancy while playing both Delta blues covers and his own blues originals. This article examines how White crafted a highly stylized visual image and a fictionalized autobiographical back-story for himself and drummer Meg White in order to direct attention away from the complex cross-racial history of his blues-based music. Using older white blues acolytes like Eric Clapton as a cautionary tale, embracing Pete Townshend and Pop art theory as foundational models, and conducting analyses of various White Stripes live and music video performances, this article explores White's visual disruption of the white bluesman's conventional autobiographical narrative.
AB - Jack White, a white singer and guitar player from Detroit who came of age in the 1990s, has frequently discussed the anxiety he felt during the White Stripes' infancy while playing both Delta blues covers and his own blues originals. This article examines how White crafted a highly stylized visual image and a fictionalized autobiographical back-story for himself and drummer Meg White in order to direct attention away from the complex cross-racial history of his blues-based music. Using older white blues acolytes like Eric Clapton as a cautionary tale, embracing Pete Townshend and Pop art theory as foundational models, and conducting analyses of various White Stripes live and music video performances, this article explores White's visual disruption of the white bluesman's conventional autobiographical narrative.
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U2 - 10.1080/03007766.2014.994323
DO - 10.1080/03007766.2014.994323
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84923227664
SN - 0300-7766
VL - 38
SP - 176
EP - 193
JO - Popular Music and Society
JF - Popular Music and Society
IS - 2
ER -