I think that all of
White Blood Cells is an exhibition of a smart young songwriter just hitting his stride. But I kind of lost a lot of my interest in the White Stripes after that.
Elephant,
Icky Thump and
Get Behind Me, Satan have flashes of that same excitement but they ultimately fall short of what I think Jack White can accomplish.
I understand that everybody has different tastes in music, but I don't get why anyone would rag on Jack White too hard. Sure, if you look hard enough, you can find things with any musician or songwriter to harp on. But I see Jack White as a good example of modern guitarists/singers/songwriters. He's been an indie-pop icon, he's constantly experimenting and finding lots of interesting sounds and textures via different guitars, amps, and effects. Not all of his tones are appealing to me, but I respect that he's always turning knobs and tweaking his tone.
I'm not a huge fan of his blues heritage though. His most interesting music to me isn't the blues based songs like "Ball And Biscuit", but the more focused songs like "Little Room" and "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground". I don't mind blues influences in modern music, but I feel like White's more bluesy stuff is a bit of a crutch. He's a sharper songwriter when he frees himself from the strict confines of the blues structures.
As for Page, I think that he has laurels unlike any other living guitarist and he can rest on them all he likes. I'm not a fan of the once-was artist living off of past accomplishments, but Page is unique in my mind. His influence is so deep and wide across all modern guitarists that it's incalculable. He did much like Jack White and took influences from blues, folk, and other musical styles and blended them (with varying degrees of success) into something that the world was obviously hungry for. Like DrewPeterson said above, anybody who wrote (and largely engineered) those first few Zeppelin albums gets more leeway in his/her current contributions to the worlds of music and guitar than others do.
I've never really listened to the Edge nor U2 in my lifetime. I was too young when they were putting out their quality albums, and now I'm simply indifferent to what they're doing now. But I have to defend the Edge's use of effects in his songs. We ALL use effects to one degree or another, and most of what any of us write wouldn't stand up without them. If you want to dispute that point, play some of your songs on an
acoustic guitar and see how it sounds compared to how it sounds on your latest album. Distortion is an effect, reverb is an effect, and without those 2 elements, a lot of modern music would sound limp. There's nothing wrong with using the tools available to achieve a musical result, if you ask me.
There's a lot of gear in the world that's especially geared towards guitarists. While the gear and toys will never replace raw talent and core sound of 6 strings vibrating, why not use them as tools that aid creativity? This analogy is used all the time for guitar gadgets, but they're like new colors, brushes, and types of paint to a visual artist. Why not use a full palette of colors, a combination of oil, water, tampra, pastels, charcoal, sepia ink, india ink, a range of brush sizes and textures, a variety of canvases and papers, and whatever else you can find in order to build a repotiore of techniques, textures, colors, and visual effects in your career? While mastering pencil drawings on 70 lb. drawing paper can yield very satisfying results, it can also be very satisfying to incorporate a variety of these other devices.
OK, so I took the art analogy a bit too far, but that's just because it fits. Music is art. There are no hard rules, only guidelines and influences. And when it comes down to it, I fully support the use of any means that will yield an interesting result.
