Don’t Try to Pin Down the Stripes

The White Stripes are the most exhilarating young rock band in America, partially because it’s so hard to pin down just what’s so great about them. The Detroit duo of Jack and Meg White have absorbed 50 years of blues, country and rock and have the audacity to make the styles their own.

In raving about “White Blood Cells,” which the Whites dedicated to country superstar Loretta Lynn, England’s Q magazine described the Stripes’ sound as a “disoriented Led Zeppelin.”

The New Yorker has proclaimed, “The Stripes play the blues the way bands like the Kinks and the Who played R&B;: loud and fast and out of control.”

Led Zeppelin? the Kinks? the Who? Loretta Lynn?

You can come up with 10 other combinations of artists and still not be any closer to defining the heart of the music’s explosive creative impulses.

On their 1999 self-titled album, the Detroit duo did a howlingly intense version of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” that sounded like something Screamin’ Jay Hawkins recorded on the same night he cut “I Put a Spell on You.”

In “White Blood Cells,” the Whites employ elements of rockabilly (“Hotel Yorba”) and power pop (“Fell in Love With the Girl”) and throw in melodies as gorgeous as Paul McCartney’s (“We’re Going to Be Friends”) and imagery as vivid and original as Kurt Cobain’s (“Offend in Every Way”).

When I saw the Stripes at the Troubadour last year, Jack White, who sings and plays guitar, struck me as a cross between Johnny Cash and the early Billy Corgan--someone with artistic integrity and enough stubborn independence not to let the record company ever talk him into compromises.

What makes the Stripes shows around Southern California so promising is that we’re likely to walk away with different descriptions of the Stripes’ music after each one.