Hey folks!

Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:

#3 The White Stripes, WHITE BLOOD CELLS

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

vs.

#35 Life Without Buildings, ANY OTHER CITY

Listen on Spotify or YouTube

To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [[email protected]] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.

We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for WHITE BLOOD CELLS, and it’s from @laurenoneal.bsky.social.

It’s barely an exaggeration to say that I would not have survived high school without the White Stripes. I owned every album (plus a burned CD of B-sides I downloaded from Kazaa because I didn’t have access to limited-release vinyl), and I listened to them as obsessively as only a teenager can, memorizing every word, every note, every transition from one track to the next.

Now that my frontal lobe is fully formed, I can articulate what it is I love so much about the White Stripes, which is the way they strike the perfect balance between so many pairs of opposing elements: 

• the rawness of the music vs. the theatricality of dressing up in color-schemed costumes

• the virtuosity of the guitar playing vs. the simplicity of the drums

• the reverence for the blues/rock tradition vs. the ambition to take the world by storm with something exciting and fresh

• Jack White being a huge nerd vs. the fact that the thing he’s a nerd about (rock and roll) is very cool

Essentially, The White Stripes are in this paradoxical sweet spot, equal parts unsophisticated garage band and savvy art-school project. (The title of their previous album, DE STIJL, hints at this, referencing a Dutch art movement that used simple elements and primary colors to create work that was nonetheless abstract and conceptual.) 

But as a teenager, I didn’t think of it in those terms. I just felt like this music was what it sounded like inside my brain. My brain sounded like pounding drums and screaming guitars. WHITE BLOOD CELLS is the album I played in my car at age sixteen when I got my license and drove by myself for the first time. To me it will always sound like being kind of a child vs. being kind of an adult, being newly independent vs. still being quite dependent.

As an adult rapidly approaching middle age, I no longer need daily WHITE BLOOD CELLS transfusions to live, but I remain a huge fan. I have this poster above my couch and this poster in my kitchen, so Jack and Meg are always watching over me.

In our current political hellscape, I feared that Jack White, who holds what could be called “traditional values” in such high esteem when it comes to aesthetics, might get sucked into the MAGAverse. (After all, the Black Keys went from playing benefits for Obama to playing a show called “America Loves Crypto.”) 

I needn’t have worried. White is now on Instagram posting anti-Trump rants every few days, and when Stephen Colbert hosted a public access show in Michigan the day after government censorship ended The Late Show, White acted as musical director, interlocutor, and chili dog sharer. And so, in honor of Colbert sucking helium from a tank before singing “Fell in Love with a Girl,” I believe we must all do our part to support democracy by voting for WHITE BLOOD CELLS.

Thanks, Lauren!

If you haven’t been reading @nanette.bsky.social’s blog about the Best Album of 2001 tournament, well first of all, shame on you, get on that. I mention it because while I intended to write up a DC for ANY OTHER CITY, it just didn’t happen, but today on the blog Jon (@putnam39.bsky.social) wrote a terrific couple paragraphs on it, as good, and probably better, than anything I could come up with. So consider it the Designated Cheerleader, and please go read it. Thanks!

Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.

Yesterday, #23 Drive-By Truckers, SOUTHERN ROCK OPERA defeated #10 The Shins, OH, INVERTED WORLD, 126-122-2.

Thanks,

Kent