Seven Nation Army

Alabama lost the Rose Bowl to Indiana today, 38-3. Between the whistles throughout the game, the Million Dollar Band played the first few bars of “Seven Nation Army,” a song that has joined the likes of “Rocky Top” and other school fight songs as a staple of football ¹ culture. It’s the enduring legacy of The White Stripes, something that’d have been impossible to predict when that band broke through in 2002 with the Lego-inspired music video for its song, “Fell In Love With A Girl.”

From 2001-2002, the music press (remember magazines and newspapers?) in America and the U.K. couldn’t go a beat without talking about the garage rock revival led by the Stripes as well as The Strokes, The Vines, and The Hives (a big couple of years for the definite article of the English language). The Strokes' debut Is This It was the catalyst for the movement but The White Stripes were the band that ultimately received the most sustained attention—I remember sitting in a computer lab and reading an early review of their 2003 album Elephant (which leads off with “Seven Nation Army”) that compared it to classic 1960s releases from The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, as something you wish you could hear for the first time again, unburdened by knowing what happens in the end.

My first listen ended up being in a barn, on a Sony Discman. The bass notes² that open “Seven Nation Army” are arresting not just for their hummability but because until then, the Stripes' second-biggest gimmick (after the lie that they were siblings, rather than a divorced couple) was that they didn’t do bass lines. Reading what felt like 1,000 profiles of the bands in the literal pages of Spin, Rolling Stone, and Blender made the Stripes come across like musical puritans who, like their compatriots in the garage rock revival, were stripping away the artifice and bloat from pop music:

• Everything was about the number “3” (seen even in the stylized letters of the Elephant album font, which rendered the “e"s in that word as “3"s instead), including the magical three components of voice, guitar, and drums (so no bass; but piano, often used in their songs, didn’t count?).
• Jack tried so hard to seem like an old soul, acting as if his favorite artists were old bluesmen despite the fact that a listen to the band’s records would reveal that they spent a lot more time listening to, say, The Pretenders³ than to Robert Johnson.
• Their apparent hatred of fame and the mainstream meant that they often rushed through their recordings, to their detriment. Later records, including Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan, seemed uneven and unfinished compared to their gloriously lo-fi trilogy of pre-fame albums, because (unlike those constrained records) they were trying to convey a ton of styles with too limited a tool set.

“Fell In Love With A Girl,” its Pretenders lift notwithstanding, seemed like it’d always be their signature song, until “Seven Nation Army” resonated through the barns and car radios of guys driving home after their driving test the same day as its release on April 1, 2003⁴. The latter song, by becoming so thoroughly absorbed into major corporate sporting events, became the opposite of the “wow this sounds like a lost 60s garage classic!” initial reaction that I and so many had to “Fell In Love With A Girl.” It became the sound of ubiquity, even of Muzak. But by being played alongside ancient chestnuts like “The Eyes of Texas”, it perhaps achieved the band’s goal of making classic Americana, of making something new that everyone instantly recognized as something bound to become old, so old it’d become anonymous and detached from its makers.