Jack White Blames Internet for Quick Launch of Dead Weather
Jack White is a famous critic of technology’s effects on the recording and distribution of music. He laid down the White Stripes’ Elephant on pre-1963 analog equipment, and Icky Thump engineer/producer Joe Chiccarelli used a rare 2-inch tape machine and tracked the album in analog. White rush-released the Raconteurs’ Consolers of the Lonely, telling Rolling Stone last year, “It really gets annoying that you have to turn into some computer-whiz salesman once you’re done mixing.”
And in a new interview with Canada’s National Post, White laments how the Web forced his newest project, the Dead Weather, to get off the ground fast. “If not for the Internet, we would have loved to have done six months of small clubs down south to really build up what we are and discover what we are,” he said, “but because of the way it is, we have to have a trial by fire and jump right in, guns a blazing.”
White questions whether the Dead Weather needed to hit the Net at all:
“Do I really need a MySpace page for this fucking music? Do I really need to do that? There’s a part of me, that just out of spite, says I don’t want to do it because it’s so antithetical to what I do.
I just question what it all means. If a million people see your Webpage, how many people actually buy something, buy a record or a song? Feels to me, if you give them a chance to fast forward, rewind, or click off to the next Webpage, they will do it. But if you take away that opportunity, you will frustrate a percentage of people, but others will get off the couch and go buy the vinyl at the store.”
The Dead Weather appear to have a Twitter account that has never been updated, and the band hosts its own YouTube channel.
In the interview, White also implies that the Dead Weather’s July 14th album Horehound will be stocked with the kind of vintage, imperfect sounds White Stripes fans have come to appreciate in his recorded work. “We’re in the age of Pro-tools: fixing things, Auto-Tuning, removing mistakes or tiny little clicking sounds and any extraneous noise or tape hiss,” he told the National Post.”If you listen to the radio of a modern song, you don’t hear any of that stuff. I think all of that stuff is soul to me. That’s the good stuff.”
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