Elephant turns 20

Tom Breihan in Stereogum:

It’s wild that we ever knew a time before “Seven Nation Army.” Rock was moribund, long in the tooth, a phenomenon that existed in quotation marks and was in need of reviving. And yet nobody had ever put those specific notes in that specific order before Jack White, fucking around at a Melbourne soundcheck one evening, was struck by metaphorical lightning. “Seven Nation Army” is an angry, paranoiac song with no fixed meaning, but it sure sounds like Jack White raging against his own encroaching fame and fantasizing about going to Wichita, far from this opera forevermore. And yet “Seven Nation Army” rocked hard enough to ensure its own immortality. Even if he did go to Wichita, Jack wouldn’t be able to escape his own marvelous big-room banger.

Seven Nation Army is undeniably a classic but the song I most associate with this album is “Ball and Biscuit.” In a sentence that sounds positively ancient, I was in a record store when it came on, and that riff made me go up to the front and ask for whatever was playing. I already knew the White Stripes through White Blood Cells but Elephant was something else. Again, in sentences that sound ancient, it was on constant repeat in my CD player and I bought magazines with articles about how it was all done in a few weeks on equipment that would have been available in the 1970s. It was a time when I had longer lasting relationships with the music in my life because it wasn’t so easy to find the next thing. I can’t really imagine listening to an album today as much as I listened to Elephant, to the point that I instinctively know what song, note, lyric is coming next. Part of it’s technology, part of it’s age — I simply can’t imagine something being as exciting as this was to me as a young adult who still didn’t know all the history of blues and punk and garage rock and the influences. But even with that knowledge now, this thing rocks.