Featured Essay: Blank Slates and The White Stripes

by Davy Andrews

The CD Cellar is the record store in my hometown, and its name no longer works. The seedy basement it used to inhabit now serves as the keg room for a craft beer bar that specializes in gourmet grilled cheese. The CD Cellar now sits a few blocks away, above ground in a bright, airy storefront, next to a guitar store and below a recording studio where, rumor has it, Dave Grohl once recorded something or other.

I never felt comfortable there when I was a kid, for the same reason I don’t feel comfortable in guitar stores as an adult. It felt like I was about to fail a pop quiz, like everyone could read the ignorance on my face the moment I walked in. These days, now that I’m older and moderately less awkward, I like to browse when I’m back in town. When I picked up a CD copy of White Blood Cells last summer, it felt like I was finally righting a wrong. It was the first album I ever stole.

I was a teenager when Napster came out. We had Erol’s Internet, a dial-up provider run by the local video store chain, and if that sounds weird now, please know that it sounded just as weird in 1999. With our 28.8 kbps modem, it was possible to download a whole song, but it might take a day or two. I remember carrying my giant cube stereo downstairs to the kitchen and connecting it to the family computer to record a mixtape of all the punk rock songs I’d been able to scrounge. I mostly ended up with live Operation Ivy bootlegs of such poor quality that my little brother went back to riding the school bus rather than be subjected to them in the car with me.

By the time we got cable internet and a CD burner, Napster was dead and the filesharing services that succeeded it were studded with viruses. Mostly, I’d download a song or two, decide I liked a band, and get their album at Best Buy, where it was cheap and nobody noticed you. Until I got to college, White Blood Cells was the only album I ever downloaded in its entirety. I can’t remember why I had such a good feeling about it, why I spent a week fighting for computer time in order to track down all 16 songs off a record I knew so little about, but burning that CD felt special. It turned the spindle of CD-Rs in the desk drawer into a revelation, a seemingly endless supply of blank slates, any one of which could change your life.

I wrote the title in my tiniest, tidiest handwriting, but I didn’t listen to it right away. I saved it for a special occasion. When my brother and I flew out to Chicago to visit our sister, I listened to other music on the plane. I didn’t want to hear it for the first time over the roar of a jet engine. I was sleeping on the couch, and when everyone else went to bed, I lay down and finally put the CD in my Discman.

By stealing the music, I also stole the context the band tried to create for it. I’d heard “Fell in Love with a Girl” on the radio, but aside from that one song, I knew literally nothing about The White Stripes. I’d never seen Michel Gondry’s Lego music video. I had no idea about the red and white color palette, the janky guitars, or the brother-sister band mythology they’d concocted. If I’d gone out and bought the record, I would’ve seen Jack and Meg awkwardly crossing a blood-red stream on the back cover. I would’ve read the label, which advertised “BOTH KINDS OF MUSIC: ROCK & ROLL.” I would have noticed the odd way the entire tracklist was in title case except the four songs that started with “I” or “I’m.” I was eighteen and I would’ve lost my mind over all of it. But after a week of searching and watching progress bars stall out and fill up more slowly than the human eye is capable of perceiving, I just ended up with a bunch of mp3 files. The White Stripes poured more energy into crafting an image than any other band I’ve ever truly loved, and exactly none of it reached me. 

I think artists deserve the chance to contextualize their art how they choose. But if I’m being honest, I usually don’t want the context. I want the music to decide. I avoid music videos, especially the first time I hear a song. Whenever I hear it again, I’ll see the video in my head. I don’t like that. I want the song to paint its own picture. I don’t know exactly what I see in my head when I listen to music, but I’ve learned that a music video will block it out entirely. The song will never imprint itself on my brain the way I want it to. I’d rather be alone in the dark with my good headphones, ready to see whatever it shows me.

Still, I had no idea how much of a blank slate I really was. I’d never heard any of the blues or garage rock that informed the music of The White Stripes. I didn’t know Jack was stealing lines from Sun House and Citizen Kane. Everything was new to me. I didn’t know a guitar could skronk like a dial-up modem until I heard it on “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.” Until I heard Meg, I never would have thought ‘honest’ was a word you could use to describe someone’s drumming. I didn’t know a record could spend its entire runtime careening headlong from one sound to another, and then stop right in the middle for something as pure as “We’re Going to be Friends.” I didn’t know some of those songs could even qualify as songs. I wouldn’t start playing the guitar for another six years. I didn’t have words for the things I was hearing. There in the dark, it built a new world all around me.

That was more than twenty years ago, and although I can still see dark apartment when I think about White Blood Cells, my feelings about both music and theft have changed a lot. I try to buy on Bandcamp, where as much of my money as possible will get to the musicians. That’s important to me. But I’m also a musician myself now, and I don’t make any money from it. I’d kill for people to take my music for free if that meant they’d actually listen to it. Stealing musically is one of my true joys. I’ll borrow a Ramones lyric, try to recreate Ringo’s impossibly long drum fills, or decide that a particular song demands my best Jack White voice. It’s an expression of love, and I hope I’m pointing the way to cooler, deeper music for anybody who’s really listening, just as I imagine The White Stripes did when they were stealing from the bands they loved. You never know who’s going to hear your music and where it might take them. After all, everybody starts out as a blank slate.

Davy Andrews is a musician and baseball writer who lives in Brooklyn. He writes for FanGraphs and plays guitar for The Subway Ghosts, whose debut EP, Underground Mutants, comes out later this month. You can hear his music at https://davyandrews.bandcamp.com/ or find him on Bluesky @davyandrewsdavy.bsky.social.