Detroit<\/a>, I\u2019m an artist who\u2019s owned his own businesses like his own upholstery shop and recording label since he was 21 years old who has enough street sense to know when a 3 card monte dealer is a cheap grifter and a thief.\u201d Clearly, the criticism had stung, hence the baroque invective of the response. But did Cheung have a point?<\/p>\nWhite \u2013 let us be frank \u2013 owes his considerable fame and fortune to his work with the White Stripes. It now seems bizarre, but the band\u2019s most famous and successful album in the United States was not Elephant, which contains their best-known and most iconic song, \u201cSeven Nation Army,\u201d but their final, 2007 release Icky Thump, which sold a huge number of copies to a thrilled public. Had the White Stripes continued, fame and fortune were assured, but White abruptly diverted his energies into solo projects instead, announcing in 2011 that his act had ceased \u201cmostly to preserve what is beautiful and special about the band.\u201d (Romantic strife between him and the drummer, Meg, his ex-wife, probably didn\u2019t help.) They reunite this year to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; we shall see if the inevitable performance is the precursor to anything more lasting.<\/p>\n
He certainly hasn\u2019t been resting on his laurels since 2007. White has released six solo albums under his own name, two albums with the Raconteurs, and three LPs with the Dead Weather. Most of them have been successful \u2013 both his 2022 albums, Fear of the Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive, entered the Billboard Top 10 \u2013 and critical acclaim comes as easily to White, one of the most prolific and admired American songwriters of the past quarter-century, as it did to his idols Loretta Lynn and Muddy Waters. It was not for nothing that the awestruck New York Times said of White in 2012 that he was \u201cthe coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Has the blossom fallen from the bud since then? In all honesty, not in any way that should make any significant difference to public appreciation of the now-50-year-old musician. Inevitably, he will forever be remembered as the composer of \u201cSeven Nation Army\u201d; nothing that he has done since is as iconic as that. Yet perhaps now he has found a new, exciting public role, as botherer-in-chief to the Trump administration. The mantle previously was held by the actor Robert De Niro, whose usual public inarticulacy slipped from him when he was lambasting the President, but perhaps someone else should pursue such a course. If it is to be White \u2013 in his own words, less a Democrat and more an outraged independent businessman \u2013 then the next few years could be incendiary indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Once, it might have seemed strange for American politicians to use a rock star as a proxy means…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64,63,2490,134,43531,136,73403,10066],"class_list":{"0":"post-100871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-jack-white","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-steven-cheung","15":"tag-the-white-stripes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}