Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Read this in the Archbishop Harold Holmes voice: Jack White is pissed off. Several days after speaking to the Guardian about his songwriting process, during which he discussed being uninterested in the autobiographical style of writing in the “Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired breakups,” the musician published a now-deleted statement on Instagram to decry media outlets who used it as an opportunity to write headlines that conflated his words into insulting Swift. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever click bait the net is trying to scrape together,” he explained. White, who has rarely engaged with the press in recent years — his Rock Hall induction speech was a lovely exception — says experiences like this made him “less and less interested in doing interviews” amid the “age of this massive demand for click bait and content.” For example, White told the Guardian that he finds it a bit boring to write about himself. “If it’s something really painful,” he put it, “I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over.” The inevitable “slams” and “blasts” headlines ensued.
The modern news cycle has encouraged White to “not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors.’” (He has taken a particular liking in recent months to sharing oft-humorous political screeds on social media.) “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting,” White added, “which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview.” We’ll just keep minding our business and press play on No Name until this blows over.
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