Contradiction is such a pillar of who Jack White is as a performer that it feels delicate to claim any of his thousand discrepancies “mean something”. If you’re so inclined—if you really like ambitious bluesy garage rock and don’t exhaust easily—it’s fascinating to consider. There’s that mythological-meets-barebones, Detroit-born-country-gentleman thing of his. And how he can put on a show that rivals ’80s glam in theatrics but in a way that relies on stripped instrumentation, facial contortions, grease, sweat, and primary colors.
Some of it can be reasoned out easily. The only thing it “means” that he could make a two-person band sound like a brawl or parade is that he mastered the use of the whammy pedal to thicken up the sound of a single guitar, even live. Other parts of the search for meaning in his music tap into such abstract territory that you reach meaninglessness from the other side. The lo-fi production feel of some of his early stuff, when contrasted to his literary, psychologically deep-diving, theological themes, floods the music with the paralytic peace of opposites canceling each other out yet also kinda not–and it just works. Or maybe that’s subjective jibber-jabber? I don’t know.