With the White Stripes under consideration for the Rock Hall of Fame, Meg White’s skills unexpectedly become a topic du jour on social media. again.
Everything old is new again, at some point — and at this late date, it’s a fierce debate over how strong Meg White’s drumming chops were during her 1997-2011 tenure in the White Stripes. The fierceness, though, has mostly been on the side of White’s defenders, who shamed the antagonist who’d called her drumming a “tragedy” into initially hiding his Twitter account, then coming back online to offer the mea-culpiest mea culpa of all time.
The unlikeliness of this subject becoming a topic du jour 12 years after Meg White retired from music was compounded by the fact that it began as a tiff between conservative journalists who don’t even normally cover music. The gamut of those who eventually weighed in to defend her skills ranged from Questlove to another one of Jack White’s ex-wives, Karen Elson.
It began with a tweet from the venerable conservative magazine the National Review, of all outlets, tweeting a link to a piece celebrating “Seven Nation Army” as possibly “the greatest song of this century so far.” Taking that compliment to task was writer Lachlan Markay, whose Twitter bio mentions him formerly writing for alternative conservative outlets like the Washington Free Beacon and Heritage, as well as mainstream sites Axios and the Daily Beast. He went into full beast mode in suggesting “Army” could not be all that since it suffered from greatness-killing drumming.
Tweeted Markay, “The tragedy of the White Stripes is how great they would’ve been with a half decent drummer. Yeah yeah I’ve heard all the ‘but it’s a carefully crafted sound mannnn!’ takes. I’m sorry Meg White was terrible,” the punctuation-challenged journo continued, “and no band is better for having shitty percussion.”
Markay has more than 93,000 Twitter followers, so it attracted far more reaction than might be usual for someone else who is a “bad music take haver,” as Markey now describes himself in his bio.
The subject picked up steam as Questlove tweeted, “I try to leave ‘troll views’ alone but this right here is out of line af.
