1. The Freddie Mercury Royal Snub. This occurs after an artist gives unlimited access to a press community that still winds up vehemently hating him. Before the King of Queen stopped doing interviews, he granted an exclusive to Tony Stewart of NME, only to have a clipping service present him with an article titled "Is This Man a Prat?"
2. The Knack Knuke Back Decree. You sense the press hates you, and you figure denying them any new quotes will make the fans respect you for taking a stand. This is a disastrous strategy, on a par with pulling your crotch while telling the Gambino family, "Here's your protection money."
3. The Village People Piss-off Policy. Also known as Spice Girl Spite-all. For a group on a continual downward slide, denying interviews is the last vestige of divadom that can be exercised. As late as 1997, the VPs were still demanding to be faxed a set of questions before agreeing to anything, as if the world were at a standstill wondering what a fifth-generation Indian chief's favorite color was.
Of course, boycotting the press only serves to infuriate and inspire them to make up even more exploitative stories that your no-access policy won't allow you to refute. That's why anyone looking to get one over on the gullible gutter press has been monitoring the moves of Detroit duo the White Stripes for the past two years. Seemingly out of nowhere, the guitar-and-drum twosome of Jack and Meg White burst onto the scene with an infectious, minimalist mélange of blues, folk and bubblegum riffs that's capturing the mainstream audience's imagination in a way that even surpasses press darlings such as the Strokes and the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.
The Stripes' most recent album, White Blood Cells, is sitting comfortably in Billboard's Top 100; "I Fell in Love With a Girl" is an MTV hit (with Jack's Lego likeness no doubt giving Michael Jackson future face-altering ideas) and the song "Hotel Yorba" is being classified as a modern rock track, of all things. The White Stripes' love of itinerant bluesmen like Blind Willie McTell seems more genuine than ironic, and unlike the Strokes, the White Stripes have made it to England and back without anyone mentioning '80s alt-pop duo Timbuk 3.
It was the British press' zealous praise that really started the buzz that the White Stripes had something to offer besides candy-cane fashion (Jack and Meg dress only in red and white). And it was the press' lax fact-checking that helped spread rumors about the pair's much-discussed personal lives. Even after several major publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Magnet and Highlights, reported that Jack and Meg were not really bro-and-sis but rather a divorced couple who couldn't decide which red and white clothes to part with, the duping persists.
And the alleged siblings continue to keep mum, except on their official Web page (www.whitestripes.com), where Mum is front and center, packing lunches and encouraging her raw rock brood. "Our mother said that she saw us on David Letterman's show, and she was pleased," writes Jack, while noting with disturbing Oedipal glee that, "Our father said he fell asleep and missed it, and was not pleased."
Now that the White Stripes have disseminated enough phony fodder to keep the press busy for months, they've stopped doing interviews. The pair even employs a publicist whose sole job is to not return phone calls. But rock 'n' roll is a liar's game, and ever since Little Anthony hunched down in the trenches at sock hops so that the Imperials would tower over him, double-dealing has been a rock tradition. Let's follow Jack and Meg's trail of deception, using their song titles as possible clues, to see if we can figure out where the red and white smoke screen begins and ends.
"We're Going to Be Friends": In lying about their onetime marriage, the White Stripes are simply following pop music's oldest custom — never let 'em see your nuptials. It used to be that even a glint of a wedding band spelled disaster for a rock star's popularity. Exempt from such teen condemnation was John "sorry girls, he's married" Lennon (who, if truth be told, was trying to maintain the integrity of rock 'n' roll by keeping son Julian under wraps for nine months). Fans forgave John's fib because the Beatles were making great music. When Bobby Sherman, Davy Jones and Peter Noone pulled the same shit, teens dropped them like a soiled Stridex pad.
"Sister, Do You Know My Name?": From ABBA to X, millions of estranged couples have played together in rock bands, but the annals include only one brother-and-sister rock team. (And don't mention Donny and a-little-bit-country Marie. Those two were refugee solo acts who became co-dependents when the Osmond Brothers' records stopped selling.) The White Stripes' brother-and-sister ruse positions them as the next Carpenters, a band everyone hated at the time but now pretends to love, since there's no threat of them making any more records. Clearly the field is wide open for a new sibling act: Post-puberty will continue to ruin the Hanson brothers' boyish good looks, and the only formidable competition will be the Bacon Brothers.
"Your Southern Can Is Mine": So far the only people to surmise that the White Stripes' records don't have any bottom are disgruntled ex-bass players. The Stripes made tentative use of standup bass on De Stijl's "I'm Bound to Pack It Up," after which they slapped themselves silly and vowed never to use one again. Similar to Queen's aversion to synthesizers, Jack and Meg will probably spend an entire career filtering their guitars and drums through gizmos or gadgets just to ensure that there's never another person in the White Stripes who gets dubbed "the quiet one." "I Can Learn": Another possible motive behind the White Stripes' shirking of press is that critics have been rather bitchy about Meg's timekeeping. She shows flashes of Gene Krupa and Max Roach, but the band's material requires her to pound the drums in the same rhythm to which most people either jerk off or drive nails. Indie fanzine Gullabaloo reported a rumor last December that Meg does not actually play on any of the records and that the beats were supplied by drum legend Bernard Purdie. This was, of course, a lie perpetrated by Purdie himself, who fell on hard times after spreading a rumor that he deputized for Ringo on the first few Beatles albums, but he wouldn't talk about it unless someone bought the six-figure rights to his story. While we can confirm through digital DNA that the beats on White Blood Cells are 100 percent Meg White, careful study of 2000's De Stijl proves that at least half of the beats were in fact lifted off Drum Drops, a popular series of drum instructional records released in the '70s, before the invention of drum machines.
"Truth Doesn't Make a Noise": Even after Time exposed Jack and Meg's bogus brother-and-sister story and printed their real names, the publication still managed to perpetrate yet another myth — that "the growing media frenzy over the White Stripes seems to be happening without an attendant promotional and marketing machine." That is a lie: The pair does indeed own a very powerful promotional and marketing machine, one of only nine Hypenators that Armlego Industries Inc. manufactured in the United States. The other eight are owned by *NSYNC, Aaron Carter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Linkin Park, Aaliyah (who is still making use of hers), Enrique Iglesias (who shares his with the Three Tenors), Oprah Winfrey and Oprah's resident care counselor, Dr. Phil McGraw, who also owns Armlego's prototype Tear-inducing Machine. The White Stripes bought their refurbished Hypenator at greatly reduced cost from Armlego; it's a model previously owned by Kathie Lee Gifford, who claimed it wasn't working. In the possession of the White Stripes, the machine still seems to be emitting a whole lot of silence. The only difference is that the press is eating it up — for now, anyway.
