As Ugly As I Seem. The White Stripes. 2005. V2.

 A recurring figure in the history of rock and roll is an under sung character, almost always male, and often the object of sneering dismissal. He is talented, but his talent typically falls just short of whatever’s required to camouflage the other deficiencies of personality or image that’s said to mar his work as public performer. Known disparagingly as a poseur, the artist is considered so presumptuous a figure that his title is even denied the definite article. At the heart of the poseur discourse is an ongoing fixation with questions of artistic authenticity. When Elvis the cultural firebrand who helped revolutionize the way mass commercial audiences listened to pop music returned home from the Army to become the movie star of B-class Hollywood kitsch, his reputation met with what would eventually be seen as the first in an ongoing series of both professional and personal missteps. Despite the success of his famous 68 comeback, Elvis’ reputation was never the same again. After going electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan was accused of treason by the folk movement that had previously canonized him into its one man superstar roster. Established superstars aren’t the only artists accused of posing. Some emerging performers are met with the accusation just as their careers are taking off. I think what makes the rock listenership—it’s no accident that the charge of poseur is almost always leveled by fans, and rarely by critics, who consider such emotional carping beneath them—sensitive to this preoccupation with authenticity is the emotional investment we commit to every time we give ourselves over to pop artistry, relying on singers and musicians not so much to make sense of our interior lives as we want them to satisfactorily express and contextualize our hardships and joys. If an artist falls short of capturing in sentiment what we know in our feelings to be a genuine form of the truth, we’ve wasted our time, certainly, but we’ve also been sold pablum, especially if we can see evidence of that artist having been taken in by his own hype. Jack White, half the founding membership of the White Stripes before beginning his own solo career and entrepreneurial side hustle as co-founder of Third Man Records, was once written about as a sort of musical wunderkind whose artistic gifts helped him produce music that plays like a pleasurable echo of seventies era FM hard rock. It’s easy to think of the White Stripes’ output as mid-career Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath archival outtakes. As Ugly As I Seem, taken from the band’s fifth studio record, Get Behind Me Satan, is an acoustic blues whose lyric is a mostly unreadable accounting of a failed relationship by a self-hating, self-described rogue with hard feelings who may or may not be responsible for whatever happened that resulted in the unhappy couple’s dissolution. As unsatisfactory as that sounds, the duo nevertheless bring some life to As Ugly As I Seem thanks in no small part to White’s savant-like grasp the rock song’s history of structure, sonic dynamics, and lyric melody. Like most infrastructure-minded individuals, White shows little interest in the poetry of words, preferring instead to sing in cliches that outline in the most primal way instantly recognizable concepts from the rock and roll songbook, then stringing together those concepts whether they make any sense—either emotional, logical-or not. The result is likable, and accomplished, but without the amplified real world connections that made rock and roll not merely enjoyable, but vital and exciting. It’s a white blues from a long, historical line that puts its plea to have its bona fides acknowledged front and center.