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Jack White apologises for Black Keys and Meg White comments

By | Published on Monday 2 June 2014

Jack White

Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney is often getting himself into trouble for bad-mouthing other bands and then having to apologise. Turns out he’s just copying Jack White. Possibly.

White published a lengthy post on his website this weekend, apologising for recent comments he’s made about The Black Keys and former White Stripes drummer Meg White.

The comments appeared in an interview with Rolling Stone, in which he said of The Black Keys: “There are kids at school who dress like everybody else, because they don’t know what to do, and there are musicians like that, too. I’ll hear TV commercials where the music’s ripping off sounds of mine, to the point I think it’s me. Half the time, it’s The Black Keys. The other half, it’s a sound-alike song because they couldn’t license one of mine. There’s a whole world that’s totally fine with the watered-down version of the original”.

Meanwhile, he said of his former bandmate: “She’s one of those people who won’t high-five me when I get the touchdown. She viewed me that way of ‘Oh, big deal, you did it, so what?’ Almost every single moment of the White Stripes was like that. We’d be working in the studio and something amazing would happen: I’m like, ‘Damn, we just broke into a new world right there!’ And Meg’s sitting in silence”.

In his “apology and explanation”, White said that he’d “felt in a way forced into talking about very private opinions”, which would normally have stayed “behind the curtain” lest the silly public misconstrue them as negative.

He continued: “There are a lot of things that only people around me can know about or understand, but despite all of that I want to say this: I wish the band The Black Keys all the success that they can get. I hope the best for their record label Nonesuch who has such a proud history in music, and in their efforts to bring The Black Keys songs to the world. I hope for massive success also for their producer and songwriter Danger Mouse and for the other musicians that their band employs. Lord knows that I can tell you myself how hard it is to get people to pay attention to a two piece band with a plastic guitar, so any attention that The Black Keys can get in this world I wish it for them, and I hope their record stays in the top ten for many months and they have many more successful albums in their career”.

On Meg White, he added: “Meg White, who I also talked about to Rolling Stone about our working conversations, or lack thereof, is, of course, a musician I’ve personally championed for fifteen years. She is a strong female presence in rock and roll, and I was not intending to slight her either, only to explain how hard it was for us to communicate with our very different personalities. This got blown out of proportion and made into headlines, and somehow I looked like I was picking on her. I would never publicly do that to someone I love so dearly. And, there are mountains of interviews where my words are very clear on how important I think she is to me and to music”.

Read White’s blog post in full here.



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