Jack White Says Everything on SNL
I missed it on the first pass.
I was excited to see Jack White on Saturday Night Live last night. However, when he started his first song, I just couldn’t place it. It sounded great, but I didn’t know what song he was performing. It turns out he was weaving three songs together. While I had no idea what he was doing, White knew exactly what he was doing.
The first strand to be woven in was "Don't Hurt Yourself," a collaboration he did with Beyoncé for her album Lemonade. White did a sight re-write, and opened the medley by singing,
When you hurt me, your hurtin’ yourself
When you lie to me, your lyin’ to yourself
When you hurt me, your hurtin’ yourself
When you love to me, your love to yourself.
The next two yarns woven in to the tapestry came together alternating between the "Ball and Biscuit" from his White Stripes days, and an old blues tune, “Jesus is Coming Soon,” made famous by Blind Willie Johnson. Like a good folk singer White takes Johnson’s tune about the 1918 epidemic and brings it up to date:
The nobles said to the people,
You better close your public schools
And until death passes ya by
you better close all your churches too
I done told ya,
they done ya,
God is comin' soon
I done told ya,
they done ya,
The Lord is comin' soon
Tell all the people to get up and get out
(I’ll go out in the streets where) I can find a soap box where I can shout it
To you
And
The Great disease was mighty,
And people were sick everywhere (2X)
It was an epidemic, and it traveled through the air
Those lines were mixed in with the White Stripes lines,
It's quite possible that I'm your third man, girl
But it's a fact that I'm the seventh son
And
Let's have a ball and a biscuit, sugar
And take our sweet little time about it
It is hard to remove the performance from its context. White was performing on two-day’s notice after the originally scheduled artist for the episode, Morgan Waller, was dismissed for not following COVID protocols, just a week after President Trump spent the weekend in the hospital with COVID-19. Into this situation White chose to sing a song about how one persons actions affect those around them; brought a folk song about an epidemic 102 years ago up-to-date; and conjured up some possible responses to both.
In a week where both sides of the Vice Presidential debate accused the other of lying, officials obfuscated about the President’s health and the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak in the White House, and American’s are hurting and more divided than ever, the first words out of the mouth of Jack White were “When you hurt me, your hurtin’ yourself - When you lie to me, your lyin’ to yourself.” Like a low-fi garage rock Mother Teresa, White’s lyrics reminded us that we are all connected and belong to each other. (1) In this moment, as we villainize those on the opposite side of the political divide and see our daily relationships strained by the binary vitriol of a two-party system gone off the rails, Jack white was calling us to consider how are actions are affecting those around us.
After that reminder White notifies us that he’s the seventh son. In the blues tradition the seventh son possesses special powers. In this case White seems to be setting himself up as the one who is going to speak, and speak he does. White climbs on his soap box and invoks the words of an old folk tune, and in doing so settles us into the historical context of the present moment. Blind Willie Johnson was singing about the Spanish Flu and by connecting us to the history we are reminded that we’ve been here before. In this way White offers a precious bit of perspective.
But that is not the only perspective switch. White takes it a step further. Rather than being focused on what is closed - schools and churches – we are reminded that “God is comin' soon.” Once again the seventh son is moving our focus. This time we are not stepping back and looking at our place in history, but rather moving our eyes from the temporal to the eternal. We are being asked to consider what really matters.
The final song offers us a chance to consider how we might respond to the moment we are in. The lyric “Let's have a ball and a biscuit, sugar - And take our sweet little time about it” is open to interpretation. One can see the lines as about cocaine (ball) and amphetamines / ecstasy (biscuit). This is one way to respond to the COVID restrictions and political turmoil. One could choose to numb the pain away.
Another way to read the lyric is that a ball and a biscuit are symbolic of a performance transaction. A dog chases a ball and is rewarded with a biscuit. In this case the response might be to stop being played. Are we the pawns of the politicians who promise us a biscuit if we just deliver, not a ball, but our vote? Are we being manipulated on our social media platforms by being promised social interaction and information (as long as we give our data) just to end up being less informed and more divided?
A third response is to see this line as about intimacy and connection. Ball can be slang for sexual intercourse and biscuit could mean a meal. What if White is again moving our perspective, from the great out there to the ones around us with whom we share our lives and meals? What if we took “our sweet little time about it” with the people that mean the most to us? What if we moved our eyes from politics and COVID to the loved ones we share our days with? Maybe Jack White is asking us to consider these questions. He is taking us full circle and asking us to consider how our lives and loves are interconnected - “When you love to me, your love to yourself.”
That was just the first time Jack White took the stage Saturday night. White’s second performance (with a nod to Eddie Van Halen) "Lazaretto" found him singing “When I say nothing, I say everything.” Saying nothing was not Jack White’s problem on SNL. He had a lot to say, and we’d be wise to take heed to all of it.
Joel K
Watch Jack White’s performance on SNL here: https://www.npr.org/2020/10/11/922788708/jack-white-gives-a-thrilling-performance-on-snl-on-2-days-notice
Footnotes:
https://www.scu.edu/mcae/architects-of-peace/Teresa/essay.html
