Jack WhiteJack White has issued a statement following a recent interview about songwriting and poetry, in which he said it was “boring” to write about himself in the “Taylor Swift way of pop singers.”
In a recent interview with The Guardian, the rock pioneer was promoting Jack White Complete Lyrics and Selected Writing. Within the collection are lyrics White has written outside of The White Stripes, plus poems, Instagram posts, and scans of notebooks. The book was published in December.
Talking about his style of songwriting, which doesn’t centre his own experiences, he remarked, “Now, it’s become very popular in the Taylor Swift way of pop singers writing about all of their publicly aired break-ups, which I don’t find interesting at all. I think it’s a little bit boring for me to write about myself.”
He added, “Even if I’ve had a really interesting day, I feel like I’ve already lived that, I don’t need to go through it every time I sing this song. If it’s something really painful, I’m not going to put this important, painful thing that I went through out there for some idiot on the internet to stomp all over.
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“So, I put a percentage of that into what I do and then morph it into somebody else’s character. I can’t really learn about myself until I put it into somebody else’s shoes.”
Of course, White’s comments were taken out of context, and uproar subsequently took over the internet.
The backlash resulted in White sharing a since-deleted social media post clarifying his comments for anyone who didn’t understand what he meant.
“Putting this up for a day and then taking down to just put this to bed,” he wrote, per Consequence of Sound. “I didn’t say that I think Taylor Swift’s music was ‘boring’ or whatever clickbait the net is trying to scrape together.
“What I was trying to say in an interview I did about poetry and lyric writing, was that I don’t find it interesting at all for ME to write about MYSELF in my own lyric writing and poetry.”
Adding that autobiographical styles of songwriting “could be repetitive for ME” and potentially “uninteresting for people who listen to my music,” White also stated that Taylor Swift and other singers who have followed in her footsteps “have tremendous success writing in their own styles.”
“Just because I say I have a way of doing things doesn’t mean that I think that EVERYONE should do it the same way,” he continued. “They should do what works for them, and they do, and it is obviously appealing to many people, and I’m glad to hear that.”
White explained that he’s become “less and less interested” in participating in interviews, “because in the age of this massive demand for click bait and content, any scrape of anything interesting or off the beaten path that can be turned into drama is swarmed over and spit out as bait, leading me to not want to answer questions with any sort of romance or passion or reflection as I’m too busy having to worry about accidentally triggering nonsense like this from so called ‘journalists’ and ‘editors’.”
He concluded, “This has always been a problem as it encourages artists to give ‘safe’ answers to any question and stifles artistic vision and imagination and pushes all of us to not share anything interesting, which was one of the points I made about keeping private things private in that same interview. But yeah, content.
“jack white III.”
In November, The White Stripes were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Jack White accepting the honour on behalf of himself and his former bandmate, Meg White.
Jack White made headlines with his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acceptance speech, not only because he read out a poem dedicated to Meg White, but also because he honoured his numerous inspirations who haven’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame. You can read more of his speech here.
