Review
Genre and Mood
The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army is garage rock, alternative rock and blues pared down to a riff, a drum and a voice: defiant in what it says, intense in how it builds, hypnotic in the way it repeats one figure.
Song Summary
Jack White wrote it as a “little experiment”, a compelling song without a chorus. He said it is about gossip, about him, Meg and the people they were dating: its narrator hears a town talking about him, leaves, and returns out of loneliness. The title was a placeholder from his Detroit childhood, when he misheard the Salvation Army as the Seven Nation Army. Recorded at Toe Rag Studios in London, it opened the duo’s fourth album, Elephant.
Musical Breakdown
Intro
The riff starts alone with the drum: a held note, four syncopated notes, then two closing notes of the kind heard in laments. It sounds like a bass guitar, but it is a guitar pitched down an octave.
Verse 1
Jack White’s voice enters distorted while Meg White keeps a heartbeat pulse and the riff keeps circling.
Main Section
Where a chorus would be, nobody sings. AllMusic’s Tom Maginnis heard anticipatory energy breaking into a wordless crush of electric guitar and bashing crash cymbal.
Outro
Verses and release alternate until the song ends just short of four minutes.
Concepts in Focus
The riff is the song. Seven notes on five pitches, Jack White devised it at the Corner Hotel in Melbourne in January 2002 and first saved it for a James Bond theme he might one day be asked to write. He played it on a semi-acoustic guitar through a DigiTech Whammy pedal set an octave down, which gives a duo without a bassist its bass line.
The riff sticks because of syncopation: after the long first note, the next four push against the beat with what the writer Nate Sloan called urgency. The distortion on the voice and on the guitar of the release adds grit to an otherwise bare arrangement.
The music video by the French duo Alex and Martin is one seemingly continuous shot through a tunnel of black, white and red triangles that speeds up and slows down with the music; it won Best Editing at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards. For the same riff on a dance floor, hear Gaullin, Julian Perretta – Seven Nation Army.
Artistic Context
The White Stripes were Jack and Meg White from Detroit. V2 and XL Recordings released Seven Nation Army on 17 February 2003 as the lead single from Elephant, after Jack White talked XL out of choosing There’s No Home for You Here. It became the first garage rock song to top Billboard’s Modern Rock chart.
Impact and Reception
It won the Grammy for Best Rock Song, reached number seven in the UK and 76 on the Billboard Hot 100. Then it moved to the stands: Club Brugge fans sang the riff against AC Milan in October 2003, Italy’s supporters adopted it on the way to the 2006 World Cup, and stadiums have chanted it since. Play it loud and hear how much room two people can fill.
