Boarding House Reach

I remember when I first suspected Jack White was ridiculous. It was the trailer for the 2009 rock documentary It Might Get Loud.

Yes, a guy in peppermint-striped clothes covering Marlene Dietrich alongside a drummer pretending to be his sister had always been a bit ridiculous. But it was good ridiculous, inspiring and even instructive. Play-acting, dress-up, making up fake blues songs: These were ingenious, even courageous ways of engaging with the big, terrifying world on your own terms. But then I watched White gaze out a limo, en route to a summit with fellow guitarist millionaires The Edge and Jimmy Page, and gravely prophesy a “fist fight.” This, I thought, was bad ridiculous— pointless, embarrassing, self-serving.

I revisit this moment of doubt now because I have heard Jack White rap. If you listen to his third solo album Boarding House Reach, you will have crossed this Rubicon with me. It happens on a song called “Ice Station Zebra.” After pounding a saloon piano for a minute, he turns his fedora backwards, stoops to the camera, and offers this:

If Joe Blow says, ‘Yo, you paint like Caravaggio’
You respond, ‘No, that’s an insult, Joe
I live in a vacuum, I ain’t copping no one’
Listen up, son: Everyone creating is a member of the family
Passin’ down genes and ideas in harmony
The players and the cynics probably thinking it’s odd
But if you rewind the tape, we’re all copying God

Now, quoting someone’s lyrics to make them look silly probably isn’t nice. It might even be disingenuous: Plenty of sharp-sounding couplets wither in the harsh light of the printed page. But White’s delivery, if possible, is even worse than the words; the painful “yo” and “Joe Blow,” the coup de grace of “we’re all copying God”—which White repeats, eager to rub it in—is a thumb in the eye. What does he think he’s doing? What does he want us to think he’s doing? All is mystery, except your overwhelming desire to turn away.

Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you. Deep in the eccentric-hermit stage of his career, with his own successful label and a devoted clutch of fans who will come to see his concerts until their children are in college, White is now free to record and release whatever he pleases. And judging by Boarding House Reach, he wants to noodle to himself in the studio, record spoken-word reminiscences about the first time he played piano in a song titled “Get in the Mind Shaft,” and make the kind of Cheeto-dusted funk instrumentals that the Beastie Boys would have left off of The In Sound From Way Out! What he doesn’t want to do: write any songs at all.

The worst part is that he doesn’t even sound like he’s having fun. The few rock songs here, like the lead-off “Connected by Love,” are blowsy, water-logged things, devoid of wit or snap or fire. Usually a good guitar solo will rouse White’s blood, but he doesn’t have many of those up his sleeve here either. Instead, he swamps himself with gospel choirs and organ and even more bongos, and boy, does he ever sound miserable. “Why Walk a Dog” would be a hilarious parody of a mawkish blues ballad—“Are you their master?/Did you buy them at the store?/Did they know they were a cure for you to stop being bored?”—if the sob in White’s voice didn’t convince me he believes every word. What I wouldn’t give for a flash of bright red, something with the verve or conviction of even his slightest Stripes material.

On the last two tracks, White finally tips his hand. “What’s Done Is Done” is a goofy country tune that he sings with the right amount of hambone. And “Humoresque” sets to words a scrappy old tune by the 19th-century Czech composer Dvořák, one that generations of little children studying Suzuki violin have scratched out in front of the forced grins of their parents. It’s the only hint of White’s lively mind at work.

Sadly, the years have steadily whittled the playfulness from White’s material. His work is now too lumbering and unmoored for anyone to take much pleasure in it. After the Stripes broke up, and as he began to dress more and more like Johnny Depp in a Tim Burton film, he started to carry himself like Depp too: A former boy-genius soured into a man, an iconoclast trapped in an icon’s body. His brief reminiscence on Boarding House Reach about learning to play piano (“I sat there for hours, trying to understand how to construct a melody”) is swathed in fluttering-curtain synths, almost as if the moment is too painfully unreal for White to recall clearly. Listening to Boarding House Reach, it is hard not to feel a pang for what he might have lost: alone in his little room, working on something good.