Fell In Love With A (Dead) Girl
So, let’s get back to this idea of Jack’s impending crack-up. It seems like he’s still a little busted about the Meg drama; Get Behind Me Satan features such breakup snaps as “Take, Take, Take”, “Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)”, and “I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)”. But on the same album, there’s this other thing mixed in with it: death fixation. We’ve already considered the costume change he’s undergoing, which is approaching a Vincent Price
ideal (he even keeps swinging that cane around, rofl!). Add to that the songs “Little Ghost”, in which he goes co-co-nuts for a ghost, and “The Nurse”, which is about a nurse (who kills people), and you’ve got the makings of an incomplete concept album. They’ve recently started covering the Tegan and Sara ditty “Walking with a Ghost” on tour. And have you seen that one video? A supermodel in a rundown shack biting into a bloodfilled apple, getting covered with snakes, and Rob Zombie is nowhere to be seen. On a metaphorical level, this is simple enough to reconcile with the breakup theme: he’s in love with a “dead” girl, a Meg White who once existed but, because of the fickleness of the human heart and the intoxicating allure of romantic ideals, no longer does. But I propose a more literal interpretation:
Jack White is a dead people fucker. He makes monkeyshines with corpses.
This makes sense. All the dabbling with black tailored suits, necromancer-y facial hair, the junk-induced eye bags—it’s a transitional phase. The guy has like more than two dozen corpses in his woodshed and he rotates them according to the lunar calendar. And he is going to kill Meg White and then prop her up behind a drumset so that she’ll be his perfect girl again, forever. Or, most likely, he’s already killed Meg, and controls her immaculately taxidermy’d corpse by means of lever and string. That’s how come she can’t play such complicated beats: Jack’s a one-man band. He puppeteers her through interviews: we KNOW the guy has the vocal range to do it.
Do you think I am kidding? Do you think I’m a full-of-shit guy? Do you know what Jack White did before he was the Head Stripe? He owned an upholstering company
. It was called Third Man Upholstery (just like Jack’s Third Man record label), and the company motto was: “Your furniture’s not dead”.
In the video for “Fell in Love With a Girl”, a Lego Jack says to a Lego Meg walk down the street, mouthing the lyrics: She calls and says Are you alright?
(In the song, it’s the girl talking to the guy, but in the video, his words come out of Meg’s mouth:)
She says, I must be fine,
‘cause my heart’s still beating.
–2006