Top 20 of 2007: We Like Crazy

11. The White Stripes Icky Thump

If I'm being honest, I would not consider myself a White Stripes superfan. I'm always interested in what they're up to, and Jack White appears to be my kind of crazy; it's just that none of their records ever took me to that next level. Although you can't help but admire a guy that makes his records for thirty bucks and then sells a million copies, while holding on to all his copyrights. I believe I'll let him take me to dinner.

I approached Icky Thump with the same kind of pseudo-detatchment I throw at every new Stripes record, and you know what? It snuck up on me. When the White Stripes set their phasers to "rock," there's no experience quite like it: Jack's God-fearing stomp and wail; Meg's American primitivism. A brief note to Meg detractors: if you think a more polished drum sound would do anything other than make the Stripes common, you're out of your tree. Thus ends the lesson. Anyway, to the rocking. The sheer amount of gain on Jack's guitar, unofficial studies have shown, has an equal chance of rupturing your spleen or getting you pregnant. It's as if he found an amp where the gain went to 50, and then he found four more, and then he plugged them into an airplane. But the great thing about the White Stripes? He could also be playing through a twenty-dollar karaoke machine.

Jack and Meg are always good for at least one mind-bending single, and "Icky Thump," with its cracked-out keyboards and crack-the-sky riff, doesn't disappoint. The guitar solo toward the end actually made me lose a tooth. And it doesn't stop there: the metal-with-the-crusts-cut-off and fever lyric of "Little Cream Soda," the weirdo vaudeville act of "Rag and Bone," and the pitch-perfect cover choice "Conquest," which, incidentally, features the best guitar/mariachi duel anyone has ever heard. And, oh yeah, there are bagpipes.

Bagpipes.