“I got one rule/I don’t start nothing/Nothing I can’t finish,” Jack White announces early in this album’s nonstop cannonade of martial-blues stomp and guitar-army theater, summing up his moral code in the chopped stride and soprano-distortion seizures of “Derecho Demonico.” And there’s more. “What I do/And how I do/And why I do it/It’s all none of your business,” he warns, firing each line like he’s spitting bullets. Still don’t get his drift? The song’s title is Spanish for “demonic law.” Cross this cat at your peril.
Frozen Charlotte is White’s eighth solo album, fourth in as many years, and his most sustained maximalist-garage studio party in the eternity since the White Stripes’ breakthrough rager, 2003’s Elephant. There was more room to catch your breath in the swagger and density of Led Zeppelin II than you get in White’s serial rush out of that devilry in “Derecho Demonico” into the rockslide riffing and Hammond organ afire of “There’s Nobody There”; the hard rain of tribal drumming and shouted incantation of “Raising the Grain”; and the 1968-Motor City helter-skelter of “You’ll Never Fix Me.” In that last blast, White and his current killers on the road — bassist Dominic Davis (one of the leader’s original Buzzards), drummer Patrick Keeler (the Greenhornes, the Raconteurs) and B-3 wrangler Bobby Emmett (formerly in Detroit ravers the Sights) — get down like they’re on a Saturday-night bill at the Grande Ballroom with SRC and the MC5, with an extra touch of Emmett’s closing, ghostly trail of mellotron.
This record — named after White’s sculpture on the cover, an image of broken innocence and looming menace in turn descended from a traditional folk song about a young girl’s fatal vanity — is very much a rage for these times, 13 songs of perpetual disorder, challenged connections, and idealism under siege. White has no fear of the specific online, naming names and calling out brazen hypocrisies in his posts. But his force of argument here is at once more coded and universal, a manic blowback of slippery wordplay, in-jokes, and pocket-grenade axioms equal to the music’s loud and twisted kicks. “Hey, I’m confused and I bet it shows,” White confesses in “Nobody Knows,” throwing in a reference to the Denisovans (an Asian subspecies of Neanderthals — I had to look it up) and citing Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Pythagoras like a police lineup from a 1965 Bob Dylan song. Later, in the marbled-guitar din of “All Alone Again,” White prescribes an extreme measure like he’s chatting with you over the garden fence: “To find a needle in a haystack/Well it’s plenty easy/You just burn down the haystack/And then you’ll find what you need.”
Bob Dylan was right: Everything is broken. So was Iggy Pop in 1973: “Raw power is sure to come a-runnin’ to you.” In “G.O.D. and the Broken Ribs,” White opens the album with his version of that empowering contradiction, soundchecking in a Garden of Eden at the end of days (“Microphone check one-two one-two”) with a mounting confidence of curt, grunting chords, furious instrumental fills, and the stacked agitation of his one-man dirty-angel harmonies: “Looks like we got a/Little place to do the/Things we need to do now.”
Nothing, of course, comes easy. There are plenty of man-woman trials amid the topical static — the “kitchen cemetery of poses” in “There’s Nobody There”; the pleading ruckus of “Thick as Thieves.” And the closing, paranoid creep of “Neighbor Blues” — a slow-burn jam like Elephant‘s “Ball and Biscuit” armored up for the surveillance age — ends with White calling in his own voodoo (“On your grave, three roosters standing guard”).
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Ken Casey stuck around after the show in San Diego, California, talking to members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Some of the challenge-coin haul.
The band started as a bet. “My band has a show in three weeks,” Casey’s coworker told him in 1996. “I dare you to open for us.”John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Dropkick Murphys (from left): Casey, DaRosa, Webster, Kelly, Rheault, Brennan, and Lynch John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Casey is largely the voice of the band, but the other members back him up. “We’re so lucky he’s the mouthpiece,” says Brennan, left. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Only the Irish can take a song about death and destruction, famine, alcoholism, and raise a glass like it’s an anthem,” says Casey. John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
“Anytime it feels like things are about to plateau for us, something gives us a little bump,” says guitarist Lynch. “It feels exciting. It feels dangerous. It feels like doing something.” John Francis Peters for Rolling Stone
Jay-Z performing at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis in Paris.
Jay-Z Deserves the Super Bowl Halftime Gig
Where’s the love? Jay-Z asked that question 25 years ago, in the chorus of one of many songs in his catalog that still move audiences today. If he performs “Heart of the City” as part of his Super Bowl halftime show next February, those indignant bars are sure to be a highlight: “First the Fat Boys break up, now every day I wake up, somebody got a problem with Hov…” It would be an appropriate choice, too — because then as now, any time Jay-Z notches a new achievement, people find a way to complain.
The jokes and nonsense started almost as soon as the first rumors trickled out that Jay, whose company Roc Nation has executive-produced the Super Bowl halftime show since 2019, might be choosing himself to headline next year’s show. “Jay-Z just Dick Cheney’d himself for the Super Bowl,” Puck‘s Matthew Belloni quipped on X last week, alluding to the time that the late prince of darkness, who’d been asked to run the vice-presidential search committee for George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign, put himself on the ticket. (Super hip and current reference, and not at all apples-and-oranges.) Others pointed to TMZ reports that pop stars like Harry Styles and Justin Bieber had been asked first. “How are they the frontrunners, and he end up in the front?” Cam’Ron, who’s delighted in trolling Jay for many years, wondered aloud on his podcast. “Out of all the people on the roster, they couldn’t pick nobody else?” asked Cam’Ron‘s co-host, Ma$e.
These critiques miss the point, which is that Jay-Z is one of the best choices for a high-profile gig like this. He’s a superstar with a comparable level of name recognition to any other A-lister in music. He has a deep stack of classic songs going back decades. And he’s a highly skillful live performer who knows his way around a stadium stage, as he’s spent this year reminding people on his Jay-Z 30 tour. He tore down Yankee Stadium three nights in a row this summer; just last week, he rocked SoFi Stadium, which happens to be the same place where the 2027 Super Bowl is being held. He held the crowd’s attention with ease at all of those shows, and though there were plenty of glittery guests — that’s a given at a Jay show, and it will surely be true at the Super Bowl, too — he did it mostly through the force of his own magnetic energy. Let’s state the obvious here: Jay-Z is really, really good at rapping. We’re talking about one of the slickest, sharpest talkers in the history of words, someone who made it to the top through a sustained act of myth-making, then kept going. Are we seriously asking whether he can handle a 15-minute televised performance?
And yeah, there’s a touch of self-congratulation in the way he appointed himself. So what? Praising his own gifts is arguably Jay-Z’s greatest talent of all. He made a fine art out of self-applause. He told his story again and again, retracing the steps from Marcy Projects to the corner suite, and he made us believe. It would almost be insulting to the audience if he didn’t give himself the gig at some point.
Pop culture observers in recent years surely remember the backlash to Super Bowl headliners like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny — all of it at least culturally conservative, and much of it frankly just racist. The blowback to Jay’s announcement is mostly coming from other quarters, at least for now (let’s just wait to see what the right-wing swamps make of this one). But it’s disappointing in a different way. Jay-Z has spent his career expounding hip-hop as a mainstream commercial force. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man. But he’s also an artist. He’s made huge amounts of money, and gotten himself into the rarefied rooms where he even has the ability to give himself a gig like this, by spinning his experiences into compelling narrative art, one verse at a time. Let’s not lose sight of how impressive his life’s work really is. Jay-Z is not some random C-suite bro, and he’s definitely not Dick Cheney. He’s one of the greatest rappers of all time, by any measure. He’s earned that Super Bowl spot.