Elephant (album)

Elephant is the fourth studio album by the American rock duo The White Stripes. It was released on April 1, 2003, through V2, XL, and Third Man records. The album was produced by the band's guitarist and lead vocalist Jack White, and continues their "back-to-basics" approach seen in White Blood Cells (2001). It was mostly recorded at Maida Vale and Toe Rag Studios across two weeks in April 2002, and was produced without the use of computers, instead utilizing a duct-taped 8 track tape machine and various gear no more recent than 1963.

Elephant peaked at number six on the Billboard 200 and topped the UK Albums Chart. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) have certified the album 2× Platinum and 3× Platinum respectively, and over 4 million copies have been sold worldwide. The album spawned the hit singles "The Hardest Button to Button" and "Seven Nation Army", which became a sports anthem and has continued to experience commercial success. "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" and "There's No Home for You Here" were also released as singles.

Elephant received widespread critical acclaim upon release. The band earned several accolades for the album, including a nomination for Album of the Year and winning Best Alternative Music Album and Best Rock Song with "Seven Nation Army" at the 2004 Grammy Awards. In 2012, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 390th on its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time", and additionally ranked it the fifth-best album of the 2000s decade. Authors and reviewers have praised Elephant as one of the best albums of the 21st century.

Recording
The White Stripes recorded Elephant over two weeks in April through May 2002 in London's modest Toe Rag Studios except for the songs "Well It's True That We Love One Another" and "Hypnotize", which were recorded at Toe Rag in November 5, 2001, and "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself", which was recorded at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios on November 13, 2001. On certain releases, "Hypnotize" was mistakenly marked as recorded in April 2002. Most of these recording dates were corrected on the 20th anniversary release.

Jack produced the album with antiquated equipment, including an eight-track tape machine and pre-1960s recording gear. As stated in the liner notes, he did not use computers during Elephant's writing, recording, or production, and none of the recording equipment was more recent than 1963.

For the track "Seven Nation Army", to replicate a bass-like sound, White connected a semi-acoustic guitar to a DigiTech Whammy pedal (a pitch shift effect), lowering the pitch by an octave. "There's No Home for You Here" was made with the idea "to see how far we could go with an eight track recorder, and I think how far we went is too far."

Meg is featured for the first time on leading vocals in the track "In The Cold, Cold Night", having only performed background vocals for De Stijl and White Blood Cells previously.

Including the song "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" (a Dusty Springfield/Burt Bacharach cover) in their repertoire was Meg's idea, and the band had begun to perform the song live, later recording it for the album.

Composition
Elephant has been described musically as garage rock revival, blues rock, and punk blues. In this album, the White Stripes expanded their style with a bass line alongside lead and rhythm guitar. Jack played guitar or keyboard to fill out the sound. Like other White Stripes records, the cover art and liner notes are exclusively in red, white, and black. According to a review in The New York Times, the White Stripes attempted to achieve the idea of "Back to Basics" and encourage other rockers to try the same; this was a concept seen on their previous album, White Blood Cells (2001). The album's lyrical themes revolve around the idea of the "death of the sweetheart" in American culture.

"You've Got Her in Your Pocket" was written after the release of the band's self-titled debut album (1999). Jack had planned on eventually giving it to a local band to cover, but felt it was too personal to give away and recorded it for the album.

"Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" was originally written for White Blood Cells, but it was removed on Meg's request, who found the lyrics to be problematic. After a line was omitted, the song was rerecorded and included in Elephant.

"Little Acorns" was written after the band had found unused tapes of journalist Mort Crim in a recording studio. Crim said in an interview that "My first thought was, well they're just gonna use the words and he's gonna build a song around the words, but then the producer said, 'no, no, no, we want to use your voice. We want to actually build a song around your commentary.'" The resulting song is about preservering through life's hardships, and draws comparisons to a "squirrel storing nuts in the winter".

Artwork
In an interview with Q Magazine in 2007, Jack said, "If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it's a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side." He went on to say, "I wanted people to be staring at this album cover and then maybe two years later, having stared at it for the 500th time, to say, 'Hey, it's an elephant!'"

The cryptic symbolism of the album art includes a skull sitting on the floor in the background, as well as peanuts and peanut shells in the foreground, and on the circus travel trunk appears the mark "III," Jack's signature. Jack is displaying a mano cornuta and looking at a light bulb intensely, while Meg is barefoot and appears to be crying, with a rope tied around her ankle and leading out of frame. Both have small white ribbons tied to their fingers. On the reverse side of the U.S. edition, all of the number "3"s are in red (disregarding the authorization notes at the bottom).

The album has been released with at least six different versions of the front cover—different covers for the CD and LP editions in the US, the UK and elsewhere. On the US CD edition, Meg is sitting on the left of a circus travel trunk and Jack is sitting on the right holding a cricket bat over the ground, while on the UK CD edition, the cricket bat touches the ground and the image is mirrored so that their positions on the trunk are reversed. The UK vinyl album cover is the same as the US CD, but differs in that the color hues are much darker. The Record Store Day 2013 vinyl and August 2013 180-gram black vinyl reissues have Meg wearing a black dress instead of the usual white dress; the only other release with Meg wearing the black dress was on the V2 advanced copy back in 2003. The advanced copy was on red and white vinyl, while the RSD copy has red, black and white colored vinyl in 2013. A 20th anniversary limited edition has Jack wearing all white similar to the limited 2003 Australian pressing.

With Elephant, its cover has become iconic, and has appeared on several media listings of the best album covers including Billboard's "The 100 Best Album Covers of All Time".

Release
Elephant was released on April 1, 2003, through V2, XL, and Third Man records; it was their second album to be released by V2 records. In 2013, Third Man Records released a limited edition vinyl reissue of Elephant, in celebration of the album's 10-year anniversary, which were pressed at United Record Pressing in Nashville, TN. In January 2023, a mono remix of the album, titled Elephant XX, was announced and later released exclusively through Third Man Records. In March of that same year, an Elephant deluxe edition was released, which includes live recordings from a performance in Chicago's Aragon Ballroom.

Reviews
Upon its release, Elephant received widespread acclaim from music critics, and has been hailed by critics as one of the defining events of the 2000s garage rock revival. Review aggregating website Metacritic reports a normalized score of 92 out of 100 based on 28 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". As of 2023, Elephant is the White Stripes' highest-rated album on the site. Many reviewers believed that it outdid the energy of their earlier albums. David Fricke of Rolling Stone called Elephant "a work of pulverizing perfection," and believed it exceeded "the plantation holler of 2000's De Stijl and 2001's White Blood Cells with blues that both pop and bleed".

Uncut magazine remarked that "Elephant is where the tabloid phenomenon of summer 2001 prove they are no flash in the pan by making a truly phenomenal record." AllMusic said the album "overflows with quality". NME noted that "The eloquence, barbarism, tenderness and sweat-drenched vitality of Elephant make it the most fully- [sic]realised White Stripes album yet." PopMatters said the album cemented "their evolution from Blind Willie McTell cover band with a pop sensibility to full-fledged, honest-to-goodness rock 'n' roll gods." Robert Christgau initially gave the album a three-star honorable mention upon release, but later admitted that he had underrated it, and gave it a new grade of A−. The "gimmicks" that surrounded the White Stripes' music—particularly their insistence on being called siblings—were criticized by Lorraine Ali of Newsweek, although she concluded that "Elephant still sounds great."

"Seven Nation Army" was the standout song of the album, acclaimed for its "ubiquitous" riff and drumbeat and becoming a stadium chant. "The Hardest Button to Button" earned praise from publications such as Far Out and Rough Trade, and spawned an acclaimed music video directed by Michel Gondry. "Ball and Biscuit" was described by Kitty Empire of The Observer as "astonishing" and David Malitz of The Washington Post called it their "definitive statement"; it was voted the best Jack White song by readers of Rolling Stone "by a landslide" even though it was never released as a single. The tracks "Black Math" and "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" were called "sonic ferocities" by Ron Hart of Spin. Meg's vocals on "In The Cold, Cold Night" were deemed "sweet and tender" and "magnetic" by Hart and Tom Breihan of Stereogum, respectively.

Elephant was nominated for Best Album at the MTV Europe Music Awards in 2003, and won the Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 2004. In March 2003, almost a month before its official release, Elephant was ranked 74th in NME's list of the top 100 albums of all time. Rolling Stone deemed it one of the best albums of the decade, and ranked it number 390 on their 2012 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time and number 449 in the 2020 edition. It was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Personnel
Credits are adapted from the album's liner notes.

The White Stripes
 * Jack White – vocals, guitar, piano, production, mixing
 * Meg White – drums, vocals

Guest personnel
 * Mort Crim – vocal
 * Holly Golightly – vocal

Production
 * Liam Watson – engineering, mixing
 * Noel Summerville – mastering
 * Bruce Brand – layout

Artwork
 * "The Third Man" – artwork
 * Patrick Pantano – photography