Jack White responds to "truly awful" tweet about Meg White's drumming

Meg White has once again become the subject of Twitter discourse following The White Stripes‘ Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination (in their first year of eligibility) and an exceptionally bad tweet from journalist Lachlan Markay, calling Meg “terrible.” The tweet went viral, causing tons of controversy, and now Jack White has weighed in, posting a picture of Meg to Instagram with an accompanying poem:

To be born in another time,
any era but our own would’ve been fine.
100 years from now,
1000 years from now,
some other distant, different, time.
one without demons, cowards and vampires out for blood,
one with the positive inspiration to foster what is good.
an empty field where no tall red poppies are cut down,
where we could lay all day, every day, on the warm and subtle ground,
and know just what to say and what to play to conjure our own sounds.
and be one with the others all around us,
and even still the ones who came before,
and help ourselves to all their love,
and pass it on again once more.
to have bliss upon bliss upon bliss,
to be without fear, negativity or pain,
and to get up every morning, and be happy to do it all again.

III

Markay has since deleted his original tweets (which read “The tragedy of The White Stripes is how great they would have been with a half decent drummer,” followed by, “Yeah, yeah I’ve heard all the ‘but it’s a carefully crafted sound mannnn!’ takes. I’m sorry Meg White was terrible and no band is better for having shitty percussion.”), and posted a response. He’s locked his Twitter, but Stereogum transcribed his statement, which reads:

By now you’ve probably seen an ill-advised (and since-deleted) tweet I sent out yesterday about the White Stripes and Meg White. It was an over-the-top take on TWS and White as a drummer, and was, let’s face it, just truly awful in every way. Petty, obnoxious, just plain wrong.

I don’t know if Meg White herself saw that tweet. I hope not, because I imagine it wouldn’t feel great to see a stranger dumping on you like that. So to Meg White: I am sorry. Really. And to women in the music business generally, who I think are disproportionately subject to this sort of shit, I am sorry to have fed that as well. I’m really going to try to be more thoughtful in the future, both on here and off.

I’ve been thinking to myself as all this—again, completely justified—hate comes in over the last 24 hours: why did I actually write that? It’s not what I really think, and I like to think I’m not the asshole it made me out to be, or at least I try not to be.

I think the answer, in part, is that sort of vicious sniping is something that we—us online folks—tend to reward with eyes and clicks. And I think I got caught up in that implicit incentive structure with a needlessly inflammatory, downright mean, and most importantly false take.