the thought

Elizabeth Rector

The English word, raconteur is derived from the French word, raconter, meaning to tell or to relate, which evolved from the Old French word aconter, meaning to count, or to reckon up. Aconter is also the source of the English word account, which is a narrative or a record of events.

Today, however, if you ask any modern music aficionado, White Stripes fan or 16-year old kid, it means something quite different.

According to Wikipedia, the colossal online encyclopedia housing over a million entries, a Raconteur is a member of the collaboration between Jack White of the White Stripes, Brendan Benson, Jack Lawrence and Patrick Keeler of the Greenhornes.

In fact, when you Google “raconteurs definition,” the band appears as the first search engine result. It is quite an achievement: The Raconteurs, ten songs deep, have managed to dethrone hundreds of years of linguistic meaning.

It is important to point out that the Raconteurs could never stake this claim without pay-per-click, wikis, consumer-generated content, streaming videos, online interviews, ecommerce, enewsletters, vertical music and video search engines, cell phone cameras, social networking, viral word-of-mouth and blogs.

Yet Jack White is unhappy. In an interview with the UK’s The Independent, White said, "The Internet is like an electronic rumor mill and it can be destructive." Jack questions the virtue of bloggers who hold no journalism degree or gift for the written word yet have the ability to possess a worldwide audience. He complains of the proliferation of his live recordings on sites like YouTube.com. In an interview with the Denver Post he said, "I've gotten critiqued about being against the Internet in the past, but look at it from our perspective. If we make a video, somebody from the set posts photos that night and kills the surprise. If we play a new song live, they'll just compare the album version to what they heard on YouTube months before."

The Raconteurs kicked off their North American tour at Denver’s Fillmore auditorium three weeks ago. My sister and I bought our tickets the day they went on sale and I rearranged previous travel plans twice so I could attend. Long before the release of their first album, Broken Boy Soldiers, I listened to the two available cuts - ‘Store Bought Bones’ and ‘Steady as She Goes’ - on their Commodore 44 inspired website. In the time that elapsed between the April album release and the show, I listened to the album countless times and watched numerous live recordings on YouTube. I received more Raconteurs newsletters than all other music newsletters combined. I streamed their live performance on KCRW’s The Morning Becomes Eclectic the moment it became available. I downloaded the Rolling Stone Original interview and read plenty others. I spent an exuberant $6.00 on Anthem magazine just because the Raconteurs were on the cover. Amongst friends, I have dispelled misconceptions that the Raconteurs are a contrived super group or a side project on the p.s. note.

Most exhausting, I become slightly faint when people say, “Jack who?” and I am thus inexplicably forced to describe what Jack White means to me. So I guess you could say I was ready for whatever the Raconteurs threw my way at the Fillmore. I was definitely not surprised, I did not expect to be, nor wish to be.

Uh-oh! Somebody found the set list, took a picture of it, posted it online and in doing so “killed the surprise.” Other than the Flamin’ Groovies 'Heading For the Texas Border’ and a yet to be released ‘5 on the 5’ what else would they play? They only have one album, ten songs.