“Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes

song info

    “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes (official video) is an alternative rock song.

link to the static song information page for this song:
http://www.thissideofsanity.com/music/songs/se/sevennationarmy.php

    Summary quotation from Wikipedia:

    “Seven Nation Army” is the first track on the album Elephant by American alternative rock band The White Stripes. It was released as a single in 2003. “Seven Nation Army” reached #1 on the Modern Rock Tracks for three weeks and won 2004’s Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. The song is known for its underlying riff, which plays throughout most of the song. Although it sounds like a bass guitar (an instrument the group had never previously used), the sound is actually created by running Jack White’s semi-acoustic guitar (a 1950s style Kay Hollowbody) through a DigiTech Whammy pedal set down an octave.

    According to White, “Seven Nation Army” is what he used to call the Salvation Army as a child.

Music video

    The video, directed by Alex and Martin, consists of one seemingly continuous shot through a kaleidoscopic tunnel of mirrored black, white and red triangles, touching on Jack’s love of the number three. Some triangle slides contain images of Jack or Meg playing, and at some points marching skeletons and an elephant can be seen, referring to the name of the album “Seven Nation Army” appeared on. As the pace of the song speeds up, the speed that one triangle passes through the tunnel speeds up, and as it slows, the speed through the tunnel slows in unison. During the video, when the song begins to intensify, the lights in surrounding the triangles flash and other effects build up as well.

As a protest song

    It was also featured on the February 1, 2011 broadcast of Democracy Now!, where it was linked to the massive pro-democracy demonstrations then occurring in Egypt. Speaking with Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy, host Amy Goodman said “That music is in your ears and head all the time, you said, Mona,” to which Eltahawy replied:

    It’s a loop, Amy, because every time I hear the opening lines—“I’m going to fight them off. A seven-nation army couldn’t hold me back”—it just takes me to Egypt, where people—I’ve never seen anything like it. Literally, nothing can hold them back. Mubarak shuts down the internet, shuts down the train system, shuts down almost the entire country, and still they come. It’s beautiful.

—from Wikipedia (the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License applies to Wikipedia’s block of text and possible accompanying picture, along with any alterations, transformations, and/or building upon Wikipedia’s original text that ThisSideofSanity.com applied to this block of text)

Proverb:

Even in the monastery there is occasion for song and merriment. —Ethiopian Proverb