White Stripes

 

Meg White and Jack White. 5.5 x 10 inches each. Oil on wood, 2007.

There is a precedent to the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2021 series. I took quite a few liberties with the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2006 though and I didn't manage to do all 100 as double portraits either. The idea then was to select two people who'd have a relationship to one another. While there were a good number of sound recordings belonging to world of ethno-musicology in the 2006 list, the bulk of musicians were rather well known and popular musicians compared to whose who are being painted in this year's top 100. It's now ten years since the White Stripes split, but in 2006 they were at the height of their popularity (they had four songs in the top 100 that year.) The White Stripes is one of those few rock 'n' roll bands that I still listen to every once in a while. I figure I'd share these with you since The White Stripes were not in the archive of this blog yet. I started the blog in 2010 and the band was not in any Top 100 since. In the meanwhile the hundred paintings (on paper) for the Top 100 2020 are nearly finished and those for the Top 100 2021 (on canvas) are well on their way. The newest addition of the latter series is a painting of Rosa Alarco, a composer and musicologist from the Lima Province in Peru, paired with a musician performing during the annual Festival of Water also from Lima Province. Alarco's name is closely associated with the festival. On the Smithsonian's Andean Music of Life, Work, and Celebration, two of Alarco's Water Festival recordings are included. A Harawi sung by three women is found at #19 in the Top 100 2021 as it stands. The painting again displays a reversal (or collapse) of the object/subject juxtaposition at the heart of the Top 100 2021 concept. While the musician in the image plays a western instrument (a clarinet) and is wearing western style clothing, the musicologist who recorded the music (and who took the photo I used) is wearing traditional Andean clothes (white stripes) and holds an ocarina, an ancient Meso-American instrument.