Club Brugge’s supporters are credited with turning the song into a sporting anthem (Photo: Sascha Schuermann/AFP via Getty ) White once described the song as “paranoid blues”. The opening words explain White’s headspace and feelings about his peers: “I’m gonna fight ’em off/ A seven nation army couldn’t hold me back/ They’re gonna rip it off/ Taking their time right behind my back”. Its lyrics concerned a fall-out from the White Stripes’ success overseas within the Detroit scene – White accusing the bands he’d left behind of jealousy, backbiting, and double standards, happy to sponge on his success. The riff initially confused fans who thought the intro was actually played on bass – White’s stringent rules about boxing himself in within the parameters of guitar and drums was legendary – but was actually played through an octave pedal to give his guitar a bass-y feel. The song – its title a placeholder inspired by White’s childhood mispronunciation of “Salvation Army” – was recorded at Toe Rag studios in Hackney, London, and was released as Elephant’s first single on alternative US radio on 17 February 2003 (it was released in the UK on 21 April 2003). He decided to return to it while making The White Stripes’ breakthrough fourth album Elephant. White shelved it, thinking he would keep it on the off chance he ever got to write a James Bond theme (which, ironically, he did eventually, singing “Another Way to Die” with Alicia Keys for 2008’s Quantum of Solace). I was playing it for Meg, and he was walking by, and I said, ‘Swank, check this riff out.’ And he said, ‘It’s OK.’” “There’s an employee here at Third Man named Ben Swank,” Jack White once said, “and he was with us on tour in Australia when I wrote that song at soundcheck. Hard as it is to imagine now, the response to this fledgling track was initially muted. On that world tour, White, the group’s songwriter, came up with the riff to “Seven Nation Army” while messing about in soundcheck at Australian festival Big Day Out in January 2002. Their 2001 album White Blood Cells, their third of raw, blistering garage and blues rock, was met with a whirl of hype: one review of their summer UK tour called them the best thing to happen to music since Led Zeppelin. The White Stripes – Jack and Meg White, a guitarist/drummer duo who pretended to be brother and sister when in fact they had been married and divorced – formed in Detroit in 1997. Not bad for a song that The White Stripes’ labels didn’t even want to put out as a single. Rolling Stone magazine named it the 36 th best song of all time in 2021 Jarvis Cocker once called it “this generation’s ‘Smoke on the Water’”. It has one of the most recognisable and heralded guitar riffs in rock history: since winning Best Rock Song at the 2004 Grammys, it has joined an exclusive club in reaching one billion streams on Spotify (only 212 songs have racked up so many). The only song that can link a football team in Belgium, Jeremy Corbyn, the NFL, darts player Michael van Gerwen and the port of Hamburg, The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” has become omnipresent in popular culture – an unstoppable terrace anthem that is now the soundtrack to some of the biggest sporting and political moments around the world. Except now, as the song goes, everyone knows about it. It started off 20 years ago as a catchy guitar riff from an alternative rock band’s new track. Often ranked as one of the greatest songs of the 2000s, it has been used widely at sporting events and political protests internationally.“Duh du du du duh duhhhh duhhhh”. A combination of the song's popularity, recognizable riff, and defiant lyrics led to it becoming the band's signature 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, 1950s-style Kay Hollowbody guitar through a DigiTech Whammy pedal set down an octave. The song is known for its underlying riff, which plays throughout most of the song. It was well received commercially as well, and won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Song. It also became the third best-performing song of the decade on the same chart. It was released as the lead single from their fourth studio album, Elephant, in March 2003, and reached number one on the Alternative Songs chart -maintaining that position for three weeks. "Seven Nation Army" (also stylized as " 7 Nation Army") is a song by American rock duo the White Stripes.
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