The White Stripes - Icky Thump

What this video is

Released in May 2007 as the lead single from the White Stripes' sixth and final album, 'Icky Thump' arrived at the apex of the garage rock revival's mainstream crossover. The video's Mexico-set theatrical fiction directly amplifies the song's political critique of US immigration hypocrisy—the first explicitly political White Stripes track since 'The Big Three Killed My Baby.' By embedding Spanish subtitles as a…

Why it matters

A definitive artifact of the 2000s garage rock revival's mainstream apex, 'Icky Thump' fused punk-blues minimalism with synthesizer experimentation, angular tempo shifts, and overt political commentary. As the White Stripes' highest-charting US single and their first Top 40 Billboard Hot 100…

The director

Emmett and Brendan Malloy are LA-born, self-taught sibling directors who emerged from Southern California surf-film culture in the mid-1990s, beginning at a company producing movie trailers before transitioning to music videos, commercials, documentaries,…