When I think about the Black Keys, I think a lot about money and public perception, and how those two things can irrevocably change something as pure as rock 'n' roll. Then, in reaction to those thoughts, I kind of have to hold back a little bit. There's a temptation to completely write this band off after the grave sin of becoming commercially popular, but, like, who among us wouldn't grab the bag if they could? I can't begrudge the Black Keys for soundtracking car commercials and network television dramas and excursions to the local Target. If all that malarkey from the first half of the '10s is going to spoil this 2022 album, then that's on me, not them.
And it's not even like I have any right to gatekeep anyone on this particular band. I have never been a certified fan—instead, let's call me a distant admirer. The title track to 2003's Thickfreakness was included—as somewhat of an outlier, in my opinion—on a mix CD that I received in 2005 that became way too influential on the music I listened to then and now. I thought it was fine, but unlike many other songs on that CD, I didn't like it enough to consciously seek out the Black Keys. I did eventually circle back to that one album, but really only after the band blew up with 2011's El Camino.
You could ask any random person on the street if they know the Black Keys, and maybe 60% will say that they have at least heard of them. Play them "Lonely Boy" or "Gold on the Ceiling" or "Little Black Submarines," though, and 99.9% of them are going to recognize at least one of those songs. They were, at one point in American pop culture history, unavoidable. That's what makes me think about money and public perception. I'm interested in fame and how it warps art.
That's really why I did eventually circle back to Thickfreakness, because I wanted to hear what they sounded like pre-fame. I listened to it again this morning too. Man, it's absolutely WILD how different the Black Keys sounded back then. I guess the guitars are relatively the same—though much more front-and-center in the early days than now—but the vocals? Auerbach sounds like a completely different person. He's got this smoker's growl that is obviously influenced by the old blues singers but also seems pretty genuine. By the time you get to El Camino, and much later Dropout Boogie, that's all gone. Dan Auerbach is a singer now. He sounds more polished and less authentic. It's a voice fit for radio, sandwiched between Imagine Dragons and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Not saying that this is a bad thing, it's just a different thing. And I'm not saying that I like it or dislike it, but I am saying that I am interested in how we got here. I'm thinking more as a music historian than a music critic when I listen to the Black Keys. That's maybe a defense mechanism from a sound that I've always liked and never loved. Sometimes I derive more pleasure in acting the anthropologist than passing any sort of judgment.
So, considering the context, where are we at now, with Dropout Boogie? As far as I can tell, this is a band resting on laurels. Put an asterisk next to "laurels" if you want—El Camino established the Black Keys as a certified mainstream rock outfit, but can you name another subsequent mainstream rock band who was influenced by them?—but the facts are that the Black Keys have hit their gold on the ceiling. There is nowhere to go but... I don't want to say "down," but maybe it really is down.
It's only "down," though, if you are still considering the money and the popularity. They are probably making a few bucks here and there from people streaming Dropout Boogie and paying for tickets for the Dropout Boogie tour. This music is still being played on Active Rock radio and also public-funded stations like WXPN. But the money isn't comparable, and the popularity isn't comparable, and thus, they rest on the laurels of the money and popularity that once was. To rest on those laurels by shacking up in a garage and banging out ten blues-influenced garage rock tunes is still pretty charming, but c'mon, there's no way that this isn't just a picture of the long tail end of a once-and-not-future success.
It's icky to be talking about all this stuff anyway, as if money and popularity and stature within the great pop music machine has any real artistic worth to begin with. If anything, all that shit is just a distraction. A unneeded distraction when considering something as pure as Thickfreakness; a welcome distraction when considering the boilerplate mainstream rock of Dropout Boogie. It's not fair, and I don't take pleasure in saying it, but it's true: some sort of innocence was lost when the band hit it big. You can't ever go back. Dropout Boogie, perhaps, is the sound of the Black Keys trying to go back anyway. It doesn't work.
Again, though—who the fuck am I? I don't want it to come off like I'm gatekeeping either, because like I said, it's not like I've ever been a fan. I can see a hypothetical in which a diehard Black Keys fan took offense to the Danger Mouse co-writes of El Camino and blew this band off completely and doesn't give a fuck about Dropout Boogie. I can see another hypothetical in which a casual fan who once heard "Lonely Boy" on a Smirnoff Ice commercial and who decided to stream Dropout Boogie one day when they were bored and completely forgot about it by the time the algorithm suggested something else like Portugal. the Man or some other bullshit like that.
I'm not either of those guys. I've been interested but also removed. I don't take personal offense to any of this. I don't care whether people like the Black Keys or not. I'm simply saying that this—all of this, all the context, all the music, all of it—is important to understand Dropout Boogie. Either that, or I'm just pretending it's important. If I let that façade fall, and admit that it is not important, then I'm forced to admit that this is the most generic garage rock album I've ever heard, and that seems too harsh (depending on whether you think "generic" is better or worse than "terrible" I guess).
If anything, I believe that Dropout Boogie is an album that is designed to make you forget about its own context. There is nothing about Dropout Boogie that suggests that the Black Keys are a moderately important and moderately popular rock 'n' roll band with a history that spans decades and a sound that has contracted and expanded and flourished and withered over those multiple decades. Any "history" or "context" attached to Dropout Boogie is our own doing, and not the Black Keys'.
No, Dropout Boogie is content to just hang out, and then end. There are no subtleties. I occasionally like that. I like the hooks, and I think a lot of this is catchy. But in the general scope of things, I find the rise and quasi-fall of the Black Keys much more fascinating than the end result of that story in Dropout Boogie. By keeping it simple and forgetting about how we got here, the album suffers slightly.
But they have their money, and I have my sanity, and so everyone is going to sleep soundly tonight, I think.
GRADE: 2.5 pukes out of 5
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