Y’all know how I feel about Jack White. He’s so delightfully bitchy and complains about the tiniest things, but I still adore him. He’s like a grumpy vampire, and it’s not a holiday without a little Jack White.

I was surprised to see how Jack was one of Jay-Z’s rich friends who signed onto Tidal. Did you expect Jack to be like Mumford & Sons and call Tidal a bunch of “new school f***ing plurocrats“? You’re not alone. Every bit of Jack’s image rails against an uber-corporate, digital subscription service. Each year on Record Store Day, Jack leads the charge for the forgotten little guy. But Jack is very much a Tidal artist. When the service started to falter, Jack joined Jay-Z to personally call Tidal subscribers and thank them for their dollars. He also hosted a Q&A to talk about how Tidal will help every musician. The problem was that Jack talked around the questions and never gave direct responses. Now he’s written a poem called “Music is Sacred,” which he swears isn’t about Tidal but totally is:

those of you who stand for the sanctity of music
so that its soul can breathe
and be heard
so that it blooms in graveyards
echoes in hotel hallways
awakens neighbors in the night
and fills peoples minds with fire
shout it out loud with whatever microphone you have
or these stones will shout for you.
jump in front of demons,
and stand over cowards and those who would intend
to rip out your lungs and dampen your desire
tell the living and the dead
what you know in your heart to be true
and what you know your ears
will forever hear
that the melody of the human race
is a song that never ends.
music is sacred.

[From Jack White – Third Man Records]

Jack once received the James Joyce award by University College Dublin (see picture below), but he’s not much of a poet here. In the Q&A mentioned above, Jack stressed that people don’t value music enough to pay for it. That’s a valid point, but I don’t see how Tidal will help the situation. The subscription costs twice as much as Netflix, and the service is reportedly buggy with bad sound quality. The involved artists are pretty defensive about any criticism. Nicki Minaj blocked a bunch of fans on Twitter for questioning Tidal-only music videos. What I get from Jack’s poem is that “the sanctity of music” = “getting paid.” Yes, artists should be paid when people enjoy their work. But I never expected Jack White to try and make that point by signing onto Tidal.

Photos courtesy of WENN