Oh No!!

The White Stripes are pretending to break up!!!!!!!

 In an announcement on their website Wednesday, the group explained that they've "officially ended and will make no further new recordings or perform live."

For fuck's sake - why do fucking bands like this go through this goddam charade?

From what I can understand, The White Stripes are usually in a state of hiatus anyway - Jack White goes around playing with whichever bands he wants, or produces stuff, and whenever he wants to do a White Stripes album, he does one. What the fuck's gonna change now? Why the OFFICIAL! announcement?

GEE.

LET me guess how this will play out:

Jack White knocks around for a few years, going from project to project (note to h8rs: I got no beef with dude. I'm sure most of what he does will be fine. You couldn't pay me to sit through a WS record, but I like a lot of the other shit he does - don't forget his work with Loretta Lynn earned him a spot on my all-aughties list.)  Eventually, after 4-5 years, he'll get a case of "Gee, Nobody Seems to Be Talking About Me Right Now-itis." After which:

RUMORS of a White Stripes recording seession will surface!
A SONG from those sessions will "leak" online! Jack and Meg White will insist that hey, it's nothing, they just ran into each other and had fun over a weekend! While being recorded! With a band!
AN ALBUM WILL BE ANNOUNCED  Let me guess: "we were just goofing around, thinking nothing of it, but once the tape started rolling we really felt the magic, and before you know it, we had 14 songs in the can! And it was just like (insert whichever album WS purists most treasure), back to our roots!"
A "REUNION" TOURwill take place, with about 8 million people going to each show.

IE, the exact same shit that would happen without any "we're quitting!' announcement, which is horseshit (anybody remember when Jay-Z "retired"? Hmm.)

The traumatic "band breakup!" is obsolete; bands can come and go and put out records every 10 years and nobody cares, it's not like the old days when people thought the Beatles were done because it had been ten seconds since they dropped Revolver, for fuck's sake.

POSTSCRIPT: gee, despite their quote above, and this entire farce, looky here:

According to the statement, unreleased live and studio recordings of the White Strips will still be distributed by Third Man Records.