My Top 100, No. 41: "Icky Thump" by The White Stripes

I'm not really sure how much I like most of this song. I'm just here for the one guitar lick.

Few other songs have a guitar lick as cool as "Icky Thump," and no other song plays this guitar lick. "Icky Thump" plays this guitar lick nine times.

Five Iron Frenzy ends its album Quantity is Job 1 with a bonus track. It's five minutes of silence, followed by three repetitions of "When I Go Out" (a 12-second song whose lyrics read: "When I go out / I play in the street / I get hit by cars / I make mashed potatoes / I get hit by cars") which is itself followed by "Kingdom of the Dinosaurs," which is a little more sophisticated than just making as much noise as you can, but not by much.

I think of "Kingdom of the Dinosaurs" whenever I encounter a drumbeat that just sounds like a brontosaurus stepping on trees, and "Icky Thump" is very "Kingdom of the Dinosaurs" in that respect. 

It's just loud and slow and completely crunchy and its synthesizer has a jarring disregard for anything regarding melody. It's shouty and buzzing and yet very well-organized, like a highway pileup in an action movie, where yeah, there are all sorts of explosions and dangerous amounts of shrapnel flying everywhere, and you think it's all about the shockwave that pins you to your seat, but they had to map out every step of it to the millisecond so Keanu shoves the badguy through the cloud of fire and broken glass at precisely the right moment.

Plus there's not really a chorus so much as that awesome guitar lick. Not that you need it.