Jack White does not usually do this. The 51-year-old White Stripes frontman has spent most of his career declining to be drawn into public arguments with other musicians. So when he answered Charley Crockett this week by posting the complete lyrics to “Rappin’ Duke” — a 1984 novelty rap in which Shawn Brown impersonates John Wayne — it landed somewhere between a joke and a dismissal.
“I never said nothing about this young buck before but since he’s trying to drag me into this here rodeo again, here’s my official response to Cowboy Charley’s accusations,” White wrote above the lyrics on Instagram.
Crockett, who is 42, did not let it sit. Within hours he was back with several hundred words of his own, ending on a line that has since become the headline everywhere: “If you want the smoke, I’m your man.”
How two artists who had never met ended up here
The argument is not really about either of them. It is about Twin Temple, the Los Angeles husband-and-wife duo who perform what they call Satanic doo-wop, and who were removed from two dates on Crockett’s summer tour.
Twin Temple went public on July 8, saying they had been told that day that Crockett had dropped them. Their statement pointed at their onstage Satanic imagery as the reason. Crockett’s first response leaned on artistic freedom and personal conscience — he told Rolling Stone at the time, “I thought they were like Black Sabbath but they ain’t” — and he then deactivated his social accounts for a stretch.
White stepped in almost immediately, offering Twin Temple a slot opening his own Los Angeles show. Speaking to Loudwire in late July, singer Alexandra James said the gesture mattered more than the booking did. “It meant the world to us, ’cause when you get removed from a show, there’s always the fear, as a smaller independent artist, that you’re being rejected by the industry,” she said. “Charley’s a pretty well-known — I won’t call him mainstream — but he’s a much bigger artist than us. So you’re always like, ‘Okay, are other people going to do similar things to us?'”
That show is still on the books: Twin Temple open for White on September 29 at the Hollywood Palladium.
The account that changed
What reignited everything was Crockett’s return to Instagram on Tuesday, when he offered a different explanation for the removal than the one that had circulated for six weeks.
“I never dropped that band from those [two] shows for ‘Satanic Imagery,’ they made it up and dragged me by a rope real good,” he wrote. In his telling, it began with production requests his crew could not physically accommodate, which prompted him to look more closely at the duo’s stage show; he decided the vibe was wrong for an all-ages audience, cut them loose, and paid them in full for the lost dates. He also accused the duo of timing their announcement to promote a record, writing that they “got together with their business folks and plotted for days,” and that “of course my rights didn’t matter since they had a new record coming out and a headline tour to announce.”
Twin Temple have not responded to that characterization, and their July account — that the Satanic imagery was the reason given — still stands as the only version they have put on the record. Crockett’s own earlier Black Sabbath remark sits awkwardly beside his new claim that imagery was never the issue, a tension none of the coverage has resolved. His Tuesday post was deleted within a day; Loudwire captured a screenshot before it disappeared.
It was in that same deleted post that Crockett turned on White, saying White had used the situation to sell tickets and that he had “lost a lot of respect for him.” He added: “I wonder why he wasn’t so outspoken back when he was in The White Stripes 20-something years ago. They purposely avoided political issues.”
That last claim is the most checkable thing either man has said, and it does not hold up especially well. As Stereogum noted, the White Stripes took on immigration with 2007’s “Icky Thump,” White sold “Icky Trump” merchandise in 2016, and he spoke publicly against George W. Bush and the Iraq War in the 2000s before later celebrating Barack Obama’s election.
What Crockett actually said back
Crockett’s Wednesday reply, quoted in full by Stereogum and Loudwire, reads less like a rebuttal than a catalog of grievances. He rejects the “young buck” framing on volume — “I got 300 songs out and 150 unreleased plus a new record on the way” — borrows a Jay-Z line to call White naive, and needles him over his stated exhaustion with the news media, listing everything from the Gulf wars to the end of net neutrality.
The sharpest passage is a class jab: “Lemme guess, you got Che Guevara and Malcolm X on your shelf, maybe even Fred Hampton, but at the end of the day you get in the Lamborghini and put your kids in private school.”
But the passage most likely to outlast the fight is the one where Crockett stops arguing about himself. Public shame of the kind he says was dumped on him, he wrote, would have been far more dangerous to a younger artist — “when that kind of public shame gets dumped on some poor kid who ain’t ready it might mean their life.”
None of the three parties has much to gain from stopping. Twin Temple’s third album, Doomed Lovers, arrives October 9 on their own Pentagrammaton Records, produced by Shooter Jennings — who also co-produced Crockett’s recently reissued Clovis. Crockett restarts his touring on August 26 in Tulsa and is booked into early October. White was on the other side of the world while the internet argued about him, playing Shanghai on the Frozen Charlotte tour, with dates running through Dublin on September 2 and a North American leg opening September 18 in Cincinnati.
