The White Stripes

The White Stripes formed in Detroit in 1997 around Jack and Meg White, stripping blues and garage rock down to just guitar, drums, and voice, with Jack White's playing drawing directly on pre-war blues figures like Son House and Blind Willie McTell alongside a self-professed debt to the two-piece rockabilly-blues configuration pioneered by the Flat Duo Jets. White has cited the Stooges as a defining influence on his own guitar playing and stage presence, calling Iggy Pop a key idol and Fun House one of the greatest rock and roll records ever made.

White Blood Cells (2001) brought the duo's stripped-down aesthetic to a considerably wider audience, its raw, unadorned production and White's blues-schooled guitar work standing in deliberate contrast to the more polished rock dominating radio at the time. The band's rise, alongside a handful of other stripped-down garage-revival acts, was widely credited with reviving interest in a more direct, unproduced version of rock and roll in the early 2000s, even as White's own roots remained firmly in the pre-war blues tradition rather than in any of the bands he was grouped alongside.