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Jack White almost saved The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” for James Bond, but then it became a global chorus that’s still holding strong over two decades later.
When the band released the anthem in 2003, no one expected the guitar riff to outlive the band itself, but that’s exactly what happened. Jack, 50, and Meg White were at the height of their garage-rock fame and were recording in London’s Toe Rag Studios with almost no outside help. Jack had been toying with a riff that he thought might someday be a great fit for a Bond movie theme. Instead, he used it for Elephant, and the move changed the course of his career.
The song opens with that instantly recognizable hook, and listeners have often mistaken the sound for bass. However, it’s Jack playing his semi-acoustic guitar through a pedal that drops the tone an octave. The effect created one of the most distinctive sounds of the early 2000s, and landed “Seven Nation Army” at No. 1 on Billboard’s Modern Rock chart, along with earning The White Stripes a Grammy for Best Rock Song in 2004.
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Two years later, the song became a hit for a surprising group of people. In 2006, fans of Italy’s A.S. Roma soccer club began chanting the riff after a big win against Club Brugge. Within months, the tune became a constant sound through European stadiums. In another stroke of luck, World Cup crowds picked up on the chant easily because they didn’t need to know the lyrics to join in. Before long, the chant moved beyond sports. Since then, it’s evolved into a protest song, a party anthem, and a general go-to chant for collective energy, hummed by crowds who might not even know the band behind it.
Jack previously admitted that he never anticipated that kind of reach.
“It’s like it belongs to them now,” he told 60 Minutes in 2018, acknowledging that the chant took on a life of its own.
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By 2025, “Seven Nation Army” had more than a billion streams on Spotify, and on Wednesday, October 8, Rolling Stone awarded it a new honor when the publication ranked the song among the Top 250 Songs of the 21st Century.
More than 20 years after its release, the song still unites strangers in arenas and bars around the world.
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