Second album De Stijl released

The White Stripes’ second album, De Stijl (Dutch for “The Style”), was released on the Sympathy for the Record Industry label on June 20, 2000. The songs were recorded on an 8-track analog tape in Jack’s living room, De Stijl displays the simplicity of the band’s blues and “scuzzy garage rock” fusion prior to their breakthrough success. The album title derives from the Dutch art movement of the same name; common elements of the De Stijl aesthetic are demonstrated on the album cover, which sets the band members against an abstract background of rectangles and lines in red, black and white. The album was dedicated to furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld of the De Stijl movement, as well as to the influential Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell . De Stijl eventually reached number 38 on Billboard Magazine’ s Independent Albums chart in 2002, around the time the White Stripes’ popularity began establishing itself. One New York Times critic at the time said that the Stripes typified “what many hip rock fans consider real music.”