Today’s Daily Song of the Day: The White Stripes — “The Hardest Button To Button”

Jason McGathey
1 min readMay 18, 2020

Well, I wasn’t even looking for this song, but it kind of worked out better this way. That’s half the fun of writing this stuff, that I’m discovering new things right along with everyone who reads it. I was actually trying to find a performance of theirs from World Café in ’03, except then this little marvel caught my eye. And meanwhile, the World Café stuff doesn’t seem to be on YouTube regardless.

Until right now, I had no idea they’d shot a video for Button, much less that it was directed by Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind, countless music videos). And though a great deal of attention was paid to their video for Seven Nation Army, from the same album, I think this one is actually much more interesting. Can you imagine strolling through the park or the subway station or something on the day this stuff was shot? It seems like that would have been almost as surreal as the video itself.