For those who know me I'm a pretty big Jack White fan - just saw him at the show in Malmö earlier this week and it was epic! I've been collecting Jack White records for years and have a fairly deep collection. Still missing a lot, but definitely got some treasures there...
And I just spent way too long -- like obsessively long -- analysing everything about the release from earlier this week that I wanted to share what I found or didn't find.
When Jack silently dropped a new album yesterday - I of course had pounce on it. Especially since the No Name drop from 2024 had me scrambling unable to get a vinyl copy until quite late. I went to all my regular Jack White dealers and nobody had the record and I believe indie shops only got it quite a bit later. This one appears quite a bit more digitally minded (or maybe not?) for various reasons that I'll go into below.
The sneaky release
A few weeks ago Third Man announced that they were going to do a video series on how to release and distribute a record. Being very deep in music these days for various personal reasons (check out my "piano and meaning" blog https://chasingliszt.substack.com/) I of course had to watch that series so I signed up and started watching the first episode on the day it was released. However, unfortunately, I didn't watch long enough in my first sitting to stumble on the first easter egg... Because as it turns out at around 21:30 the video get garbled and you see what will later become known as the Frozen Charlatan appearing and you hear "dollar bill" Jack's latest single play (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2lnosRCL80).
The next day I learned of the release by opening up Instagram in the morning and I saw the Third Man Memories profile sharing a story about the album silently dropping. My eyes went wide open and I instantly made my way to the Third Man site to secure my TMR version 💪. Phew - SoMe FOMO crisis averted.
In the story that the Third Man Memories profile posted you see a video of Morgan, the GM of TMR speak in a round table fashion, but then get's distorted. This appeared to be a clip from the Release Lab video I just watched so instantly I knew that there must be some clues in that video series. So I watched the whole thing - which btw is very worth watching if you're starting out as an artist. It's was particularly very interesting to learn in detail about how the No Name release was carried out last year and why one had to wait quite a while to actually get a vinyl version of the album unless you live at a TMR location.
In the videos the Frozen Charlatan interrupts in fact three times, I believe, in the two Release Lab videos:
Video 1 @ 21min, the first time he appears and you hear parts of Jack's latest song Dollar Bill.
Video 1 @ 32min, when they talk about social media being important and he appears with a finger raised.
Video 2 @ 3min, when they talk about that they weren't looking at analytics when No Name was released. He appears in a hallway where the words SAVE MESSAGE ENGAGE FOLLOW LIKE POST.
More about these individual appearances later.
CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT
I don't recall exactly how but I believe I saw some post referencing that there was a Frozen Charlatan Youtube account, and lo and behold there is: https://www.youtube.com/@FrozenCharlatan. It only has one video which features the original "scrambled signal" from the TMR Release Lab video 1, the words CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT and two links:
Link nr. 2 is just a linktree that links to either the Blue version of the album from TMRs website or the Chrome version which is available on Jack's website. This COULD just be two different color versions, but maybe, just maybe it could be that there's some difference.
Remember when "Fear of the Dawn" and "Entering Heaven Alive" was released when there was a version a different version of "Taking me back" on each? Maybe there's something like that going on. Impossible to know at this point of course. Just to be sure I ordered the Chrome version also. It does appear to me that there's two different characters here. There's the Charlotte (the blue faced sculpture) and Charlatan which appear to be the chrome-faced version.
My wallet screamed "no!!" at me but my JWCD (Jack White Compulsory Disorder) took over and I was compelled to do it.
I guess I need the archbishop.
wwwwwwwww.000000000.net
Then there's the website. If you go there you'll see the word "CONTENT" repeated across the screen, a rotating gif avatar of the Charlatan. If you start moving your cursor around, one of the "CONTENT" lines change to "PRE-ORDER". Clicking that links to a linktree address with the Chrome and Blue version links.
But there's more, as an engineer I had to look at the code of course and there's a small easter egg hidden. That if you click the "E" in CONTENT it changed to a 3 and the website switched to black mode. Also it prints out "💀💀💀" in the console if you open developer tools in your browser.
They also appear to have planned to switch the O out for a 💀 if you click it but that have been commented out for unknown reasons. Finally you can drag the skull gif around and if you click it you're taken to the Frozen Charlatan youtube.
A couple of other oddities that I haven't been able to resolve completely:
Name of the gif: The gif with the rotating skull is named 0001-1200.gif. I thought initially this could be an indication of the amount of frames used in the gif, but extracting the individual frames showed that only 200 frames is used in the gif and I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary for any of these. Although a few of the frames stand out for being much brighter or much darker. So probably the name was just an artifact from the "ezresize" tool that appear to have been used to export it. If you look careful at the individual frames it does appear that the skull is not full 3D as it appear to have no back of the head. Just when the back of the head is about to be shown the front side of the skull melts into view again.
Other code: I also looked at the Cursor-effects code that is used and the fonts. They're quite hard to analyze manually so I used Claude. Maybe they hid something in the actual code that are doing the blurry effect on the cursor or the font. Claude found nothing that looked out of the ordinary.
The Avagraha
Looking that the Youtube channel it appear to be pretty standard. But there is one comment from the Frozen Charlatan him/herself/itself:
I asked Claude to look at anything out of the ordinary here and one of the characters stand out
ॱ
It's called an Avagraha apparently. Claude and Wikipedia explains:
The avagraha ॱ marks elision — the place where a sound or vowel has disappeared, been absorbed, swallowed into the surrounding text. It doesn't mark what's there. It marks what's gone. A placeholder for an absence. And in Sanskrit sandhi — the phonetic merging it's associated with it marks the point where two separate things have merged so completely that the boundary between them has vanished. You can no longer tell where one ended and the other began.
Interesting if you can trust AI.. This led me to think about Jack's art exhibition as Newport Street Gallery in London, which happened to be titled: "These thoughts may disappear".
And you know who he mentioned a couple of times that he collaborated with for the exhibition: Damien Hirst (for instance see Supernova chair on his Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY8lo65CDuc/) and it's Damien's freaking gallery!
Who's Damien Hirst? Damien Hirst put on an exhibition where art collectors had to choose whether to get the actual physical art piece or an NFT representation of it (read here for instance: https://heni.com/nft/more-info/the-currency). Whichever version the person didn't choose was destroyed. Interestingly this brought in a LOT of money too (*wink wink* "did it for the dollar, dollar bill" in Jack's latest track).
You know whose been big on physical mediums being the thing? Our very amazing artist in question, Mr. Jack White III.
I wanted to make the modern version of chalk ware of the 40’s and 50’s which to me is 3D printed plastic. We took the piece to be scanned and CAD filed in order to make more of her with the help of Daniel Birkhead at @pr3nter_inc and my good man Daniel Mancini facilitating.
OBVIOUSLY this could just be what he actually says. They wanted more copies to play with, which are clearly actually present at the exhibition, but it could be something else...
The NFT hypothesis
Up until this point, I've shared a careful analysis of what's actually on the site and what's been shared by various public Jack White channels and what has actually been written with just a twinkle of speculation being thrown in. Now we go full on speculation! BUCKLE UP!
That website address: wwwwwwwww.000000000.net reminded me of a block chain address in some way. The address: "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000" on Ethereum, the second biggest blockchain and where the Palm Blockchain which HENI which sells Jack's art has used before, is where you would send tokens or NFTs to if you wanted to destroy them.
There seems to be a fascination with "disappearance" going on here... ?
Now the Charlatan web address only have 9 0s and 9 w's so not the same number obviously but still think about the connection here:
Damien Hirst creates an exhibition which forces people to choose between physical or digital medium via NFTs, and destroys the version they don't choose.
Damiens Newport Street Gallery hosts Jack's art
HENI which sells Jack's art is very known for trading art NFTs
That weird address, why the zeros?
At least some pieces especially the Frozen Charlotte, Charlatan etc are 3D scanned.
Will he release NFTs in some form of some of these? It can't be. Can it?
I should make it perfectly clear that this is by no means wishful thinking on my part but simply pure speculation. My personal opinion on NFTs is a fairly negative one that I'll avoid sharing here also for brevity and to not turn this into a discussion about NFTs.
Think about the symbolism of the Frozen Charlotte and the Frozen Charlatan. The victorian tale that the doll appear to symbolise is Charlotte who refuses to put on a jacket in the cold to not ruin her perfect dress and ends up dieing. She cares about surfaces of things and dies. The alter ego, the charlatan shows up, interrupts a perfectly reasonable and good Youtube video about how artists should make it in the world at a time where social media (surfaces), AI etc are clouding art as ever before (fx: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-spotify-enabling-massive-impersonation). He even makes a short appearance "shaking his head no when they talk about social media" (see above). The SAVE MESSAGE ENGAGE FOLLOW LIKE POST words in the last Frozen Charlatan clip in the TMR Release lab video 2 heavily to hint at social media. Think about what digital in some sense represents. It's the surface of things. It's not "the thing". A physical copy of the vinyl is the physical manifestation of the music. The digital version is invisible, it's a surface.
So the Frozen Charlatan appears and what? Sell "fake surfaces of things"? Maybe he offers the same choice as Damien but destroys both if you pick digital 😂? Would be awesome in some sick way 😂.
IDK there's something here..
Maybe. ?
Maybe not. ?
I will for sure be watching the Frozen Charlatan and other known TMR and Jack channels for more clues about what's going on.
P.S. These thoughts are 100% speculation and maybe 1000% ridiculous in retrospect in a few months. But I really love how Jack and the TMR team keeps on our toes with this and I wanted to share my probably crazy hints about what might be happening.
Updates - An earlier version mistakenly found some Evernote css that couldn't be explained. It turned out that it was in fact myself who had the Evernote browser extension and that inserted that css into the website which I just forgot about 🙈😳.
