The White Stripes

Two people. That was the rule, and the rule was the whole idea. Jack White on guitar and voice, Meg White on drums, and a hard line drawn around everything they would not add: no bass player, no session help, no fourth or fifth thing to hide behind. Red, white, and black, always, down to the clothes and the artwork. A band built like a constraint, on purpose, to see what you could do once you’d taken most of the options away.

They formed in Detroit, Michigan, in 1997, and for a while they let people wonder whether they were brother and sister or something else; the mystery was part of the design. What was never in question was the noise two people could make. Meg’s drumming is plain and heavy and refuses to show off, which is exactly why it works under Jack, who plays guitar like he is arguing with it.

The records got bigger without the band getting more crowded. The breakthrough came when the smallest possible rock group wrote one of the largest-sounding songs of its era, and did it without adding a single member. Everything that made them famous was already in the room. They just refused to leave it.