3:01 Pick Me Up: the White Stripes

Unless you have the good fortune to be unemployed or working as a ditch-digger, 3 p.m. is the cruelest time of the workday. The morning latte has worn off, and the post-lunch crash has you desperately reaching for the J. Peterman Urban Sombrero. To get you through the rest of the afternoon, you have a choice. You can raid the vending machine for an old-fashioned (not to mention life-shortening) white-sugar injection. Or you can kick-start your heart by cueing up one of the over-adrenalized videos we carefully hand-select each weekday at 3:01 p.m. If the following clip doesn’t bring you temporarily back to life, chances are you’re dead inside. Now plug in those earphones and fucking crank it.

Today's offering: There was a stretch—a long stretch—when the White Stripes were about the coolest thing on the planet.

It began with the timing of their arrival. Rock ’n’ roll had spent the late ’90s in a deep snooze, plagued by bad dreams in which bands like the Verve seemed important. The White Stripes went off like a car alarm in that silence.

From the start, they had the entire thing going on: aggression, subtlety, sex, humour, technical brilliance, unpretentiousness, incredible pretentiousness.

Sure, there were moments over the years when the coolness seemed in danger of evaporating—say, during Jack White’s earnest rock-icon summit meeting with the Edge, carefully preserved on film.

But the White Stripes never lost it, never even came close, as this live performance of the title track from their final album proves. They got out while the getting was very, very good.

You miss them. You really do.