You can tell quite a bit about a musician from the guitars he plays. This is not, as it may seem, a superficial judgment of a book by its cover. Rather, an instrument is a legitimate indication of an overall attitude towards the experience of playing and creating music. Recently, I saw the (sort of) documentary It Might Get Loud, a set of interviews with guitar icons Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White. They spoke about music, their respective careers, and, of course, guitars. Needless to say, Jack White’s guitars — a (hopefully) accurate reflection of the man himself — are really fucking cool.

The film opens with a clip of Jack White at an outdoor stage on a rural looking expanse (complete with a cow), fashioning a one-stringed electric slide guitar out of a wood board and a coke bottle. He then proceeds to play it. Featured over the course of the film are a vintage 1950s/60s guitar manufactured for Sears with a warped neck whose finish is almost completely worn away, a red vintage Airline, two custom Gretsch guitars — one of which was engraved by a tattoo artist — an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano and Jack White as a little kid with a beat up Delta blues guitar.

Recalling the opaque and mystical legends of such iconic Delta bluesmen as Son House and Robert Johnson (who allegedly sold his soul to the devil in order to become a great guitarist in the early 1930s) the film features Jack White teaching his nine year-old self to play. Nine year-old Jack — in garb identical to grown-up Jack’s — then plays the type of guitar the blues players Jack White emulates would have played.

This type of romanticism is typical of White. His general approach to music is old-fashioned and nostalgic, and is all the better for it. He spoke throughout the film of the process of playing aged and warped instruments where you have to fight for the sound you want, and how he constantly finds ways to make it a challenge, to force creative solutions to uncooperative instruments. In stark contrast to The Edge’s emphasis on electronic manipulations to construct the perfect guitar sound, Jack White values the purity and unique characteristics of the sound of the instrument itself, and the unique history of a particular guitar, much in the vein of his blues idols — though while he invokes their purity of expression, he does not get caught up in an attempt at imitation.

Everything from his vintage car, to his suspenders and bowtie, to the barn in which he is filmed for It Might Get Loud, to the blues musicians he emulates, to the fact that he’s also a drummer yet still built the White Stripes around Meg’s drumming, all illustrate the now antiquated musical ideal of bare expression over instrumental manipulation. In an interview about music, White has said: “Download culture isn’t a very romantic experience for the fan regarding art,” because for Jack White, the experience of discovery and the hunt for a particular record are as important as the music itself. Much in the same way, inherent in a vintage guitar — when one come across it in the right way (discovered not collected) — is a magical quality. It is the reverence that Jack White has for this history and mysticism that makes him so awesome. Also, he’s just really fucking cool.