Creativity Quote by Meg White

It is a wonderfully low-tech bit of mythmaking: Meg White describing modern equipment like contraband, smuggled under a table so the room can pretend it lives in a different decade. The line isn’t anti-technology so much as pro-illusion. CD burners are tolerated only if they don’t break the spell.

That’s the White Stripes ethos in miniature. Their whole project sold a kind of strategic anachronism: red-white-black minimalism, primitive blues riffs, analog aesthetics, the suggestion that rock could be reset to its bare parts and still hit like a fresh bruise. Hiding the CD burners isn’t about purity tests; it’s about controlling the frame. If you can’t see the modern apparatus, you can more easily believe in the time travel - and if the band believes it, the audience will too.

There’s also an implicit critique of the early-2000s music moment, when digital convenience and infinite choice were flattening subcultures into files. Meg’s phrasing - “a little bit newer,” “basically we had the feeling” - is almost disarmingly casual, but it smuggles a serious artistic stance: authenticity is an environment you construct, not a virtue you inherit. The subtext is that creativity sometimes needs a costume drama, a room arranged to keep you from acting like a contemporary. In that sense, the hidden CD burner becomes the perfect symbol of pop modernity itself: always there, always useful, and best when it doesn’t get to run the show.