jack white's riff

sitting at home with a stomach bug watching the euro football tournament. ukrainian fans, russian fans, danish, german, spanish: they sing the riff from "seven-nation army": tens of thousands in unison. well, it's a great riff. for that matter, american college basketball crowds do the same; perhaps we'll hear those seven notes at the nba finals tonight. i wonder what it would be like to have written something like that. it's like you produced a little poem that became a world-wide universal cliche, a phrase-fad. the closest analogue i can think of is "we will rock you." now certainly you would regard it with a certain pride, but it might also be a sort of burden; nothing else you ever do will have such an effect, and now it is you: no escape or revision or re-interpretation is possible, really.