It’s White Stripes night on Sunset Strip

The White Stripes want to bring physicality back to rock music. Nearly every decision Jack and Meg White make as a band reminds listeners that the best rock and folk music is never ephemeral and faceless. It comes from places you can visit and sticks with you like a black eye.

The band’s latest stunt of self-mythologizing is Icky Thump Records, a note-for-note re-creation of the former Tower Records store on the Sunset Strip, tweaked to fit their peppermint candy-meets-Flannery O’Connor-mortician aesthetic. The venue hosted a one-off White Stripes performance Wednesday for the first 200 shoppers (a mix of hipster demimonde such as Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, frat dudes waiting for “Seven Nation Army� and Strip metal-heads who wandered in off the street) who had come to the “store� opening Monday to buy the new “Icky Thump� album.

“I’m quite fond of Amoeba, but this is the coolest thing,� said Delta Johnson, a Hancock Park resident who visited Monday and admitted to a bit of sweet-talking to get into Wednesday’s show with her sister.

Icky Thump Records acted as a three-dimensional MySpace page that slyly disguised a promotional onslaught as a chance to let the audience tangibly enter the White Stripes’ universe. Jack and Meg are the most reliably on-message rock band today, and each detail -- from the red cellophane over the house lights to the pillbox-hatted waitresses plying sweets and water bottles (if there was any alcohol in Icky Thump Records, it must have required extraordinary diligence to find) -- seemed designed to break through the fourth wall.

“It’s unreal, the chance to see them on this scale,� said Corinne Ferris, a 28-year-old Valley resident who won tickets to the show from KROQ-FM (106.7). Her sister, Tara Ferris, estimated that she’d seen the band seven times.

“Icky Thump� comes at a time when the dominant pop music is minimalist, robotic R&B; that’s often pitch-corrected and visually anonymous. After a brief and typically enthusiastic introduction from Jack Black, the duo made a profound re-statement of purpose from the first chords of the new record’s title track.

“Can I get an amen for nondisposable music?� Jack asked the crowd at one point.

Record stores and even records themselves may seem to be negligible in today’s music industry. But if music has any future as a physical object, the White Stripes are likely the band to hand it to us.

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