Elephant (album) Magazine" in 2007, Jack White said, "If you study the picture carefully, Meg and I are elephant ears in a head-on elephant. But it's a side view of an elephant, too, with the tusks leading off either side." He went on to say, "I wanted people to be staring at this album cover and then maybe two years later, having stared at it for the 500th time, to say, 'Hey, it's an elephant!'" Upon its release, "Elephant" received widespread acclaim from music critics. The album enjoys a Metacritic rating of 92. The White Stripes were gaining momentum with their previous
Elephant joke and reject the authority of traditional knowledge. He draws a parallel between this and the counterculture of the 1960s, stating that ""disestablishment" was the purpose of both," pointing to the sexual revolution and noting that "[p]erhaps it was no accident that many of the elephant jokes emphasized the intrusion of sex into the most innocuous areas." In their paper, "On elephantasy and elephanticide", Abrahams and Dundes consider elephant jokes to be convenient disguises for racism, and symbolised the nervousness of white people about the civil rights movement. Whilst blatantly racialist jokes became less acceptable, elephant jokes were a useful proxy.