when i get to the bottom i go back to the top of the WHITE ALBUM POLL

I will freely concede that "Julia" should be in there (and "Sexy Sadie") - also just trying to make it work as a Beatles record which means some balance of John/Paul stuff.

I do find "Bungalow Bill" haunted if not actually that GOOD. It's a weird, mean little Lennon song at its core. Rocky Raccoon is sort of its opposite number - where John tells a half-formed yarn of nasty boastful, hollow "bullet-headed" cowboy, Paul just has...a story about a guy who gets shot up in a bar fight. And yet Rocky, along with "Don't Pass Me By," adds to this overall, I dunno, "Mouldy Old Dough" quality to this record, there's some kind of creaking saloon stench wafting through the whole place - it's the same saloon where John is slumped in a chair, contemplating a drink in "I'm So Tired." It fits together in my head anyway.

yeah, that makes sense. the "moldy old dough" music hall stuff would be the first to go on the chopping block if i were doing this, but i ain't, so do what thou wilt.

I mean, the great thing about the White Album as the sprawling mess that it is, is you really could carve two or three clearly coherent theme/vibe albums from it - - I think when I first started I wanted to make it HEAVY, that spun off separately the stuff that's actually GENTLE, and then I decided what I really ultimately like about the record is that it's WEIRD. "The Weird Album." Or, knowing that Dune was out and John liked wordplay, "The Weirding Album"...

^^^just crossed the line

hahahahah

if the white album was released today they would have been forced to stretch it out to 3 LPs

i'm just noticing that the 7-songs per side tracklisting there is way too long to fit onto 1

also cry baby cry AFTER revolution 9 is just weird to me

just wanted to say that the David Bowie cover of across the Universe should be used as scare-em-straight material to any young band that thinks messing with cocaine in a recording studio is a good thing.

http://www.dustandgrooves.com/rutherford-chang-we-buy-white-albums/

artist guy is assembling a show/"store" whose stock consists entirely of first-edition copies of the White Album. He's also playing a bunch of them back and recording them overlapped; there's a soundcloud embed in that article where you can hear Side One gradually fall out of sync and become a total cacophonous mess. Not bad.

That embed is brilliant.

yeah, that sort of thing seems to work really w/ the beatles in particular, the combination of musicality and heavy familiarity. reminds me of a kenny g show from wfmu that i can still remember dropping my jaw listening to it live over ten years ago - http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/2633

Count me as someone who thinks the winner is a rather dubious (least aggressive word I can come up with) #1.

"Long, Long, Long" and "Martha My Dear" would be my picks. My third got zero votes: "Don't Pass Me By."

The great thing about Beatles albums is how you can know every single detail of them by heart, for years, and still individual songs and moments can sneak up on you and hit the exact right note at the right time. Feel like the White Album is maybe the epitome of this just for having so much stuff floating around. Like, the ending of "I'm So Tired" just hit me like a stack of bricks. Damn.

(accidentally misposted to the "worst song" thread, reposting)

The title and cover of this is weird: it implies austerity and restraint whereas the album is both the most playful and heterogeneous albums the Beatles releases. Malevich would not approve.

not necessarily... it could imply a blank canvas, suggesting a world of possibilities lie within.

Maybe... Isnt white "all colors" and black is "no colors." that might be what they were thinking. Still, the album is full of genre experiments and is very pop art whereas blank white canvasses, in 1968, suggested an Ab-Ex sensibility, maybe.

Idk it just feels like the wrong cover for that album to me.

it's meant to look like conceptual art

it is

i don't really get yr point

none more white

The cover is part and parcel of the album's charisma, especially in how it doesn't "fit"

Results of this poll are so suspect

iirc McCartney wanted it to be the complete opposite of Sgt Pepper

Some artist dude set up the album art. I don't think it was The Beatles' idea.

But yeah, pop-art and abstract both equally fit for this record IMO.

plus idk, with all the tension in the band the absence of artwork feels like a fuck you, and the way the album is just a huge melange of song styles is kind of a fuck you too

from wikipedia

The album's sleeve was designed by Richard Hamilton, a notable pop artist who had organised a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery the previous year. Hamilton's design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake's vivid cover art for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve. The band's name was discreetly embossed slightly below the middle of the album's right side, and the cover also featured a unique stamped serial number, "to create," in Hamilton's words, "the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies."[citation needed

Interesting. I forgot about the serial numbers.

Woah, never knew it was Richard Hamilton! I really only know him by the 50s collage stuff (''What Is It That Makes Today's Homes'' etc etc), so I don't know how this fits into his work but it's interesting since he would also have been known for kind of a four-color pop-culture maximalism, not dissimilar from the Pepper cover.

I think the cover works well for the reasons Treeship gives. If I had to give it another cover it'd probably be something like Revolver: four separate personalities, airy and bright from a distance but crowded and weird and bashing-into-each-other up close.

yeah Hamilton's work doesn't really hint at the austerity of the White album cover --- which kind of impresses me, that he could serve the needs of the project so perfectly by coming up with something that was not only anathema to what the band had been known for, but also kind of anathema to what he was artistically known for

it's so cool

I changed my mind. The cover's alright.

speaking of covers, just saw the cover for this thing -- kind of terrible?
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61-AXldtQDL._SL1500_.jpg

oh yuk

it looks like a SingStar box

'Revolution #9' took this? Oh, ILX.

wow that really does look terrible

it's really annoying me

it wasn't my fault, i voted for julia...

Hamilton's work doesn't really hint at the austerity of the White album cover

He did the poster also.

Only on ILM could Revolution 9 win. It's ridiculous and brilliant at the same time,

i like it but i think it's insane that anything beat long, long, long.

i'd like to note for the record that my vote, for "i will," was wrong.

i still think it's a great song, though.

it seems I did not vote? sb me

xp that's not a bad vote at all. i thought for a second this was the "worst song" thread and was momentarily scandalized.