The cover for the White Album is great, within its context. As the proper follow-up to Sgt Pepper's* with its colourful, hyper-elaborate sleeve, the almost entirely blank cover of the 1968 album is intended to communicate that this set is going to be something very different. "We've left Sgt Pepper's behind; this is us now," the cover says, with the attendant message that The Beatles fancy themselves as having progressed from Sgt Pepper's.
Of course, once you opened the White Album, it turned out to be a very generous packaging, with the huge poster of a collage, and the four individual cardboard A4-sized photos. It can't be said that nobody bothered much with the cover presentation.
*if we disregard Magical Mystery Tour, which was a compilation rather than a conceptual album.
Ugh, that is horrible. Looks like tinned spaghetti.
The thing about Magical Mystery Tour is that if you grew up hearing it (the album length reissue with the singles on side 2), Revolver and Abbey Road then it's in your head as a proper album like the others, and a very good one too.
I always found the cover of Piper At The Gates Of Dawn rather dull, but I grew up with A Nice Pair, the cover of which is endlessly fascinating to a child.
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