Radiohead Album Cover: What Are They Thinking?

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I think Tom's right about this "reinforcing the total aesthetic" business. It IS packaging - but not "just" packaging. What's packaging for? Keeping something together, all wrapped up in one place. What seems more aesthetically apppropriate, that the new Of Montreal album have childlike surrealistic cartoon drawings on its art - or ambiguous H.R. Geiger paintings of technologically advanced sexual penetration? (On second thought, don't answer that.)

Josh, Wednesday, 6 September 2000 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Ah but Tom, my comparison to Roger Dean was, as I admitted, very obvious, lazy and cheap, just an instant reaction to all those Radiohead = prog analogies of a few years back. You're right, the Kid A cover is *very* straightforward and pared-down compared to his designs.

Like you I was deeply irritated by the uniformity of the promotions for OK Computer and its singles (that mock-sloganeering around the lyrics: so obvious, so arrogant, so horribly "above" the screaming teens on TOTP, so convinced that it will remain so for all time). But I also think the aesthetics surrounding a band (its album covers, style of promotion, etc.) do create, for many people, a certain assumption of how it will sound. Radiohead's aesthetics have always influenced me to think of them as arrogant in their sense of intellectual superiority, distancing and isolation (I could write this better), and when I've actually heard them I've usually concluded that they don't have the music to make such tendencies excusable, in my view at least.

Robin Carmody, Thursday, 7 September 2000 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

I'm sorry, but that album cover looks like it was knocked up on photoshop by someone who had the mp3s but wanted a cover to go with it whne they burned it to CD.

Chewshabadoo, Thursday, 21 September 2000 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

three years pass...
Well, I like it.

Let's revive an old thread to say so.

mark grout (mark grout), Thursday, 2 October 2003 09:42 (twenty years ago) link

isn't it actually a video still from Shynola's blipvert animations?

stevem (blueski), Thursday, 2 October 2003 09:59 (twenty years ago) link

One of Thom's attempts at drawing, I believe

Nichole Graham (Nichole Graham), Thursday, 2 October 2003 22:29 (twenty years ago) link

((One of Thom's attempts at drawing, I believe ))

It's better than his singing at least.

Sasha (sgh), Thursday, 2 October 2003 22:35 (twenty years ago) link

Three years on, oh dear.

Ned Raggett (Ned), Thursday, 2 October 2003 22:41 (twenty years ago) link

i like the album

stevem (blueski), Thursday, 2 October 2003 23:14 (twenty years ago) link

one month passes...
God knows why I'm contributing to this thread but aren't the 'mountains' degraded and spun around versions of the OK Computer sleeve?

This is a very acute observation. My brane = broked.

Curt1s St3ph3ns, Monday, 1 December 2003 00:24 (twenty years ago) link


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