 Before this video gets started, I wanted to let you all know that I'm on TikTok now. If you head over there, you'll be able to see cool visual experiments that I've been doing, like this one set to Strawberry Fields. I also wanted to remind you that over on Nebula, I've got a full series on Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here already out. The next episode of that will be dropping on YouTube in a couple weeks, but if you're impatient or if you just want to support what I do, you can check out the link to Nebula in the description. 1968 was a wash with color. It was the year after the Summer of Love and the psychedelic movement was in full swing. Over the past few years, artists across the globe had been tapping into their psychedelic experiences to create a new style of album artwork. From 13th floor elevators to the Grateful Dad to Jimi Hendrix, it seemed like everyone was trying to create album covers as trippy as the music they were recording. But in the midst of this onslaught of brilliant kaleidoscopic album covers, the biggest band on earth made a radical decision. They stripped all of the color, and really any visuals at all, from a highly anticipated album. The result was one of the most iconic pieces of album artwork ever set to print. The official name of this groundbreaking release is The Beatles, but chances are you know it better as the white album. The Beatles were no stranger to psychedelia. In 1967, they released their masterpiece Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which was the soundtrack of the Summer of Love. Its cover was a bright collage featuring the Beatles in colorful costume, standing with a crowd of life-sized mock-ups of famous people from all professions. In its own way, it was a celebration of unity between classical aesthetics and psychedelia, between Eastern and Western philosophy, and between themselves and the world. But this utopian vision didn't last for long. Shortly after the release of Sergeant Pepper's, the death of long-time manager Brian Epstein shook the Beatles to their core. Six months later, they went for a three-month retreat in India, but that retreat was filled with drama and scandal, and only Lenin and Harrison stayed for the whole duration. By the time the band got back to the UK and were recording their next album, fractures were growing. Ringo quit for two weeks, and Lenin famously lost interest in collaborating with McCartney. But the band still had an album to make, so they took a new approach to their songwriting. Every track is an individual track, Lenin told Rolling Stone in 1970. There isn't any Beatles music on it. It's John and the band, Paul and the band, George and the band. With this distinct new sound, the band needed something different for the cover. At first, they reached out to pop artist Richard Hamilton. His first design had the band's name in black letters and featured a green apple to reference Beatles' newly founded Apple Corps. These were rejected, and the band went with a radical decision. They released a plain white cover. To make the cover even more void, the band's name was hidden by blind embossing it crookedly, slightly below the middle of the album's right side. The only visual cue on the album was a stamped serial number. Hamilton said this was to create the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like 5 million copies. While Hamilton's original idea celebrated the irony of the situation, the blank white canvas was the perfect vehicle to prove that each factory stamped vinyl would have its own story. In the UK, the first 2 million printed were numbered sequentially. In the US, each factory had its own numbering scheme, which produced around 3 million additional numbered copies. Some began with the letter A, some with a single dot, and others had no lead character with only zeros as a placeholder. Allegedly, these different printings created up to 12 different number one printings of the Beatles. But even without the numbers, each copy was already destined to be unique. This uniqueness is the basis of Rutherford Chang's project We Buy White Albums. Chang currently owns over 3,000 copies of the white album, all of which are available to browse on Instagram. Almost all of the covers have yellowing or ring wear from age, but no two are worn in the exact same way. Many also sport personalized messages, doodles or artworks that tell a version of the album's history, and the history of its owners. The Beatles was dubbed the white album almost immediately on release, and it had imitators nearly as fast. The very next year, Genesis released their debut from Genesis to Revelation in A Black Sleeve with nothing but the title and the name of the record label. And over the next few decades, more imitators or homages would pop up. Look at ACDC's Back in Black, Metallica's Black Album, or Weezer's series of colored albums. I even think that anti-covers like System of a Down Steal This Album, or Kanye's Yeezus, are riffing in the same territory as the Beatles' iconic blank cover. So why did Pure White become one of the most iconic covers of all time? Because it left space for the album owner and their stories. Without a visual guide in the form of a photo or a surreal image, anyone could insert themselves into the album and draw anything they wanted. Imagine anything they wanted. And no matter how carefully designed a piece of album artwork is, it pales against the imaginations of millions. If you go check out Nebula, you'll be able to watch my entire Wish You Were Here series, which is I think the best thing that I've ever made. And I've also got some new original content coming to Nebula very soon, so keep an eye out for that. And if you like what I do here, make sure you subscribe. I'm really close to a million subscribers, and I think that would be a pretty cool thing to have. Anyways, that's it for now. Thank you all so much for watching.