Purists will point out that the actual title of this album is The Beatles, but since it has gained such renown as The White Album, and since that's what the band refers to it as, henceforth so shall it be called. Without that title, we would never have had Metallica's The Black Album, Jay-Z's The Black Album, the Simpson's collection The Yellow Album, or half of Weezer's catalog (The Blue Album, The Green Album, and The Red Album).
This is one of those albums that it's worth picking up the remasters for. You can pick out whole instruments that weren't apparent in previous releases. The clarity and definition in the new masters is incredible, and the complex arrangements in these songs really benefits from it.
So this album was supposed to be the follow-up to the legacy-defining Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In the time since SPLHCB, the group had lost their manager, made a truly awful movie (Magical Mystery Tour) that had spawned a memorable soundtrack, and gone to India to find spirituality. While in India, they wrote a whole bunch of music on acoustic guitar and came back pissed off and disillusioned, and began writing and recording. The new technology allowed them to track individually, and they put together a whole lot of music, so much so that The White Album feels almost more like a collection of four individual efforts than an actual double-album. Indeed, the only song that all four played on at the same time was Happiness is a Warm Gun.
The songs range from the simply-crafted I Will and Julia to the cacophonous Helter Skelter, to the jaunty complexity of Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da to the subtle political wiles of Back in the U.S.S.R. to the we're-not-sure-why-they-wrote-this-song-at-all-ness of Birthday and Goodnight.
Also included on the album is Don't Pass Me By, Ringo's first creative contribution. His first of two. Ringo was a fabulous drummer, but I'm glad he didn't write too many songs. Our "What the fuck, George?" moment comes from the song Piggies, which is played on a harpsichord and would go on to be a big influence on Charles Manson. Wild Honey Pie gets the "Nice effort, there, Paul", narrowly edging out Can You Take Me Back because it gets its own track (Can You Take Me Back is appended to the end of Cry Baby Cry, almost as an afterthought).
As for "John being a dick," there are too many moments to choose from. There's Glass Onion in which he deliberately feeds disinformation to fans vis-a-vis Paul, the walrus, et al. (Also, I have a particular dislike of artists referencing previous songs in new songs.) Or there's Sexy Sadie, which was a none-too-complimentary song about the Maharishi. Or we could talk about how he managed to get Yoko a lead vocal part (if only for a single, incomprehensible line) on The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill.
And then there's Revolution 9, the only must-skip song in the Beatles' catalog, a song which Paul and producer George Martin tried very hard to block, because it's 8 and a half minutes of noise. Don't get me wrong, it's interesting noise, but it's still noise. Also, I may have mentioned that it goes on for over eight minutes!!!! I have a cousin who swears its exactly what an acid trip sounds like, so I guess that's kind of cool, but on the whole it is an artistic experiment that fails miserably, but that John put on the album anyway.
The songwriting is generally pretty solid, but the recordings are decidedly unpolished--and this may or may not have been intentional. The album is riddled with lo-fi moments from botched takes (a la Revolution 1) to studio chatter (a la... well, most of them actually) to abrupt and noticeable edits. A particularly vexing incident of the latter happens at the end of Yer Blues in which the beginning of a different take was spliced on as an outro--John's vocal was muted but can still be heard bleeding into other microphones.
Still, the album is pretty remarkable, especially in songs like Mother Nature's Son where a simple guitar ballad is beautifully supported by George Martin's score. Despite how constructed it was, it captured the sort of live-and-by-the-seat-of-our-pants vibe that I think Paul was going for with the Get Back sessions (that would eventually become Let It Be). The White Album contains several of the group's most enduring compositions, and it shows a foursome that is experimenting wildly but is still, at heart, a rock and roll band.
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