Oversized Novelty Packaging Gimmicks
Instead of the standard version housed in a jewel case featuring a disc and artwork – and even sporting a cardboard sleeve outside the jewel case, as is the fashion for many albums where one cover just isn’t enough – this deluxe version comes in a cardboard box. The box is square, taller than a jewel case but not as wide, and much deeper. It has one of those pieces of hologram plastic – where you look at them from different angles and the images move – glued to the top of the box. It’s already coming off, right now, in my hands. It looks like a Book-it pin I had in elementary school. In fact, look:
Trust me. If you could see both holograms in action, you’d totally agree with me on this.
Anyway, the box is crappy. It’s going to fall apart. Inside the box are two flipbooks, one of the book on the cover, which I’ve already seen in motion on the cover, and another of some people swimming or something. It doesn’t really work. There’s a normal lyric book that would fit into a jewel case. Maybe it’s the actual artwork from the standard Neon Bible. The disc itself is in this black plastic envelope. At first it looks like it’s all dusty, which it is, it’s actually all covered in loose crappy cardboard case bits. There’s some kind of picture in the black plastic disc envelope, but you can’t really tell if it’s supposed to be anything because it’s blurry and vague and the two sides of the envelope don’t really line up correctly so it’s sort of a double-image of whatever it’s supposed to be. I dunno. It looks like space gas or something.
And I realize that I paid two extra dollars for all this crappy extra packaging that’s obviously going to break apart and get thrown away. There’s not any bonus music or anything cool like that. It’s the same damn CD (again, the music is very good, but that’s not the point) in a more expensive, disposable box.
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Today, I decided to not buy any more deluxe packagings. I don’t know what took me this long to come around. Deep down inside, I’m a media materialist. I love the smell of a new CD or DVD. I love artwork, lyric sheets, innovative cases. I love gimmicks, really. But it’s gone too far.
Remember fifteen years ago, how every CD you bought had a bonus track? Remember ten years ago, all the enhanced CD’s with multimedia tracks with proprietary video players (or just stupid Quicktime) that had to be installed before you could watch insanely low resolution videos 
of hit singles from previous albums? That logo used to make me cringe. Remember five years ago when albums started shipping with bonus DVD’s with “making of” featurettes? I refues to watch the “making of” an album. They wrote it, they recorded it, and some producer mixed it for them.
The new gimmick is ridiculously overdone packaging. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium came out in two formats; the one I have is big enough, it’s a tri-fold cardboard folder with removeable lyric booklet. On the right is the super-deluxe shadowbox extra disc plus bonus artwork version. Who needs all this crap? And did you see Tool’s 10,000 Days? It has two lenses. The whole thing unfolds to become a sort of stereoscope, a device that was sort of popular in the late nineteenth century. There was Beck's recent sticker-album album, the Information. Menomena’s entire “I am the Fun Blame Monster” packaging is actually one big flipbook made of 72 incredibly delicate paper pages. Now, I have to be careful where I leave it (keep in 
mind that I'm used to piling CD cases everywhere: on my desk, on my TV, on the floor, in my car...). The Simpsons DVD heads are ridiculous, made of cheap, ugly blow-molded plastic and cardboard that comes unglued by as much motion as opening
the case to see what's inside. Thank the Lord Almighty that Fox came to their senses and issed a replacement case that sort of matches the previous seasons up to that point. And does anybody remember the ridiculous packaging that the Northern Exposure season one came in? Actually, I thought that one was pretty cool.
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About a week ago, I was helping a friend move. He's about twenty years older than I am, and accordingly has a lot of records. I opened up his bi-fold sleeve for Electric Light Orchestra's "Out of the Blue." It was full of brightly colored cardboard punch-out spaceships. When I commented on it, he proudly proclaimed that he had kept all of that stuff. He said that I probably was too young to remember back when records came with all sorts of stuff: the spaceships, the assortment of fake mustaches that came with his copy of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and so on. So in perspective, I guess all of this excessive, disposable, crappy packaging isn't new.
And, to be honest, I'd rather have a shelf full of awkwardly oversized CD and DVD cases than a hard drive full of sterile Mp3's.
Yeah.
Know what? Bring on the single album boxed sets.
posted by G at 3/06/2007
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