The Musicgoer: Radiohead's In Rainbows CD Package

RADIOHEAD
In Rainbows
(TBD)
MUSIC: **** (out of five)
PACKAGING: *** (out of five)

You people do realize you could have legally gotten this album months ago for free, right?

It’s hard to know what to make of the fact that the “conventional” available-in-stores version of Radiohead’s In Rainbows was last week’s top-selling album. Is it a testament to Radiohead’s massive popularity—that even after essentially giving their disc away online, they still had more fans left over than any other band on the planet? Is Radiohead’s fanbase so old-fashioned that they still feel uneasy about buying music over the Internet? (“Computers are so not OK!”) Or do people just really, really like getting a nice, “archival” CD package to add to their shelves?

If it’s the last one, then the hard-copy package of In Rainbows comes as kind of a perverse joke: you don’t actually get a CD case with it! Instead you get a flimsy fold-out cardboard dossier containing all the materials you’ll need to assemble your own CD case, including a couple of peel-and-stick labels to slap on the cover. (Beck used a similar gimmick with The Information—why are all these sophisticated alt-rock guys taking this Rainy Day Fun for Boys and Girls approach to CD design?)

The main advantage to buying this package is the lyrics booklet, which deciphers all of Thom Yorke’s often-muddy vocals. As is so often the case with CDs, even ones from major artists, the printed lyrics are strewn with misspellings and typos—doesn’t anybody ever proofread these things? Radiohead makes such meticulously produced music—couldn’t they have at least taken the trouble to run their booklet through a spellcheck?