In 2012, Rolling Stone issued a revised list of the 500 Great­est Albums of All Time, at the very top of which sits The Bea­t­les’ 1967 record, Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band. Jus­ti­fy­ing mak­ing the album its num­ber one pick, Rolling Stone wrote:

Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band is the most impor­tant rock & roll album ever made, an unsur­passed adven­ture in con­cept, sound, song­writ­ing, cov­er art and stu­dio tech­nol­o­gy by the great­est rock & roll group of all time. From the title song’s regal blasts of brass and fuzz gui­tar to the orches­tral seizure and long, dying piano chord at the end of “A Day in the Life,” the 13 tracks on Sgt. Pep­per’s Lone­ly Hearts Club Band are the pin­na­cle of the Bea­t­les’ eight years as record­ing artists. John Lennon, Paul McCart­ney, George Har­ri­son and Ringo Starr were nev­er more fear­less and uni­fied in their pur­suit of mag­ic and tran­scen­dence.…

Sgt. Pep­per for­mal­ly ush­ered in an unfor­get­table sea­son of hope, upheaval and achieve­ment: the late 1960s and, in par­tic­u­lar, 1967’s Sum­mer of Love. In its iri­des­cent instru­men­ta­tion, lyric fan­tasias and eye-pop­ping pack­ag­ing, Sgt. Pep­per defined the opu­lent rev­o­lu­tion­ary opti­mism of psy­che­delia and instant­ly spread the gospel of love, acid, East­ern spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and elec­tric gui­tars around the globe. No oth­er pop record of that era, or since, has had such an imme­di­ate, titan­ic impact. This music doc­u­ments the world’s biggest rock band at the very height of its influ­ence and ambi­tion.

Giv­en Sgt. Pep­per’s icon­ic sta­tus, it’s hard to imag­ine a con­tem­po­rary band decid­ing to cov­er the entire album. (Can you real­ly improve upon it?) But that’s just what The Flam­ing Lips have done with With a Lit­tle Help From My Fwends. Sched­uled to be released next week, the album fea­tures con­tri­bu­tions by fwends like Moby, My Morn­ing Jack­et, Miley Cyrus, and oth­ers. Pro­ceeds from the album — which is now stream­ing free for a lim­it­ed time at NPR — will go to the Bel­la Foun­da­tion, a non-prof­it that assists low-income, elder­ly or ter­mi­nal­ly ill pet own­ers with the cost of vet­eri­nary care when it can­not be afford­ed. You can pre-order the Flam­ing Lips album on Ama­zon and iTunes.

In oth­er news, Paul McCart­ney announced today that he has unearthed a Wings’ song he played (back in the day) with John Bon­ham on drums. An intrigu­ing idea. Catch it here.

What Alan Freed did for rock ‘n ‘ roll in the ‘50s, DJ John Peel did for punk and new wave in the 70s and 80s, play­ing ground­break­ing artists like Joy Divi­sion on his show and curat­ing essen­tial in-stu­dio per­for­mances in his Peel Ses­sions. But long before he first played the Ramones on his BBC show in 1976, Peel played the 1969 debut album by the Stooges, the scrap­py Detroit garage band whose front­man, Iggy Pop, would lat­er be grant­ed the title “god­fa­ther of punk.” He’s cer­tain­ly lived up to it, con­sis­tent­ly, writes Kris Needs at Clash, “dump­ing on rock ‘n’ roll’s pre­vi­ous­ly set-in stone inhi­bi­tions.” Each new gen­er­a­tion has giv­en Pop a new set of restric­tions to dump on, but many of them could, per­haps, boil down to the same thing, the very con­di­tion Peel so often diag­nosed in pop cul­ture: the pack­ag­ing and sell­ing of rock ‘n’ roll that com­pro­mis­es its raw pow­er and dimin­ish­es its artists.

Who bet­ter then to deliv­er the 2014 John Peel Lec­ture for the BBC at the UK Radio Fes­ti­val, despite the fact that Iggy Pop—who Rolling Stone describes as “a vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor from the School of Punk Rock Hard Knocks”—has nev­er deliv­ered a lec­ture before? But he has always been wit­ty and wise, on albums and inter­views, and he is now—as was Peel for over three decades—a BBC DJ, a role that grants him a cer­tain amount of crit­i­cal author­i­ty.

It’s not his only side gig. Dur­ing his lec­ture, Pop admits he’s had to begin “diver­si­fy­ing my income,” appear­ing, for exam­ple, in insur­ance ads for UK insur­ance com­pa­ny Swift­cov­er (England’s been good to him). “If I had to depend on what I actu­al­ly get from sales,” says Pop, “I’d be tend­ing bars between sets.” This is the sit­u­a­tion he addresses—the plight of the artists, the labels, and the fans in today’s mar­ket­place. The top­ic of his lec­ture: “free music in a cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety.”

Iggy is crit­i­cal of the U2/Apple alliance and their intru­sive and unpop­u­lar recent mass album release, but he prais­es Thom Yorke’s deci­sion to release his lat­est solo album on peer-to-peer file shar­ing ser­vice Bit­Tor­rent for $6. Acknowl­edg­ing that Bit­Tor­rent “is a pirate’s friend,” he claims nonethe­less that “all pirates want to go legit, just like I want­ed to be respectable.” This last remark may come as a sur­prise from the guy who want­ed to be your dog, but although he defines cap­i­tal­ism as dom­i­nat­ing and destruc­tive, Pop isn’t anti-entrepreneurial—he’s sim­ply a cham­pi­on of the lit­tle guy. He denounces dig­i­tal theft, call­ing it “bad for every­thing,” but he doesn’t want to see file-shar­ers jailed, which is “a lot like send­ing some­body to Aus­tralia a cou­ple hun­dred years ago for poach­ing his lordship’s rab­bit.”

The larg­er prob­lem is the media con­glom­er­ates, includ­ing not only major labels, but also, and maybe more so, Apple and Google sub­sidiary YouTube, who are “try­ing to put the squeeze” on the indies, “the only place to go for new tal­ent, out­side of the Mick­ey Mouse Club.” Over­all, the talk is a very sober and sober­ing look at the music indus­try from an old pro who has clear­ly paid care­ful atten­tion to the trends. And although his glass­es and stance behind a podi­um might make him look the part, Pop is a lit­tle less pro­fes­so­r­i­al than con­ver­sa­tion­al, deliv­er­ing some bad news with sev­er­al dos­es of opti­mism and good humor, and exhibit­ing an unabashed will­ing­ness to mix tech, cre­ativ­i­ty, and com­merce in a TED-like way.

The com­plete lec­ture was broad­cast on BBC DJ Marc Riley’s show, and you can stream it here for the next four weeks (the talk begins at 37:00, but lis­ten to the first thir­ty min­utes of the show for some excel­lent music and an intro­duc­tion to John Peel). And if you’re in a hur­ry, catch the high­lights of Iggy’s lec­ture in The Guardian’s “Cliff­sish Notes ver­sion” here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From The Stooges to Iggy Pop: 1986 Doc­u­men­tary Charts the Rise of Punk’s God­fa­ther

Iggy Pop Con­ducts a Tour of New York’s Low­er East Side, Cir­ca 1993

The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

We’ve shown you two exceed­ing­ly rare pieces of footage that cap­ture jazz sax­o­phon­ist Char­lie “Bird” Park­er in action: one fea­tur­ing him play­ing with Dizzy Gille­spie, his fel­low “found­ing father of bebop,” in 1952; and anoth­er, from two years before, where he plays with the likes of Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young, and Ella Fitzger­ald. But since so lit­tle motion-pic­ture mate­r­i­al of Park­er exists, his fans must have savored even see­ing just the sheet music of his piece “Con­fir­ma­tion” ani­mat­ed when we post­ed it last year, along­side oth­er such videos bring­ing to life the nota­tion of works by greats like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “To see it ani­mat­ed,” wrote Josh Jones, “is to see Park­er dance a very dif­fer­ent step than Miles’ post-bop cool, one filled with com­plex melod­ic para­graphs instead of chordal phras­es.” Indeed.

And the source of those videos, Dan Cohen’s Youtube chan­nel Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music, has even more Park­er in store. Here you can also enjoy Cohen’s ani­ma­tions of “Au Pri­vave,” that 1951 bebop stan­dard with the mys­te­ri­ous­ly un-French French title, and Park­er’s 1953 blues “Bloom­di­do.” These will, nat­u­ral­ly, pro­vide a rich watch­ing and lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence to those well-versed in the mechan­ics of both music nota­tion and the forms of jazz, but even if you know noth­ing at all about either sub­ject, these ani­ma­tions more than repay the short time spent. If you’d like to get less an expla­na­tion than a feel of how sheet music works, and indeed how jazz works, you could do much worse than get­ting it through a visu­al­iza­tion of Park­er’s inim­itable play­ing — and you might well come away with just a lit­tle bit more of a grasp on what, exact­ly, makes it inim­itable in the first place. “After spend­ing sev­er­al hours pre­cise­ly tim­ing Char­lie Park­er’s eighth and six­teenth notes,” writes Cohen, “I have come to the con­clu­sion that the dude can swing.” Indeed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Jazz Greats Cole­man Hawkins, Bud­dy Rich, Lester Young & Ella Fitzger­ald (1950)

Char­lie Park­er Plays with Dizzy Gille­spie in Only Footage Cap­tur­ing the “Bird” in True Live Per­for­mance

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

Watch Ani­mat­ed Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Char­lie Parker’s “Con­fir­ma­tion” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

It’s an old joke at this point—the hipster’s retro-obses­sion with vinyl is an affec­ta­tion as bogus as lou­vered sun­glass­es and high-waist­ed acid washed jeans, right? Well, there are plen­ty of peo­ple who buy records and lis­ten to them, too. There are even peo­ple who buy and lis­ten to cas­sette tapes, imag­ine that! You can count me in both camps, and it isn’t because—or only because—I love the look and feel of these ana­log cul­tur­al arti­facts or that I’m nos­tal­gic for sim­pler times. It’s because I love the sound. Even cheapo cas­sette tapes can often sound bet­ter to me than the medi­um of music we’ve all grown so accus­tomed to over the last decade or so—the MP3.

Begin­ning in the CD era, the so-called “Loud­ness Wars” more or less killed the dynam­ics of record­ed music, push­ing every sound to the absolute limit—from the most del­i­cate­ly plucked acoustic gui­tar string to a black met­al singer’s most demon­ic roar. With­out the pleas­ing push-pull of musi­cal dynam­ics, songs lose their depth and pow­er. Once the music is released as prod­uct, it suf­fers anoth­er indig­ni­ty in the data com­pres­sion of MP3s and stream­ing ser­vices, for­mats that—according to high-end audio com­pa­ny Harmon—“have dimin­ished the qual­i­ty and flat­tened the emo­tion” of music. In the short film above, The Dis­tor­tion of Sound, Har­mon brings togeth­er a num­ber of engi­neers, pro­duc­ers, and musi­cians, includ­ing big names like Quin­cy Jones, Slash, Hans Zim­mer, and Snoop Dogg to dis­cuss what Har­mon acoustic engi­neer Dr. Sean Olive, calls “the val­ley of sound qual­i­ty” we’ve sup­pos­ed­ly reached in the last five years.

Harmon’s Chief Engi­neer Chris Lud­wig claims that data com­pres­sion (not audio compression—a dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy), “removes up to 90% of the orig­i­nal song.” With our low-qual­i­ty MP3s and cheap, tin­ny ear­buds and lap­top speak­ers, says Zim­mer, we’ve become “a McDonald’s gen­er­a­tion of music con­sumers.” It’s a depress­ing real­i­ty for audio­philes and musi­cians, but Har­mon has the solu­tion and Dis­tor­tion of Sound is essen­tial­ly an adver­tise­ment for it. Whether or not you buy in is your call, but along the way, you’ll get an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to the record­ing process and the his­to­ry of record­ed music. Scroll down to the bot­tom of the “Dis­tor­tion of Sound” page to see how Har­mon is “bring­ing sound qual­i­ty back.” They aren’t doing it with tape decks and turnta­bles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Neil Young Reveals the New Killer Gad­get That Will Save Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.