At least in my mind, Aretha Franklin stole the show on Tues­day. It’s hard to top her singing My Coun­try, ‘Tis of Thee — the beau­ty of the voice, the obvi­ous poignant sym­bol­ism of the moment, and then her hat. Yes, the hat that has cap­tured the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion. Just days lat­er, we have a Face­book group ded­i­cat­ed to her head­wear, and now on Flickr a series of pho­tos that cre­ative­ly super­im­pose the Franklin hat on oth­er celebri­ties, Col­bert and Bull­win­kle includ­ed.

Imag­ine you’re surf­ing YouTube and come across a clip of Leonard Bern­stein con­duct­ing Shostakovich’s Fifth. It looks and sounds great. Now imag­ine that you lay­er on top a series of YouTube com­ments that accom­pa­ny the video. Sud­den­ly things get a lit­tle dif­fer­ent and bizarre. This piece comes from the YouTube Com­men­tary Project devel­oped by Artists Space, which we’ve added to our col­lec­tion, YouTube Edu­ca­tion: 80 Intel­li­gent Video Col­lec­tions on YouTube. 

PS The YouTube com­ments are rat­ed R, not PG. So watch this clip in the com­pa­ny of an appro­pri­ate audi­ence.

 via Kot­tke via The Rest is Noise

Alex Ross, the New York­er music crit­ic who recent­ly won a MacArthur Genius grant and pub­lished The Rest is Noise, a wide­ly praised work that makes sense of 20th cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal music, lists his favorite clas­si­cal music record­ings of 2008.

Thanks to some dig­i­tal hocus pocus, John Lennon is back and help­ing pro­mote One Lap­top Per Child, a char­i­ty work­ing to bring cheap com­put­ers and inter­net access to chil­dren in devel­op­ing coun­tries. Done with the approval of Yoko Ono, the com­mer­cial stitch­es togeth­er old record­ings of Lennon’s voice and adds at least a cou­ple of new words (did Lennon ever say “lap­top”?). In the end, it all comes out fair­ly seam­less­ly. If you want to give a lap­top (start­ing at $199) and change the world, go here. Oth­er­wise, here’s John:

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via Goings On via Rolling Stone

This week­end’s New York Times ran a piece detail­ing how the record indus­try has dithered and con­tin­u­al­ly failed to release sev­er­al long-await­ed Bea­t­les’ projects. It also men­tioned how fans and col­lec­tors have forged ahead and put togeth­er unau­tho­rized boot­leg projects, some of which the Times calls “cura­to­r­i­al mas­ter­pieces.” In par­tic­u­lar, the arti­cle high­lights the Pur­ple Chick label, which “has assem­bled deluxe edi­tions of each com­mer­cial­ly released [Bea­t­les] album, offer­ing the orig­i­nal discs in their mono and stereo mix­es, along with the sin­gles (also in mono and stereo) released at the time, as well as every known demo, stu­dio out­take and alter­na­tive mix.” Some of Pur­ple Chick­’s include “Bea­t­les Deluxe” (which cov­ers 10 CDs);  “A/B Road” (which gives you 96 hours of the “Let It Be” ses­sions); and a series of BBC radio per­for­mances. 

So how do you get this stuff? It’s a ques­tion that Rolling Stone asked rhetor­i­cal­ly when it recent­ly gave anoth­er pos­i­tive review to Pur­ple Chick record­ings. And it answered the ques­tion with this: “Google is your friend: Try search­ing ‘pur­ple chick and megau­pload’ to get start­ed.”

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Here it goes: