The Israeli mashup artist known as Kuti­man gave us Thru Jer­susalem last month, a con­tem­pla­tive jour­ney through Jerusalem’s eclec­tic, local music scene. Now he returns to his Moth­er of All Funk Chords roots and goes uptem­po again, stitch­ing togeth­er 80 cov­ers of Led Zep­pelin’s 1974 clas­sic, “Black Dog” (orig­i­nal here). Per­haps more than any oth­er I’ve seen, this video gives mean­ing to the expres­sion “the total is greater than the sum of the parts.” The indi­vid­ual cov­ers hard­ly stand out, but the mashup deliv­ers the goods.

via Wired

Before the week­end slips away, we want to remem­ber Bil­lie Hol­i­day who was born 98 years ago today. To this day, Hol­i­day is wide­ly con­sid­ered the great­est jazz vocal­ist of all time, known for her dis­tinc­tive phras­ing and melan­choly voice. Above, we bring you her per­for­mance of “Strange Fruit,” a song record­ed in 1939 that protest­ed the lynch­ing of African Amer­i­cans in the South. The com­po­si­tion intro­duced Hol­i­day to a main­stream audi­ence, giv­ing her career a big break. Down the line, Hol­i­day closed every con­cert with the song, which con­tin­u­al­ly grew in cul­tur­al impor­tance. By 1999, TIME called “Strange Fruit” the song of the cen­tu­ry, solid­i­fy­ing its place in the Amer­i­can song­book.

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