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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