Music: Great Job, Internet!: Watch a London stadium crowd sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Music: Great Job, Internet!: Watch a London stadium crowd sing along to "Bohemian Rhapsody":







Emirates Stadium, home to Arsenal Football Club in London, hosts plenty of concerts in the offseason during the summer. At Green Day’s record-setting concert (due to a new stadium configuration) on June 1, the capacity crowd waited for the band to appear, and whoever ran the soundtrack over the PA system was a genius, because they played Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” leading to a massive sing-along. One concertgoer up in the stands recorded most of the spontaneous event, but the roar from the crowd throughout the song shows just how its popularity has endured today. Apparently the reaction was better than openers Kaiser Chiefs and All Time Low received, but up against a Freddie Mercury classic, that's not hard to believe. [via Reddit]

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TV: Great Job, Internet!: The Seinfeld theme slowed down by 1,200 percent is horrifying

TV: Great Job, Internet!: The Seinfeld theme slowed down by 1,200 percent is horrifying :







Seinfeld mashup artist Gorge Catanda took a rather simple but novel approach while tinkering with the bass synthesized theme song composed by Jonathan Wolff. He slowed down the speed to a crawl, producing a sound that certainly wouldn't make anyone think they were about to enjoy a show about self-absorbed people obsessing with the most mundane aspects of modern life. If anything, it sounds like something that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay would play for 12 hours straight in a darkened room to drain the last ounce of sanity out of an enemy combatant. Still, Kramer would probably like it. [via COED]


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Call in the Night

Call in the Night: experimental project that calls you randomly at 2am and records it for a podcast

The Dark, Creepy side of ABBA

The Dark, Creepy side of ABBA: Starting from their very first album, ABBA was recording songs which opened a door onto a darker side than one might be familiar with from their hits. The first of these is Ring, Ring's track Another Town, Another Train, wherein a lover is left while still asleep with only a note to explain the departure of their now-long-gone beau. But that's nothing compared to what was to come across their career...

ABBA's next album, Waterloo, had the track Suzy-Hang-Around, full of childhood younger-child bullying and ineffective parental intervention.



Hey, Hey Helen, from ABBA's next release, the eponymous ABBA, outlined the life of a divorced woman with children and questioned whether her choices were wise.



Arrival includes the track Tiger, which warns of the dangers of urban life and predators which may lurk in the shadows.



Perhaps their best known dark song comes from The Album. I'm A Marionette, part of the mini-musical Girl With The Golden Hair (previously), is a bleak depiction of a singer being used by the industry and the audience for their own selfish gains.



Their next album, Voulez Vous, has two contenders for this list: The King Has Lost His Crown, about a pickup artist who has lost his touch, and Does Your Mother Know, an upbeat ditty about jailbait in a disco club.



The Piper comes from Super Trooper. It's a song about being entranced by magickal music and losing one's will to the player.



Saving the best for last, ABBA's final album The Visitors featured the sort-of title track The Visitors (Crackin' Up), a song about paranoia perhaps in the face of an oppressive government or perhaps just fear of The Other.



After all that darkness, let's change gears with the darkly humorous Two For The Price Of One, also from their final album.

Information, Please!

Information, Please!: Can you identify a composition, given only a single clarinet cadenza? Can you recite a poem, given only the last words from a single stanza? Can you play on the piano extempore the most popular song from a Gershwin show, given only a snippet of a few seconds from a little-known piece in the production? And can you believe this was once one of the most popular radio shows in America?

The radio quiz show from a wrier age, Information, Please, features an urbane, erudite host (Clifton Fadiman, the editor of the New Yorker's book review section), whip-smart panelists (like Franklin P. Adams, of "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" fame), and ridiculously interesting guests (Dorothy Parker, Leonard Bernstein, S. J. Perelman...!). Several years' worth are available here, for your listening pleasure. (Start with Page 2 -- the quality of the broadcasts on Page 1 is quite low.)

Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets

Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets:

Here is a complete recording of T.S. Eliot reading the masterpiece of his later years, the cycle of poems called Four Quartets.
Eliot considered the Four Quartets his greatest work. “I’d like to feel that they get better as they go on,” he told Donald Hall in a 1959 interview for the Paris Review. “The second is better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flatter myself.”
The Four Quartets are perhaps the most mystical and religious of Eliot’s poems. Each one is a meditation on time, mixing Christian and Hindu imagery with personal and historical events. “In The Waste Land the waste was place, the ‘Unreal City,’” writes Eliot’s biographer, Lyndall Gordon; “here, the waste is time–time unredeemed by a sense of the timeless.”
As in The Waste Land, Eliot uses the four classical elements as a structural device in the Four Quartets. The first poem, “Burnt Norton,” is associated with the element of air. It is named for an English manor house Eliot visited in the 1930s. The poem was first published in 1936. “East Coker” (which begins above at 10:46) is associated with Earth, and takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, from which the poet’s ancestor, Andrew Eliot, set out for America in 1669. The third poem, “The Dry Salvages,” (beginning at 24:17) is associated with Water and is named for a treacherous cluster of rocks off Cape Ann that was among the hazards Andrew Eliot’s ship needed to avoid in order to safely reach the coast of Massachusetts. The final poem, “Little Gidding,” (39:08) was published in 1942. Its underlying theme is one of purgatorial Fire. The poem is named for a village in Cambridgeshire, England, which was the site of a 17th century Anglican commune that based its daily life around the Book of Common Prayer.
The Four Quartets were first published as a unified whole in 1943. Despite their initial appearance as four separate poems, the themes are tightly interwoven and each poem is composed of five parallel parts. You can hear Eliot reading the Four Quartets above. To follow along as you listen, click here to open the full text in a new window. The first poem begins:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

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Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956)

Hear the Very First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading His Epic Poem “Howl” (1956):

Occasionally I slip into an ivory tower mentality in which the idea of a banned book seems quaint—associated with silly scandals over the tame sex scenes in James Joyce or D.H. Lawrence or more recent, misguided dust-ups over Huckleberry Finn. After all, I think, we live in an age when bestseller lists are topped (no pun) by tawdry fan fiction like Fifty Shades of Grey. Nothing’s sacred. But this notion is a massive blind spot on my part; the whole awareness-raising mission of the annual Banned Books Week seeks to dispel such complacency. Books are challenged, suppressed, and banned all the time in public schools and libraries, even if we’ve moved past outright government censorship of the publishing industry.
It’s also easy to forget that Allen Ginsberg’s generation-defining poem “Howl” was once almost a casualty of censorship. The most likely successor to Walt Whitman’s vision, Ginsberg’s oracular utterances did not sit well with U.S. Customs, who in 1957 tried to seize every copy of the British second printing. When that failed, police arrested the poem’s publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and he and Ginsberg’s “Howl” were put on trial for obscenity. Apparently, phrases like “cock and endless balls” did not sit well with the authorities. But the court vindicated them all.
The story of Howl’s publication begins in 1955, when 29-year-old Ginsberg read part of the poem at the Six Gallery, where Ferlinghetti—owner of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore—sat in attendance. Deciding that Ginsberg’s epic lament “knocked the sides out of things,” Ferlinghetti offered to publish “Howl” and brought out the first edition in 1956. Prior to this reading, “Howl” existed in the form of an earlier poem called “Dream Record, 1955,” which poet Kenneth Rexroth told Ginsberg sounded “too formal… like you’re wearing Columbia University Brooks Brothers ties.” Ginsberg’s rewrite jettisoned the ivy league decorum.
Unfortunately, no audio exists of that first reading, but above (or via these links: Stream – iTunes ) you can hear the first recorded reading of “Howl,” from February, 1956 at Portland’s Reed College. The recording sat dormant in Reed’s archives for over fifty years until scholar John Suiter rediscovered it in 2008. In it, Ginsberg reads his great prophetic work, not with the cadences of a street preacher or jazzman—both of which he had in his repertoire—but in an almost robotic monotone with an undertone of manic urgency. Ginsberg’s reading, before an intimate group of students in a dormitory lounge, took place only just before the first printing of the poem in the City Lights edition.
The recordings listed above all appear in our collection of 525 Free Audio Books. Just look for the Poetry section.
Related Content:
Allen Ginsberg Recordings Brought to the Digital Age. Listen to Eight Full Tracks for Free
Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats”
James Franco Reads a Dreamily Animated Version of Allen Ginsberg’s Epic Poem ‘Howl’
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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