Wouldn’t you like to hear Mumford & Sons do “The Boxer” with renowned dobro player Jerry Douglas?

Yeah, me too.

(h/t: Mikeray via Twitter.)

Why not visit my pal Mike to enjoy The Iron Maidens and Misstallica? There’s video of an “Aces High” cover…

1. Maya Rudolph is in an all-girl Prince cover duo called Princess.

2. They played “Darling Nikki” on Fallon last week, backed by the fucking ROOTS, and there is video.

You’re welcome.

(h/t MeFi.)

Make of these what you will:

Point the First Amanda Palmer’s record entered the Billboard charts at #10. A crowdsourced, Kickstarter record, completely free of label support. Or a label at all, really.

If you are a record label, my guess is that this scares the shit out of you.

Good.

Point the Second Running errands at lunch, I flipped over from NPR to a local pop radio station. It was playing Gangnam Style.

Specifically, here, where you can see shockingly high quality footage of a very, very young U2 playing “11 O’Clock Tick Tock” in a Berlin nightclub.

Presumably, West Berlin. Kids, ask your parents.

h/t to (@groovehouse](http://twitter.com/groovehouse).

Because the Internet is magic, I’m able to point you to this excellent thread at Reddit where a South Korean explains the cultural context of the now-iconic song and video.

Here’s a few bits that may not be clear:

• Psy is not a one-hit wonder. He’s had a long and varied career despite having it interrupted twice by conscription.
• While obviously somewhat goofy in presentation, he’s taken seriously from a musical and cultural commentary standpoint.
• Even the phrase “Oppa Gangnam Style” is pretty loaded with meaning in Korean.

Go read both of juyunkim89’s posts there; this kind of cross-cultural perspective is what we all hoped would happen way more often with a global Internet. It’s pretty damn cool even if it’s just discussing a pop song.

Aimee Mann’s new video may look a little familiar:

(Context for the youngsters.)

These are Matthew De Abaitua’s words. They are awesome:

Wendy Melvoin is fresh from high school. She is a wearing a V-necked sleeveless top, and patterned shorts. She is playing the first chords of a new song on her purple guitar, opening chords that she wrote, a circular motif with a chorus effect. Wendy is eighteen-nineteen and she has the high cheekbones and diffident confidence of a Hollywood upbringing. She half-smiles at the faces that crowd close to the low club stage. This is Wendy’s first gig with the new band, and the song she is playing is “Purple Rain,” and nobody in the audience has ever heard “Purple Rain” before because this is the night that Prince and the Revolution record the song.

No, seriously. This video link is the foundation of the take you know and love and have been listening to for almost 30 years. They took it live, from here.

The gig is a benefit for the Minnesota Dance Theater. Prince and the Revolution are taking dance lessons and their tutor suggests the gig as a way of supporting the financially challenged theatre; because Prince is a local lad, born and raised in Minneapolis, a city he will always come back to, he agrees to play.

In 1983, Prince is an international star, thanks to “1999″ and “Little Red Corvette.” He has released five albums in five years, from when he was eighteen years old. He has so many songs he forms other bands like The Time and Vanity 6 to play them. He is an impresario and a producer and he is also only twenty-three, not so far away from the poor black kid who stood outside McDonald’s just to smell the food he couldn’t afford. His instinct for self-reliance, his tendency to be dictatorial, has been blindsided by these two sophisticated young women, Wendy and, on her keyboards, her lover, Lisa; for the first time in his life, he will collaborate in a meaningful way.

[…]

The crowd at First Avenue, their faces straining against one another, receive the brief benediction of a wavering spotlight: to them, “Purple Rain” doesn’t sound like any song that Prince has played before: the tight electronic funk, his harsh and weird sex songs, the soul ballads in which he asks for forgiveness — “Purple Rain” is something new, something different. They don’t know how to react. In fact the crowd is so muted that when this recording is prepared for the album, the engineer loops some crowd noise taken from a football game to give it some life.

What do great songs sound like the first time we hear them? Can you remember that feeling? When Bob Dylan heard The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun,” he got out of the car and ran around it again and again he was so excited. The first time you hear a great song is so rare, and it can never be repeated; watching the crowd during this first performance of “Purple Rain,” I see that look on a few faces, a silent shocked awe. On the twenty-seven other recordings of “Purple Rain” on my iPod, the moment the first chord is strummed, the crowd cheer, acknowledging the anthem. They become a congregation, keen to be guided through the Purple Rain, and that has its ecstasies, even if it involves cigarette lighters held aloft, and hands waved in the air. But to hear silence flowing back from the audience, no singalong because they don’t know the words, is to eavesdrop on the shock of the new.

Oh, holy crap just go read the whole thing, and do NOT miss the first link up there — it’s the video.

Via MeFi. This shit, right here, is some quality Internettin’, boys and girls. Enjoy.

PS: The MeFi thread reminded me of this Hall of Fame peformance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Steve Winwood, and others, which I previously mentioned here. The best part, even over Prince’s amazing solo and the degree of “holy shit” you see on the faces of the other musicians is what comes at the end: Prince finishes his solo, tosses the guitar up into the air, and walks — no, struts — offstage.

The guitar never comes down.