Wherein I read things, laugh, and pass them on to you…

•READ: The last mystery of the blues: were Robert Johnson’s recordings sped up?:

Robert Johnson isn’t merely the best-known and most popular blues singer ever; he’s the performer through whom millions of people have been introduced to the form. For most people who hear Robert Johnson the first time, it’s the voice that grabs them. High-pitched, on the edge, filled with authority, lust, and fear, that voice inspired everyone from Eric Clapton and Keith Richards to generations of lesser performers and enthusiasts. There’s only one problem: that voice might be a fraud.

Much of Johnson’s life is semi-known and extrapolated (including his tragic death at the age of 27 in 1938), but his recordings and the thick shadow they cast on all blues that followed them were the part everyone could agree on. No more. A group of diehard blues fans are claiming that Johnson’s recordings (he was recorded twice; once in San Antonio in 1936, again in Dallas the following year) were sped up as much as 20 percent for release. That speed increase is not enough to rename his signature album Alvin and the Chipmunks Sing the Blues, but it does make one wonder whether one of the most important American musicians of the century is known to us only via some sort of falsifying technical manipulation. The theory, which may have started in Japanese collector circles (it goes back at least to 2002; I’m still hunting for the original source) and has been taken up by several people in the UK, most notably John Gibbens, a poet and musician who has researched the matter and produced alternate versions of the recordings in which he slows down the existing recordings roughly 20 percent. We still hear those amazing words and that tough, doomed voice, but we hear a dramatically different Robert Johnson: his voice sounds more like the masters who preceded him (Charlie Patton, Son House) and his guitar playing, while still intricate (Johnny Shines, another outstanding bluesman who travelled with Johnson for a time, once claimed Johnson used a bizarre seven-string guitar), is more deliberate and dour. He sounds older, nastier, as if the hellhound on his trail that he sang about had caught up to him already. He sounds, in essence, like a different man. Speeding up the recordings, if it happened, changes how we hear blues and rock history. If Gibbens is right, this would change the way we hear and understand the blues. Johnson’s raw, on-the-edge voice? Fake. The wild guitar runs that made thousands of aspiring guitarists’ fingers bleed? Ditto.

•READ: Deadpool will be harder than the comic. Plus Torchwood’s weirdest new character is confirmed!:

Talking to Total Film magazine, Ryan Reynolds reiterates that this film will have no connection to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and he says this film will be surprisingly hardcore:

The script is going to be a little harder [than the comic]. If you were going to assign a rating, the comic books are PG-13, the script right now is walking a tightrope between that and an R-rating.

He also calls the film a “nasty piece of work” in which the fourth wall is broken constantly. And I’m not sure if it’s Reynolds saying that Blind Al and Weasel will be in the movie, or if that’s just Total Film’s speculation. [Scans via Ryan Reynolds Fan]