How dare you?

Read all the other bloody strands, please, before the usual garbage about value being placed on previous significance rather than current worth. It is what is that is, not what was. Thats called meritocracy. With an i.
Better a fond memory, with an evidence base of decency, than an embarrassing requirement to explain to younger people who she was. Sure, have her there, but please, don't shatter all our memories by having her thinking she's still got it. Muhammed Ali doesn't do boxing any more; he can't. I'm sorry, it seems neither any more can Aretha sing, at least in that setting or under such pressure.
Sorry to rant, but nobody is too holy to attract fair comment and criticism. That way idolatry lies.

...who 'nothing bad should ever be said about'? By anyone?

That Wire TV prog is rubbish.

I think your reaction is a little dogmatic and is in danger of erring towards idolatry - however, I too was a little annoyed listening to those comments on the podcast. OK, fair enough she's not the great singer she was but her appearance there was symbolically stirring and if anyone in the history of popular music deserves our respect and admiration it's Aretha Franklin. OK, no-one's untouchable but I think a little more respect for their elders was in order from our favourite podcasters.

Just don't have her spell it out!

in thinking this post is the music blog equivalent of Poe's Law?

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.

I'd check but I think its (up) your fundament rather than mine.
(Grr, it's aggressive Retro day)

a wind up?

was she? Not ever, just at the Obama gig. And if we pretended that she was good because we respect her history, doesn't that make us like the idiots who thought the emperors new clothes were the height of fashion?

The hat was a talking point surely?

and she fitted with the occassion. Same went for seeing the 89 year old Pete Seeger "sing" the Woody Guthrie "This Land is Your Land with Bruce Springsteen at an Obama concert.

He may not be able to hold a note but he was there in 1963 when MLK made his speech and the resonances of history are just too great in those circumstances and if your cynicism cannot get over that I pity you.

Nice to see Pete restore the "radical verses" as well.

I bought Aretha Franklin's great records when they came out. Long before she was in the history books. Long before anybody knew that she had massive resonance. Long before everybody had her nicely tidied away as cultural icon.

And when Martin Luther King made his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 Aretha was peddling MOR records for Columbia and nowhere in evidence. Indeed the musicians who stood on the platform that day were the none-more-white Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul & Mary. And don't forget this was in the days when, as Bob Dylan pointed out, not everyone thought that there was a strong case for racial equality and you could get your head broken for suggesting there was.

I think white men have just as much right to criticise her as anyone. Many of those records on which her reputation is founded, that most people bought twenty years after the fact on the Best of Atlantic Tunes That Have Been On A Levi's Commercial were:
a) produced by white men
b) written by white men
c) played by white men

What infuriated me the morning after the Inauguration was listening on the radio and reading in the papers lots of approving mooing about Aretha's performance from the massed bands of the Cultural Significance Brigade who wouldn't know great music if it was taking place in their front room.

as this fine performance of Mariah Carey's uplifting song 'Hero' proves.

is beyond criticism?

Aretha and uncle Ray.
(reassuringly, the dress sense has not improved)

Sorry. I do think that there are some people whose laurels are so great that they can do an awful lot of resting, but obviously no one is beyond criticism. I wrote in a bit of heat, and I do apologise for the old white men bit, I have no idea where that came from. However I feel perhaps it was not a moment for music criticism. That mimed string thing was dreadful. But the moment superceded that and it represented hope and we can all use a bit of that surely.

We all feel better now. Better out than in.

Those alarmed by Aretha's rather unfortunate pause for breath in the middle of the word "country" might have seen it coming. Here she is doing the same thing while murd... reinterpreting a classic Christmas carol on her most recent album:

Yes, that was actually released.

Never mind Jerry Wexler - the late W.A. Nutter (LRAM, LLCM), my old school choirmaster, would have hurled a board rubber at her Very Large Grey Bow for trying to get away with that. He was so "they're words, boys, not just notes" in his approach that he even had us sing "God rest ye merry - GASP! - gentlemen" because there was apparently a comma in the lyric, essential in order to settle any doubts as to whether the gentlemen in question might, in fact, be drunk. And now, at last, I think I see his point. Losing your range as you age (hi, Mavis!) is one thing; abandoning all sense of metric decorum and meaningful interpretation is quite another.

(A serious question that's just dawned on me: Could it be that Aretha's obesity has now reached the point where the effort required for her to expand her ribcage - combined, I suspect, with a lifetime of gaspers - means she can no longer sing continuously for more than three seconds without an emergency replenishment of oxygen?)

If she was rubbish so be it. It doesn't make it any less meaningful that she was there.