In July 2012, Miyagi Chilombo, older brother of LA singer-songwriter Jhené Aiko, died of a brain tumor at the age of 26, following a two-year struggle with cancer. Aiko’s recent trio of creative projects, which she’s bundled under the title MAP (for “movie,” “album,” and “poetry”), chart her path through her grief. In September she dropped the first two, a short film called Trip and a 22-track album bearing the same title, through Def Jam, and in December she followed these with a book of poetry, 2Fish, through Ulysses Press....

Update on Monday, May 4: Ratboys will appear on a special Zoom episode of Chic-a-Go-Go on Friday, May 15, at 6 PM. RSVP to host Mia Park at mia@miapark.com to receive an invitation 15 minutes before start time. “It was really exciting, because we had never done a headlining tour,” Steiner says. “We’d done DIY tours, but those don’t have as much pressure or as much weight behind you. This was a new experience for us....

For our year-end double issue, we flipped the script on our annual Best of Chicago edition with a Worst of Chicago issue, featuring dozens of essays about the worst people, places, and things in our fair city. On social media we asked you to kvetch about your own least favorite things. We asked you to tell us your #WorstofChicago and these four came up most often. Now vote for #1!...

Jay Paul/Getty Images The discredited Rolling Stone story about rape in a UVA frat house reinforces the undesirability of pseudonyms. If you come across a pseudonym in a news story, do you distrust the entire story? Blogger Steve Buttry—who’s a visiting scholar in the communications school of LSU—titled a recent post “When should journalists use pseudonyms in stories? Never.” I thank Charlie Meyerson for bringing it to my attention on Facebook....

John Herndon doesn’t really want to tell me this story. He hasn’t discussed it much in public, and he’s not sure he wants to now. You can’t blame him. It’s hard to know who to trust with details of the cruel abuse you survived in foster care, or who will understand what it was like to be raised by committee in an intentional community in North Carolina. “I totally cried out loud when I heard them,” he says....

Here in the midwestern tundra, January can be a sleepy time for shows by touring bands, but no matter where or when Madison garage punks the Hussy play a gig, they heat things up—or even set them on fire. And that’s not just cliche rock ’n’ roll hyperbole; in this case, you can take those words literally. In an interview with the Wisconsin State Journal last January, guitarist-vocalist Bobby Wegner (who also runs DIY label No Coast) estimated that since he and drummer-vocalist Heather Sawyer joined forces in the summer of 2008, he’s set his instrument ablaze about 100 times....

Magnificent Coloring Day was surely a God’s dream. When Chance the Rapper—a south-side native who’s finessed a ten-day school suspension into a record-breaking music career—stood teary-eyed as a sold-out U.S. Cellular Field recited every lyric and ad-libbed Igh! from his three mixtapes, it felt like a victory for all of them, not just for Chance. However, it wouldn’t be a music festival without complications. The scene was like something from a 1990s Michael Jackson concert....

“I thought, what a great way to tackle this [issue]—with someone who had been through it,” says Adam Kassen, one of the series’ executive producers. Ultimately, though, Nagao says she’s “ecstatic” about how the show turned out, and is hopeful that it will draw wider attention to the problem of wrongful convictions. Between 3 and 5 percent of U.S. prisoners are estimated to be innocent, which translates to an estimated 60,000 people currently serving time for crimes they didn’t commit....

I hate Valentine’s Day. A lot of people do. But I don’t hate it for any of the conventional reasons. As a former Hallmark employee and lifelong midwesterner, I find chalky candy hearts, pink plush puppies, and other kitschy garbage hard to resist. I’ve never spent V-Day alone weeping into a pint of ice cream while You’ve Got Mail plays in the background. In the past decade, I’ve never even been single on February 14....

On their self-titled 2013 debut, Toronto-based four-piece band Pup were all about crafting poppy hooks from high-octane punk brashness. The album’s massive choruses scream, the guitars roar, and the beats stampede. It’s been six years, and as far as punk rock goes, the boys in Pup have grown up. On the brand-new Morbid Stuff (a joint release between Rise Records and their own new label, Little Dipper), Pup balance the fury of their past with deliberate rhythms, massive dual-guitar leads, and nonstop epic hooks and vocal harmonies....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Media Jesus “Chuy” Garcia was blindsided by the jaywalking allegations. Mayor Emanuel’s campaign this morning produced a video showing that Jesus “Chuy” Garcia once jaywalked across 25th Place. But a source within the mayor’s campaign said more disclosures about Garcia may be coming soon, although none of them quite as explosive as the jaywalking revelation. “The election’s almost here, we’ve spent a ton on oppo [opposition research], and it seems a shame to waste the other stuff we’ve found,” the source said....

After Shawn Carter grew from rapper Jay-Z into all-powerful rap mogul Jay Z, the money he made as one of the most gifted lyricists in music became a key ingredient in his songs—resulting in the sagging nadir that is 2013’s Magna Carta Holy Grail. But a switch flipped with his 13th album, June’s concise 4:44 (Roc Nation/UMG). Call it a response to Beyoncé’s Lemonade (in which she confronts infidelity, a subject her husband addresses here); call it a response to ongoing injustices and the now very public deaths of black citizens at the hands of police officers....

This morning Riot Fest announced the lineup for its 15th year (its eighth outdoors), and the most eye-catching headliner is Bikini Kill. When the iconic riot grrrls announced in January that they were playing a handful of reunion shows, a Chicago date was conspicuously missing—and as other big local festivals announced Bikini Kill-free lineups, it became clear that the band were coming to Riot Fest or not at all. Alas, Bikini Kill are the only top-tier Riot Fest act that includes women....

At first glance, the recent banning of political science professor Jacqueline Stevens from the Northwestern University campus looks like a case in point for this dismissive old quip about university faculty squabbles: “The politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” On July 28, College of Arts and Sciences dean Adrian Randolph sent Stevens a letter banning her from campus and from any contact with students, and ordering her to undergo a “fitness for duty” evaluation with a doctor of their choosing....

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. Don’t miss the climax!

Jim Franks thinks your open-crumb, cold-proofed, exquisitely lamed sourdough boule is bullshit. These are all bakers who have managed to make a living at the difficult and often dangerous business of running commercial bakeries—and selling bread made from hard grains that have been milled without removing the nutritious bran that surrounds the germ, unlike the majority of commodity flour produced in the United States. He didn’t find his purpose until after a friend showed him how to make sourdough and he made it on his own for the first time....

Chicagoan Jonathan Scott founded his indie-rock band Doleful Lions in 1996, and though they’ve been active ever since (albeit with a revolving-door lineup), they’ve mostly gone overlooked. That could be in part because Scott has avoided aggressively promoting his group, but I still wonder why more people haven’t found and fallen for Doleful Lions. Their effervescent power-pop melodies, topped with Scott’s unsettlingly sweet and appealingly out-of-focus vocals, should’ve at least made the band a sleeper success....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, April 6, 2016. Take one of Professor Barack Obama’s law school final exams President Barack Obama taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School for 12 years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. Based on his evaluations, students loved his class. In honor of his visit to the law school Thursday, DNAinfo Chicago has posted some real final exams from his classes for the brave people who want to see if they could have passed....

The Pitchfork Music Festival celebrates 11 years this year—12 if you count 2005’s Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival—which is more than long enough for familiarity to set in. (The jury is still out on the contempt.) During that time, most of the changes to the event have been incremental: For 2016, for instance, three-day passes have gone up by $15 to $165, and they no longer come with a subscription to the website’s print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review....

One of the last shows Gossip Wolf saw before the pandemic brought live music to a halt was by Chicago indie-rock darlings Ratboys. They were at Lincoln Hall, celebrating the release of Printer’s Devil—and it’s too bad more people didn’t get the chance to see the band play songs from that great album in person. But as Tim Crisp wrote for the Reader last April, Ratboys have turned lemons into livestreams, becoming champions in the virtual performance arena—not least by broadcasting 40 episodes of Ratboys Virtual Tour....