Concentrate on the cookies. Practice your song. We won’t speak ill of Pastor Eddy at the poor man’s funeral. It doesn’t matter what unfinished business you and he had left when he died by falling off a ladder the other night. It doesn’t even matter whether you think he was pushed. Keep it to yourself. Only you can’t. Good Lord, this is going to be one of those messy funerals isn’t it?...
There’s a steely determination inside “Don’t Shut Me Up (Politely),” a song from Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power’s recent second album, The Two Worlds (Tompkins Square). As the song thrums on within a single chord, she quietly but firmly chastises someone intent on controlling her and makes it clear she won’t be silenced. “You’d try to convince me / That I was somebody / Somebody that I’m definitely not,” she intones before asserting her own agency....
As the days tick down to the March 20 election, I feel like a flag, flapping in the breeze. Man, I can’t decide who to vote for in the gubernatorial primary! Is that asking for too much? So as much as I like Daiber—and I still like him a lot—I flipped toward Biss, the state senator from Evanston. I figured he’s smart—a former University of Chicago mathematician. Plus, he’s served in both the state house and the state senate, so he knows how Springfield works....
Last winter, the wildly popular Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer turned a pair of Wisconsin attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, into celebrities. Although Strang and Buting weren’t able to spare Steven Avery from a murder conviction—he was charged after serving 18 years in prison for an unrelated sexual assault he didn’t commit—the documentary raises significant questions about how the American justice system works. We generally get local moderators....
Ron Gallo channels his contempt for the world into the songs that fill last year’s Heavy Meta (New West), a snarling assault on selfishness and phoniness set to sharp, ringing 70s protopunk. The former Philadelphian moved to Nashville in 2014, leaving behind the destructive relationship that haunts the album’s reflections on emotional abuse (“Young Lady, You’re Scaring Me”), romantic atrophy (“Put the Kids to Bed”), and self-medication (“Kill the Medicine Man”)....
Photographer Tim Nagle weathered sweltering heat and thunderstorms to go behind the scenes with three artists at Pitchfork 2019. Here are the candid moments he caught with Grapetooth from Friday, July, 19, 2019.
Michelle Sinclair (left) with Maya Rudolph and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice An unexpected standout among the star-studded cast of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is Michelle Sinclair, who until 2012 performed in adult videos under the name Belladonna. Sinclair plays Clancy Charlock, sister of the neo-Nazi biker whose mysterious death kicks the plot into gear. She appears sometime in the middle of the film to provide stoner private eye Doc Sportello with some inside information and share a canister of laughing gas....
Irma Enriquez, owner and operator of Humboldt Park restaurant La Encantada, is hoping for a better year. The financial blow has been so severe that Enriquez changed La Encantada’s business number to her personal cell phone number to cut back costs on paying multiple phone bills. Prior to the reintroduction of indoor dining in late January, dine-in establishments faced the challenge of seating customers in a way that both complied with the city’s COVID mitigations and protected customers from the harsh Chicago winter....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Progressive Democrats targeting Congressman Dan Lipinski in primary Longtime Chicago congressman Dan Lipinski is being targeted by the progressive wing of the Democratic party in the 2018 primary. New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Gloria Steinem, the Human Rights Campaign, and numerous organizations have endorsed Lipinski’s opponent, businesswoman Marie Newman. “Dan Lipinski has a real, formidable challenger like he’s never had before. The environment is different....
The envelope arrived about a week after the online request was made. It contained a smaller envelope sealed with black wax stamped “J.” Inside were a mirrored coin and a card which, when scratched, gave off a faint whiff of password. At the center of the performance are four impossible bottles modeled after the works of magician and teacher Harry Eng. But where Eng would somehow fit blocks of wood, packs of cards, locks, and scissors inside small-necked bottles, Andrews, whose work often explores the magical possibilities of smell, fit perfume bottles inside instead....
By the time Chicago rapper Juice WRLD died in December at age 21, he’d already made a gigantic impact on hip-hop. His meteoric rise started when he was just a teenager with the 2017 single “Lucid Dreams,” a landmark in the burgeoning “emo rap” genre, which exploded after he rerecorded it for his 2018 debut full-length, Goodbye & Good Riddance. The whole album was a stone cold masterpiece; Juice sang some of the catchiest melodies ever put to tape over slick, ethereal trap beats, weaving in poetry about self-doubt, isolation, and drug use....
Little Big have all the nuance of a Las Vegas motel sign, but that’s the point. They’re a Russian rave band that have employed jackhammer drums, earthquake-inducing bass drops, and synths that could soundtrack for Sonic the Hedgehog on ecstasy to spoof Russian culture and dance-music cliches. The music on their two 2018 Antipositive EPs (SBA Music Publishing/Warner Music Russia) relentlessly bludgeon the listener—if you’ve ever made fun of teenage American EDM fans, these songs are likely the sound you imagined when you did it....
Few recordings transport me directly to a time and place like Dusted, the 1987 album by foundational New York noise-rock band Live Skull. Founded in 1982 by guitarists Tom Paine and Mark C., Live Skull were a buzz saw of guitar-led postpunk that combined art-rocker sensibilities with leather-jacket sneer, almost perfectly encapsulating the early-80s Lower Manhattan scene that birthed them. Dusted came fourth among the seven studio releases of the band’s initial incarnation, before one too many lineup changes and a lack of commercial success led to their breakup in 1990....
During her rousing afternoon set at last summer’s Pitchfork Music Festival, Chicago soul and gospel legend Mavis Staples claimed she was thinking of running for president to help get rid of “the orange face up in the office.” Let’s be frank—she wouldn’t even have to ask for Gossip Wolf’s vote! On Friday, Staples dropped “All in It Together,” a slippery, Stones-y new single she wrote with longtime collaborator Jeff Tweedy that benefits the Senior Viral Response program of Chicago nonprofit My Block My Hood My City, which aims to get hand sanitizer, groceries, and other necessities to isolated members of the city’s aging population during the COVID-19 pandemic....
When Chicago postrock band Tortoise began attracting international attention in the 90s, critics frequently discussed the band’s nifty adaptation of Steve Reich-style minimalism, particularly its use of hypnotic, interlocking tuned percussion. Tortoise’s “Ten-Day Interval,” from the brilliant 1998 album TNT, reconfigured his ideas for an indie-rock audience. At the time lots of underground artists took inspiration from Reich, and the following year Nonesuch Records released Reich Remixed, which featured electronic acts such as Howie B....
Forty-eight years ago this week, the first issue of the Reader hit the streets, introducing Chicago to an irreverent alternative to the daily newspapers, nightly newscasts, and radio broadcasts that defined the journalism landscape at the time. That we are here when so many of our peer publications are not is a testament to the dedication and stubbornness of this staff, the vision of various leaders over the years, the support of advertisers and sponsors, and the ride-or-die devotion of you, the Reader‘s readers....
Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing for Wednesday, December 13, 2017. Chicago Public Schools students will learn coding thanks to Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” initiative Apple wants to teach coding to every Chicago Public Schools student under its “Everyone Can Code” initiative, Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook told USA Today. “We’ve fundamentally concluded instead of just waiting and going into the four-year school system and seeing how many women and minorities are graduating in coding, which is abysmal, that we had to back up,” Cook said....
Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times Rahm Emanuel has turned on his national fundraising spigot to help him stay in office in Chicago. On Tuesday—hours before the last prime-time mayoral debate—Rahm Emanuel released his latest TV commercial. And his donors aren’t just suburban residents who work or have investments in the city. More than a third of his haul came from beyond Illinois. But as election day approaches, Emanuel has avoided talking about how flush his campaign is, probably because it doesn’t square with the image of a guy fighting for minimum wage workers and middle-class parents....
Contact: Tracy Baim, publisher, Chicago Reader 773-387-2394tbaim@chicagoreader.com Yazmin Dominguez, project coordinator, CIMAydominguez@chicagoreader.comsavechicagomedia.org This is the second annual Chicago Independent Media Alliance (CIMA) joint fundraiser. The 2020 campaign, put together in three weeks, raised more than $160,000 for 43 members, including $60,000 in matching funds from local foundations. More than 1,000 individuals donated, with two-thirds opting to support all outlets. One of the positive side effects of the effort was new visibility and amplification of a wide range of media voices....
The influence of gospel music on singer-songwriter Luke Winslow-King is obvious, even when he’s playing an up-tempo song with a title such as “Swing That Thing.” Though King doesn’t approach it in a superficial, frantic, tambourine-banging way, if you’re familiar at all with southern gospel you can easily identify its hallmarks in his use of chord changes and repetition—it often vamps on a groove. And if it’s possible to be reflective while delivering songs with a hard backbeat, then Winslow-King fills the bill....
