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Who deserves more recognition in the story of rock ‘n’ roll: the black artists who created the sound or the white men who brought it to the masses? Memphis focuses on the latter, building a musical around a white DJ, Huey Calhoun (Liam Quealy), who fights the racism and segregation of his hometown by playing “race records” on the radio. Memphis, now playing at Porchlight, is driven by good intentions, but it fails to recognize the full scope of the issues....

As a teenager in Oak Park, Mia Joy Rocha visited the library to learn about music. “I didn’t have the Internet growing up, so I had to go to the library all the time to rent CDs to rip,” she says. Throughout the mid-2000s, Rocha would check out 20 CDs at a time, immersing herself in genres that had emerged long before she was born—Krautrock via Neu!, for example, and ambient in the works of Brian Eno....

It’s been great to see the extended second act in the career of veteran British pop master Nick Lowe, who’s been involved in making timeless music as a singer, a sideman, and a producer for more than four decades with nary a misstep or bad look. He’s aged with impressive grace, and at 67 he continues to produce strong work that feels neither geriatric nor desperate. (I was recently reminded how bad an idea it is for senior citizen rockers to try to act like they’re still in their 20s when I accidentally saw a bit of the latest Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, where Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander looked like a leathery-skinned retiree who’d spent too much time in the sun in Fort Lauderdale....

The performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago began as a place where disciplines met. Founded in the early 1970s by Thomas A. Jaremba, who taught dance and movement at the Goodman Theatre, performance as theorized and practiced at the SAIC was always understood to be a hybrid form. At SAIC, these modes of collaborating have been developed in parallel with the process of teaching. “In my classes, I’ve had students from China, Tel Aviv, Michigan, Tennessee, Seattle, Chicago,” says graduate coordinator and associate professor Mark Jeffery....

Last week, the Reader didn’t publish a Gig Poster of the Week—concerts have been pretty unanimously postponed or canceled to help slow the spread of COVID-19. This is a tough time for gig-poster artists, as it is for so many others, but the Reader‘s audience is full of fantastically creative people. We have an activity suggestion that will not only provide an outlet for that creativity but also keep these posts coming until we have live music again: send us your fantasy gig poster!...

Two members of Chicago hardcore band Daybreaker, guitarist Alex Petrov and singer-guitarist Cameron Wentworth, are headed to Hollywood Spirits, at the intersection of Hollywood, Ridge, and Wayne in Edgewater. They need to talk to the owner about using his store’s stocked coolers and shelves of craft beer as a backdrop for their next video—and they’re expecting director Alex Zarek and the band’s other two members to meet them for the shoot in less than an hour....

Hip-hop has drawn from Bollywood and bhangra beats for years: Erik Sermon sampled Asha Bhosle back in 2002, and M.I.A. has spent much of her career finding different ways to make South Asian music and Western rap go together. In that context, Bloodline (Epic), the new EP by Indian-American songwriter and rapper Raja Kumari, sounds less like a merging of two disparate traditions than a natural extension of a conversation that’s already in progress....

I read Stars in My Crown as a boy sick in bed (it’s told by a boy sick in bed) years ago, and came across the movie on TV just in the last few months. The book by Joe David Brown was published in 1947, and the film by Jacques Tourneur was released three years later. I bet Harper Lee knew both works. I’ve got to think that a 24-year-old Harper Lee saw Stars in My Crown when it played the local movie house in Monroeville, Alabama....

By the time Muhammad Ali moved into his Chicago residence in the 60s, he’d already claimed the title as “The Greatest.” Born as Cassius Clay in 1942 in Louisville, Kentucky, boxing was introduced to Ali at a young age as a means to defend himself in retaliation of his stolen bicycle. However, after winning several bouts and titles, it was Ali that used boxing as a platform to defend the civil rights of people all over through his humanitarian efforts and activism....

This August, rapper and actor Mykele Deville dreamed about his dead grandmother. It was the night after her funeral in South Carolina, and he was asleep in the car with his family on their 11-hour drive back to Chicago. Surrounded by the cornfields of his great-grandmother’s property, a former plantation where slaves once picked cotton, Deville had been able to feel his grandmother’s presence. He remembered when he was 16 and she’d revealed to him that he wasn’t the only artist in the family: she told him that in the 1950s, she used to sneak out of her family’s home in South Carolina to sing at lounges late at night....

Ant loves funerals. He doesn’t have family left, so when he goes to funerals, he no longer fixates on the deceased. Instead, he’s fascinated by the minute observations of each spectacle: “The whole show—the bouquets and black-out drapes, the living room chapels, the organs droning out dirges to drum machine beats, the discount casket coupons thumbtacked by the phone, padlocked basement door—none of it is morbid, to me, anymore.” Some old patterns do hold up, but flimsily....

The history of documentary filmmaking is bound up with notions of ethnography, the work of Robert Flaherty serving as a pioneering and critical example. With such influential films as Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1926), Flaherty used cinema to understand people unlike himself and relate what he’d learned to a general audience. Many have critiqued Flaherty’s work over the years, specifically with regard to its underlying assumption that the subjects needed a third party to document them....

In the mad scene in Akram Khan’s Giselle for the English National Ballet at the Harris Theater, the corps de ballet encircles the title character just after she has discovered that the man she loves is betrothed to another. They clasp arms and huddle about her, pulsing like a heartbeat. They lift her, and she seems to float above a billowing skirt before she drops back down into an ocean that overwhelms, soaks, and submerges her....

I fear Patricia Clarkson’s judgment. Like many moviegoers, I first took notice of the actress when she played Eleanor Fine, a conservative white housewife in 1950s Connecticut, in Todd Haynes’s revisionist melodrama Far From Heaven (2002). Eleanor’s friend Cathy has fallen in love with a black man, and a pivotal moment in the story arrives when Eleanor finally pieces the truth together and fixes her old friend with an ice-cold stare....

In the early 1970s, singer Paulette McWilliams quit ascending Chicago R&B group Rufus and recommended that her friend, Chaka Khan, take over the lead spot. The decision benefited everyone, even (and arguably especially) McWilliams, who dodged the pitfalls of limelight while continuing to work constantly in music. By the time she relocated to Los Angeles in 1977, top musicians knew what she could do with her voice: Quincy Jones added her backing vocals to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, Aretha Franklin extended a similar invitation (on 1982’s Jump to It and 1983’s Get It Right), and for 20 years she collaborated with Luther Vandross (they were both part of Bette Midler’s famous backing group, the Harlettes)....

Instead of mayonnaise, Snider used egg white to give the cocktail body and froth. A little lime juice and simple syrup added acidity and sweetness, while the ground chiles that Snider mixed with smoked paprika as a garnish contributed heat. “I think it tastes delicious,” Snider says. “It’s a little savory and sweet. I’ve never had corn in a cocktail [before]—other than corn whiskey.”

In February, members of Chicago’s upper crust were invited to visit the sleeping quarters of one of the least successful painters in the history of art. Some were even granted the opportunity to spend a night there. For “Van Gogh’s Bedrooms,” now showing through May 10 at the Art Institute, the museum partnered with Airbnb to offer visitors the chance to rent an actual re-creation of the famous painting Bedroom in Arles (1888) in an apartment in River North for a night....

Courtesy of Atlantic Records Death Cab for Cutie When it comes to Ben Gibbard projects I gravitate toward the Postal Service, in part because for one reason or another Death Cab for Cutie never really did it for me. I certainly understand the group’s appeal—mannered, cozy indie rock that’s bookish enough to be “smart” but not intellectual in a way that could get in the way of mass acceptance. As I moved from high school to college in the mid-aughts and The O....