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If you’d seen any Pivot Gang rappers performing in the last nine months without knowing they belonged to the local hip-hop collective, you’d have soon caught on based on two phrases they pepper throughout their time onstage: “Pivot Gang” (obviously) and “Long live John Walt.” Walt, the Pivot cofounder and rapper-singer born Walter Long Jr. (he changed his stage name to Dinner With John in 2016) was stabbed to death on February 8....

Hoo-boy. Good intentions pave a path off the deep end in Collaboraction’s ensemble-derived season finale, which reenacts pivotal moments in Chicago’s history of violence inflicted by whites upon people of color. A ten-person ensemble presents a living 4-D exhibit at the fictional Chicago Racism Museum, teaching and role-playing its way through a litany of flash points and milestones in the city’s civil rights history, ranging from the 1919 race riots to Harold Washington’s mayoral election to the uncovering of Chicago Police Department abuses at Homan Square....

Rappel says that he wanted to “subtly subvert” some of Altgeld’s inward-facing nature with the new building’s exuberance. But perhaps the most important factor determining Altgeld’s defensive posture is less rooted in the social dynamics of the place and more in the material conditions of the economy. Boxed out of expanding suburbs by racist lending practices and redlining during a historically tight housing market, Altgeld offered Black families subsidized housing in a tidy suburban atmosphere....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Have a great weekend! State senate to hold hearings on Quincy Veterans Home deaths Illinois senator Tom Cullerton is planning to hold public hearings after the New Year on the 13 Legionnaires’ disease deaths since 2015 at the Illinois Veterans Home in Quincy. “We’re going to bring all of the veterans’ affairs department in front of us,” Cullerton, who is also the chairman of the senate’s Veterans’ Affairs Committee, told Politico....

When it comes to conversations about the best guitar players of all time, rock fans typically mention the likes of Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix long before the thought of little old Adrian Belew crosses their minds. That’s a shame, because the unassuming shredder has one of the most mind-bending discographies in music history. Belew shared the stage and studio with icons such as Frank Zappa, David Bowie, and the Talking Heads, frying minds with his next-level alien dexterity—and that was all before joining up with Robert Fripp in 1980 to front newly re-formed progressive-rock pioneers King Crimson....

On Sunday Lupe Fiasco tweeted the video for an unreleased track called “Harold’s” he composed as a birthday gift for a friend, and, yes, it’s all about the beloved fried chicken joint. The lithe soul number barely crosses the two-minute mark, but that’s more than enough time for Lupe to unload delectable descriptions of the restaurant’s fried fowl, a “southern delight, supper color the white.” Happy Birthday To My Real Brothers Harold “Huggy Bear” Perkins…this one dedicated to you big bro!...

If you were looking for compelling source material for an album of 21st-century Americana, you might not start with poems written in England at the tail end of the 18th century. But the 2012 debut album by Martha Redbone Roots Project, The Garden of Love—Songs of William Blake, sets the words of the English writer, artist, and visionary to arrangements that blend elements of Appalachian folk, gospel, soul, blues, and Native American music....

The myth of 17-year-old pop star Billie Eilish is that she blew up overnight at age 13, after she uploaded the dreamy, trap-inflected “Ocean Eyes” to Soundcloud and it went viral. That was in November 2015, and by the following summer she’d signed a joint deal with Darkroom and Interscope. But that narrative omits the influence of her actor parents, who homeschooled Eilish and her older brother, 21-year-old Finneas O’Connell—in 1997, the year O’Connell was born, one of the top hits was “MMMBop,” written by three homeschooled Oklahoma brothers, and Eilish’s parents figured that a similar education might help their kids develop their artistic sides....

Cassette tapes and the avant-garde are what I call “play cousins.” They’re not necessarily related, but they work well together and have a lot in common. I use “avant-garde” here as a catch-all for experimental music, contemporary classical, odd films, and forward-thinking literature. I’m thinking of the new and unusual, a testing ground for ideas that might shift our perspective and understanding of the human experience if broadcast widely. At first glance, though, this stuff isn’t for everyone—I consider myself adventurous, and even I have moments when the voice of a skeptical geezer from the old neighborhood pops into my brain and says, “What the hell is this shit?...

In the world of Chicago goth dance trio Pixel Grip, “the arena” is more than a literal venue where spectators gather to delight in competition—it refers to any context our society envisions as a zero-sum game, where no one can win without someone else losing. The band’s sophomore album, Arena, proposes the club as a sanctuary. The “Demon Chaser” video, directed by Todd Diederich Chasing the forbidden is the premise of “Demon Chaser....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Like all great social justice movements, Chicagoan Kale Williams’s revolution involves cats—namely, Gingy, a sweet lil fur baby with quite the social media following. Williams and Gingy are at the helm of #iPlan2Live, a two-veined project that involves animation and personal testimony via social media platforms. As of writing this article, the hashtag is trending on TikTok with over 150K views and is still gaining traction. How did your perception of racism change as you got older?...

If the woozy, intergalactic raps on Knife Knights’s debut full-length, 1 Time Mirage (Sub Pop), remind you of Seattle hip-hop outfit Shabazz Palaces, they should. Ever since rapper Ishmael Butler and multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire launched Shabazz Palaces more than a decade ago, they’ve grown their catalog by finessing songs in jams with engineer Erik Blood—and the core of Knife Knights is the duo of Butler and Blood. Shabazz Palaces is so closely linked to Knife Knights that “offshoot” or “side project” falls short of describing the incestuous relationship between the two....

Q: You say people need to be in “good working order” to be in a relationship. What if you will never be in “good working order” because you cope with a mental health condition? Q: I’m way more into BDSM than my huzzben. He enjoys it, but he does not initiate play. How can I encourage him to be the instigator of rough sex? We have negotiated limits and safe words but he finds using restraints and toys to be too much work!...

After Ronin, the long-running band of Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bartsch, dropped its 2010 studio album, Llyria (ECM), the group experienced some major personnel shifts. In 2011 six-string bassist Björn Meyer left the group and was replaced by Thomy Jordi, who plays a conventional four-string model. When percussionist Andi Pupato split a year later, Bartsch chose to shrink his quintet into a foursome. This month, the new lineup has finally released a new record....

Chicago would have been a much more mundane place over the last two decades without the tireless efforts of musician, artist, promoter, historian (and Reader contributor) Plastic Crimewave, aka Steve Krakow. Sometimes his music can seem overshadowed by his work organizing and promoting shows of great psychedelic trip-meisters from all over the world, but a new Plastic Crimewave Syndicate album is always a cosmic event. The power trio—currently includes Anjru Kieterang on bass and Jose Bernal on drums—is about to drop Thunderbolt of Flaming Wisdom on EyeVybe (run by erstwhile drummer Karissa Talanian)....

Years before there was the Invisible Institute suing Chicago’s police department in hopes of cleaning it up, there was Citizens Alert, doing the same thing. And by years, I mean decades. In 1970, three years after it was founded to monitor the police, Citizens Alert filed a suit charging the city with racial discrimination in the hiring of recruits. Mary Powers died Saturday at Evanston Hospital at the age of 93....

As I was reading the latest Sun-Times exposé on filthy Chicago Public Schools, my mind flashed back to a conversation I had in 2014 with Lenny, an old pal who’s worked as a CPS janitor for years. The point was to get fewer janitors to do more work in less time so there’s more money for the people who own the the firms that got the contract. In this case, they figured to save money by doing away with rinsing the floor....

No initial visit to a restaurant engenders the kind of nervous, soaring expectations an Alinea Group spot inspires. Whether it’s the forthcoming reboot of the mothership, the latest incarnation of Next, predinner drinks at the Aviary, or the hope of a rare postprandial descent into the Office, Grant Achatz, Nick Kokonas, and company have set such lofty standards for some of the most exclusive and elusive (actual) tickets in town that it’s difficult to maintain a steady heartbeat in anticipation of eating or drinking in any one of them....

Ryan Smith Dressing like a Stormtrooper is basically socially acceptable at this point. One of the costume-clad conventioneers who’d packed into a room at the McCormick Center for a Q&A with actor Jason Momoa stood at a microphone to ask a probing, Inside the Actors Studio-style question. He wanted to know about the psychological impact his now-deceased Khal Drogo character had on the Queen of Dragons on HBO’s Game of Thrones....