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After Rolling Stone published its April cover story on shape-shifting pop musician and actor Janelle Monáe on the release of her third album, Dirty Computer (Wondaland/Bad Boy/Atlantic), it felt like every traffic-hungry news outlet cherry-picked the quotes where she opens up about her sexuality. Monáe’s transparency about being pansexual is well and good, but in the midst of stories that boiled her statements down to one cheap talking point—for example, the Washington Post piece headlined “Janelle Monáe comes out as ‘pansexual’—what does that mean?...

When Robyn first played Pitchfork in 2010, she was the closest thing to a mainstream pop artist the festival had ever booked. That day, her glistening dance music stood out on a stage whose lineup also featured the relatively hard-edged sounds of rapper El-P and rockers Modest Mouse. But her first Pitchfork booking seemed to open the door for the festival to include more pop in that vein: Sky Ferreira in 2013, Grimes in 2014, and most prominently Carly Rae Jepsen in 2016....

PJ Gordon, 24, has been involved in Chicago’s hip-hop scene since his senior year at Whitney Young Magnet High School in 2014. He contributes to Fake Shore Drive, organizes concerts, and works as a curator for streaming service Audiomack—he makes its playlist Hometown Heroes: Chicago. My cousin was a friend of Hebru Brantley‘s, and they’re both friends with Andrew, so they introduced me to Andrew. After I’d been writing for a number of local blogs for a little while, they pretty much just saw, “He’s serious about this....

Coincidentally, I sat down for breakfast with former governor Pat Quinn to talk about mayoral term limits last week on the very day that a certain mayor named Rahm laid off 1,000 employees, including 500 teachers, from Chicago Public Schools. Quinn calls it his “Take Charge Chicago” referendum, though I think we might call it the “Protect us from Rahm” initiative.” Since we, the voters, seem unable or unwilling to protect ourselves from him on our own....

Long before I realized Jaden Smith was carving out a rap career, I found his weirdness endlessly entertaining. The 19-year-old son of superstar couple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith has been blowing up the world of Twitter since age 12, sharing his deep thoughts and musings on topics as disparate as Illuminati conspiracies and chance encounters with Owen Wilson. More recently, he’s posted about how much he loves the Twilight movies and his appreciation for potatoes....

On his new third studio album, All My Heroes Are Cornballs, Brooklyn-born, Baltimore-based hip-hop artist Barrington Devaughn Hendricks, aka JPEGmafia (Peggy for short), offers an escape from the monotony of music that’s restricted by genre. Hendricks dives headfirst into his attention-deficit-fueled opener, “Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot,” which is the album’s most concise answer to the question “What kind of music does JPEGmafia make?” (either despite or because of the fact that it doesn’t stick to any specific sound for long)....

No entrance greets the eye at the intersection of Lake Street and Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, where Unity Temple, a fortress of an edifice in poured concrete, stands. A heavy structure in solid gray, the building almost repels with planes and right angles, and the visible windows are too high up to peer inside. To penetrate is, to borrow a phrase from choreographer Martha Graham, an “errand into the maze”—you circle the building, searching in all the usual places, and at last scurry down an unmarked sidewalk and up an unassuming flight of steps to arrive at a platform over which hangs a motto in brass, “For the worship of God and the service of Man....

The moment you start reflecting on a time that’s past, it’s no longer something you’re living—it becomes something you’ve lived. Lucy Dacus documents and interrogates her own coming-of-age on her new third album, Home Video. After being blindsided by the success of her 2016 debut, No Burden, Dacus was forced to reckon with her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, which had swiftly turned from safe haven to minefield as she rose to fame: assumptions circulated, jealousy seethed, and strangers came knocking at her door....

Montreal dance-pop duo Blue Hawaii instinctively understand what kind of sounds get people to boogie, and that’s never been more clear than on their fourth album, October’s Open Reduction Internal Fixation (Artbus). They’ve long had a flair for tastefully minimal dance tracks, but some of the songs on the new record are so skeletal they make the group’s older material sound positively florid. Blue Hawaii borrow the euphoric magic of 90s club music and the four-on-the-floor rush of house, then combine these styles into slinky nocturnal songs that feel like they could’ve filled dance floors in an imaginary but not-too-distant past....

Mike Sula Lampredotto, Nonna’s When I first visited Florence as a young whelp I was too much of a wuss to try the city’s signature panini di lampredotto, a tripe sandwich sold from street stalls all over the city. Historically a workingman’s sandwich, it was a cheap, high-protein way to fill up on the way to the olive orchards. But it’s maintained its appeal despite its filling: the abomasum, or a ruminant’s fourth stomach, which resembles “bundles of dirty dishcloths” as the The Oxford Companion to Italian Food puts it, and can smell fairly miasmic if not properly cleaned....

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made Chicago’s gun violence problems the linchpin of his “law and order” message yet again. During a 20-minute discussion about “racial healing” at the first presidential debate, Trump bypassed Hillary Clinton’s remarks about systemic racism in law enforcement and instead doubled down on calls to revive stop and frisk in Chicago and other major cities—despite the fact that this tactic has been ruled unconstitutional principally because the practice disproportionately affects minorities....

In 1996, the self-taught photographer and film artist Laura Aguilar, then in her 30s, positioned her naked body in the rocky desert landscape of southern California and took a series of self-portraits. The black-and-white series Nature Self-Portrait (1996) juxtaposes the land and the artist’s flesh: large, brown, queer, female. It asks viewers to focus their attention on the artist’s body and see the often invisible and marginal reality of someone like Aguilar....

Karina Natis Crown Larks On its recent full-length debut, Blood Dancer (Space Lung/Land Breathing), the hard-working, young Chicago combo Crown Larks demonstrates a learned appreciation for the city’s recent underground musical history (particularly the ongoing collisions between improvised music and art-rock, which has marked the scene for more than two decades). The material is rooted in a hazy strain of expansive psychedelia, with loose grooves that suggest a Krautrock band wrecked on some strong weed: together guitarist Jack Bouboushian and keyboardist Lorraine Bailey sketch out tentative licks and patterns that flicker, ring, and crash over Bill Miller’s drumming....

On January 7, 2015, at 11:30 AM two gunmen, brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, entered the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. They killed 12 people and injured 11 before making their escape by car. The two days that followed saw six more victims, with the two gunmen and an additional shooter named Amedy Coulibaly also killed. “We knew people would be interested in getting it or at least seeing it,” Ismond said....

Mana Contemporary Chicago will create something new in 2017: a film festival about dance that also expands commonly held interpretations of what “dance” means. Presented in collaboration with Chicago Dancemakers Forum and Montom Arts, the first annual Body + Camera Film Festival will celebrate “the intersection between the moving body and the moving image” and welcome emerging and established artists “with contemporary, experimental projects that push traditional mediums to their edge....

There’s plenty to do this week. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 1/9: The Chicago Film Society unearths a 35mm copy of Elaine May’s 1972 film The Heartbreak Kid—about a newly married Jewish man who breaks both his bride’s and family’s hearts by pursuing a shiksa on his honeymoon. Screening at Music Box (3733 N. Southport), the film will be introduced by Chicago writer-director Joe Swanberg (Easy). 7 PM, $7-$11

Cthulhu is a fictional creature described by H.P. Lovecraft in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu” as a terrible monster that simultaneously resembles an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, with “a pulpy, tentacle head” atop “a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings.” It’s also one of the drinks on the menu at Leviathan, the new bar from the Fifty/50 Group on the mezzanine level of the Dana Hotel adjacent to sister restaurant Portsmith....

The weekend after George Floyd was killed by police officers in Minneapolis, like in hundreds of other cities across the country, protests against police brutality swept Chicago. Thousands marched downtown and in neighborhoods across the city to demand justice not only for Floyd, but for the thousands of people, especially Black Americans harmed by police in every corner of the United States. He added, “all of us arrested were Black....

Last year I became a big fan of Norwegian piano trio Moskus on the strength of its second album, Mestertyven, released in 2014. When I wrote about the record in August 2015, I noted that the group had just finished making a new album and that I couldn’t wait to hear it. It came out early this year, but I guess I’ve been distracted—I only got around to playing it this week, and now I regret the months I could’ve been listening to it and wasn’t....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Chicago Women’s March draws about 300K people, about 50K more than 2017 About 300,000 people descended on the Loop for the Women’s March Saturday, about 50,000 more than attended the first Women’s March in Chicago a year ago, according to organizers. “It’s so empowering to be here,” participant Jaenne Marie Mandley told ABC 7 Chicago. “When I saw everyone I almost started bawling, ’cause it’s just so many women, so many people coming together....