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Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. At the time Berkow was living in a tiny room at the Red Herring, run by campus arts and activism organization the Channing-Murray Foundation, which is affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church. Berkow had convinced a draft board that as a conscientious objector he’d do his alternative service at the coffeehouse (his adoptive father was also a minister at the church)....

E The head-scratcher for me was that the CTA has been planning to implement off-board fare collection along the Loop Link bus-rapid-transit corridor for years. But nearly six months after that route launched last December, prepaid boarding still hasn’t materialized. But the transit agency says there are several reasons why the Belmont station, which is also served by the #82 Kimball bus, is a good location for the program’s maiden voyage....

Gossip Wolf first caught wind of local producer-rapper Montana Macks in 2015, when his work appeared all over the Rich Jones EP Pigeons & Waffles. Macks has been a little quiet for the past couple years, but he’s had his hands full working on an instrumental album called Arrivals & Departures. He tells Gossip Wolf that he began working on it when Jones suggested he compile his unreleased material for a beat tape—but because Macks has been recording for around a decade, he has a whole lot of unreleased material....

Dimensional Stardust is a splendid sonic antidote for the spirit-damping insults of a year that can’t end soon enough—growth and transcendence are programmed into the album’s DNA. The Exploding Star Orchestra’s leader, multi-instrumentalist Rob Mazurek, started out playing idiomatically correct hard bop in Chicago’s jazz bars in the 1980s. These days he lives in Marfa, Texas, and he’s as likely to spend his days jamming electronic noise, painting abstract canvases, or designing metal and light installations as he is to play music that operates within the jazz continuum....

On Bowlcut’s sizzling new album, Semaphore (Amalgam), it’s easy to hear the bond that saxophonist Jake Wark, guitarist Matt Murphy, and drummer Bill Harris have formed performing together over the last few years. The group cleaves to improvisation, allowing its deeply interactive attack to direct its proceedings even when employing loose structural devices, moving easily between raucous, abrasive free jazz and cool, harnessed sound sculpture. On “All Toes, Part 1” Harris generates a synthetic low-end vibrato that conjures the sound of a distant helicopter as Murphy spreads out a blanket of long tones embroidered by cool arpeggios and Wark unleashes a precarious balladic improvisation with a striated tone that hovers ominously on the brink of chaos—but the track effectively concludes before they surrender control....

Lots of events happening this weekend to celebrate Juneteenth and more. Here’s some things to do in Chicago over the next seven days.

YouTube is known for creating Internet sensations-makeup gurus, live-action gamers, teenage heartthrobs, and now, poets. With more than 100 million overall page views, 13 million of them on his poem “OCD,” Neil Hilborn is the most-watched poet on YouTube. Hilborn writes: Hilborn released his book Our Numbered Days with Button Poetry in 2015. He now spends months at a time on tour, like a rock star. His show at the Beat Kitchen last November sold out within days....

As a loyal Reader reader, you may already feel well versed in LGBTQIA issues. I’m hoping that the majority of you are at least an A (ally) even if you’re not feeling aligned with the other letters (and by the way, LGBTQI people should also be A’s for each other, in case we all forgot). Sometimes life brings you more complicated situations than were covered in Lesléa Newman’s 1989 book Heather Has Two Mommies....

Here’s what’s true no matter how you look at the events of the last week: This country is experiencing an economic crisis on a scale unseen since the Great Depression. But, Ademola said, abolitionist work is gradual and long-term; changing a society that took hundreds of years to reach its current form takes time. “As we reach towards that goal we still have to think about harm reduction,” he said....

Poppy is the patron saint of the extremely online: a pop star who never pretends to be anything other than an Internet-inspired construct. With her high-fashion-meets-Silicon-Valley aesthetic and a persona that seems part robot, part alien, and part algorithm turned flesh, she toes the line between art-house experiment and modern-fame meme through her heavily produced songs and bizarre YouTube videos. But though Poppy might strike some as satirical, her music comes off as pretty earnest....

I couldn’t dial up industrial designer Charles Harrison to interview him for this story. The man behind the ubiquitous plastic trash can, the futuristic 3-D View-Master, the beehive-bonnet Jiffy-Jet hair dryer, and so many more irresistible versions of familiar 20th-century products died November 29 in Santa Clarita, California, where he’d lived for the last few years, at the age of 87. Born in Louisiana in 1931 and raised in Texas and Arizona, where his father taught industrial arts at the only black high school in the then segregated state, Harrison was a smart kid, but he struggled with what was later diagnosed as dyslexia, and floundered as a 16-year-old economics major at the City College of San Francisco....

A jovial crowd celebrated a string of victories Tuesday night as Jesus “Chuy” Garcia appeared headed to congress and other Latinx candidates won, too.

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 16, 2016. How Chicagoans have been “living with lead”—and what they can do it fight it Lead is a dangerous toxin that has deeply affected generations of Chicagoans, even if they didn’t realize at the time. City Bureau and South Side Weekly‘s fascinating new series examines how lead has changed the lives of some Chicagoans, and what we can do to stop its harmful effects....

Attitude is essential to selling a punk play, but Nothing Without a Company’s production of Sharon Krome’s Throatpunch doesn’t deliver on the promise of its aggressive title. Flat performances plague this tale of three young punks holed up in a small apartment in 1983 Chicago, where they play bad music, experiment with drugs, and hook up in different configurations. The script demands a level of intensity that the ensemble fails to reach, and the actors are still at the line-reading stage rather than fully embodying characters....

Part three of this year’s countdown begins below. You can read about picks 40 through 31 here and picks 30 through 21 here. 16. Kendrick Lamar, Damn (Top Dawg/Interscope) On his latest album, Kendrick Lamar strips down the layers of samples and beats that usually support his complex rhymes, leaving behind something simpler and more direct, with more overtly head-nodding grooves—but otherwise his music remains as dense, confrontational, and lyrical as ever....

No song from the early years of Chicago hip-hop occupies a place quite like Sugar Ray Dinke’s “Cabrini Green Rap.” It’s not the first Chicago rap record—depending on whose story you believe, that honor goes to Casper’s 1980 EP Casper’s Groovy Ghost Show (reputedly recorded by a New Yorker visiting Chicago) or Eye Beta Rock’s 1982 12-inch “Super Rock Body Shock.” Dinke’s single didn’t come out till 1986, but it can lay claim to another first: unlike the handful of local records that preceded it, “Cabrini Green Rap” combined Chicago-centric subject matter with modest success outside the city....

It’s been more than 38 years since the Flesh Eaters released their acclaimed second album, 1981’s A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die. But the classic version of the ragtag rockabilly group that made that recording—which included founder and front man Chris Desjardins (aka Chris D.), John Doe and DJ Bonebrake of X, Dave Alvin and Bill Bateman of the Blasters, and Steve Berlin of Los Lobos—returned to the studio last year to produce a new full-length, I Used to Be Pretty (Yep Roc)....