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Three years ago, when Chance the Rapper‘s career went into hyperdrive after the release of Acid Rap, music sites had a field day pillaging the Internet for public traces of his history. It became almost a sport to “unearth” videos and mixtapes that featured Chance performing under a different name (he sometimes goes by “Chano”) or with his old band, Instrumentality. Of course, as so often happens during media feeding frenzies (which prize speed and quantity over nuance), sometimes the history surrounding those recordings would get distorted or lost....

A few days after the city finally got around to releasing the horrific video of a police officer shooting 13-year-old Adam Toledo, Mayor Lightfoot called for Chicago to come together and rally around her plan. The official reaction from Mayor Lightfoot and her editorial and corporate enablers went a little like: Shut up. Take your pay raise. And get back in those classrooms. If we wanted your opinion, we’d ask for it....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, December 4, 2017. Report: The generational fault lines in local Latino politico have emerged The unexpected departure of U.S. representative Luis Gutierrez last week has “brought to the surface some of the political fault lines that have long made it tough for Latino politicians in Chicago to speak with one voice,” according to the Tribune. In addition to the historic political tension between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and establishment and independent Latinos, there is a generational conflict brewing “as the next wave of Latino politicians is chafing against its elders’ hold on power while trying to take advantage of the district’s changing demographics to wrest control,” the newspaper wrote....

To explain why Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), playing this Wednesday in Doc Films’s valuable Satyajit Ray retrospective, is a masterpiece is a bit like explaining why flowers are beautiful: the film’s glories are so natural and self-evident that describing them feels redundant. One of the airiest of great movies, Days and Nights seems lightweight and plotless—yet it reveals countless insights into its characters, setting, and theme. Along with Aparajito (1956), Charulata (1964), and The Home and the World (1984), it represents the epitome of Ray’s talents—his ability to divine universal meaning from observations of local behavior, his nuanced approach to character, the way he makes time’s passing seem mellifluous—yet it displays these talents so modestly that you may not recognize them at first....

It’s hard to believe that a genre as vital to American popular music as country (and its cousin, country and western) had a bad rap for a while among many dwellers in major northern cities, who looked down their noses at what they mistook as simple tunes for the unsophisticated. Musical forms come and go, of course; for instance, the big-band era, born in the midst of the Depression, effectively ended with the close of World War II, yet its sound recently has been making a comeback....

In November, Chicago poet, teacher, and singer-songwriter Jamila Woods performed her 2016 debut album, Heavn, at the Harold Washington Cultural Center in Grand Boulevard. She brought in dozens of collaborators, including a youth choir, a small troupe of dancers, and a backing band. Several prominent young local poets of color, including Tasha, E’mon Lauren, and Eve Ewing, recited their work during interludes. The night paid tribute to contemporary Black Chicago and celebrated the joy its community can create....

On February 4, after a yearlong search, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago announced the appointment of Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell to the role of artistic director. A native of Baltimore, Fisher-Harrell began dancing at the age of 14. “My generation as a teenager was MTV. Michael Jackson was in his Thriller heyday. Beat It came out, Billie Jean. Solid Gold was on TV—Fame—Flashdance. I was surrounded by dance in popular culture in a really tangible way that was linked to adolescence....

Before the three main characters of the new video series Menace speak a single word, their phones buzz with an emergency alert: “Females seek shelter immediately. Attack in your area.” One thousand women in Chicago have been killed by a group of radical men’s rights activists, jokingly called GuySIS. Our heroes find themselves holed up in a tiny apartment, forced to rely on women they barely know for survival. And the whole story is told in 13 one-minute episodes on Instagram....

In the current issue of the Reader, Kathleen Sachs wrote an overview of this year’s African Diaspora International Film Festival, which continues through Thursday at Facets. This annual event provides as good an excuse as any to explore the great cinema produced by Africa and the people from its widespread diasporas. Of this cinema, the titles made by African American filmmakers understandably receive the most attention stateside, in part because the U....

For the past few weeks, Mayor Emanuel’s allies have been trying to bully Friends of the Parks into dropping its opposition to the Lucas Museum’s lakefront site by relentlessly lambasting the group as a bunch of elites who want to deprive “black and brown children” of a world-class facility. Anyway, in an attempt to offer an alternative view, allow me to wade into this fight by introducing you to Juanita Irizarry, the executive director of Friends of the Parks....

The term “minimalism” often conjures up white walls and bright lights—a defiant barrenness in a world steeped in chaos—but Chicago-based industrial duo Hide take their stark sounds to a far darker and more malevolent space. On the new Interior Terror, multi-instrumentalist Seth Sher (Coughs, Ga’an) and singer and visual artist Heather Gabel don’t attempt anything particularly complex or detailed, but they more than compensate with punishing volume and powerful messages—they use Gabel’s voice, field recordings, and a smokestack of electronic hardware (including a skipping Depeche Mode CD) to craft brutal social commentaries....

Looking at clothes is a form of time travel. In museum exhibits especially, where the clothes hang on headless mannequins, it’s entirely up to you to imagine the sort of woman who wore the narrow-skirted riding habit in 1880, or the man who wore the elaborately embroidered silk dressing gown—a banyan—in 1822, or maybe the girl who found it in the attic in 1910 and decided to appropriate it as her own....

If COVID-19 hadn’t shuttered all the theaters in town about a month ago, Scott Silberstein estimates that his company, HMS Media, “would have been in ten different theaters over five or six days, capturing everything possible.” Par for the course for HMS, which has recorded live performances of everything from small dance companies to touring Broadway productions over the years, as well as creating original documentaries about Second City and John Kander and Fred Ebb, the legendary songwriting team behind Cabaret and Chicago, for WTTW....

Among the contenders for the title “Best pizza” this year, you might have been surprised to see the name of Reader staff writer Leor Galil. How does a music writer become a pizza, you ask? Like many major happenings these days, the story starts with Twitter: while promoting Best of Chicago 2016, Leor tweeted that voters could write in any candidates they pleased—for example, they could nominate him for best pizza....

The first-ever Chicago Cocktail Summit, which took place recently at the Logan Theatre, offered so much information that my head’s still spinning (the drinks that accompanied each session probably contributed). It lasted two days: Sunday was devoted to home mixology, while Monday was aimed at bar and restaurant professionals. Each day was made up of four session blocks of several one-hour talks, with the starting times staggered so that you could stay for part of one lecture and then pop into another....

When Mayor Rahm left office, my friends and colleagues consoled me, as though I’d lost my reason for existence. And then, as if the TV gods were looking down on me, ABC hired Rahm as a contributor. And there he was last week, offering pre- and postdebate advice on what Democrats must do to defeat Donald Trump. As much as possible, go in the opposite direction of the way he recommends....

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded to COVID-19 swiftly by imposing a statewide shelter-in-place order on Saturday, March 21. But even at that point, Chicago music venues had already been dealing with the onrushing pandemic for more than a week. Venues began to cancel shows en masse on Thursday, March 12—the same night Goose Island sponsored citywide concerts (some of which went on as planned) as part of 312 Day. In short order, the torrent of tour cancellations and refund requests turned the live-music industry upside down....

Q: I am a pretty handsome gay (I have been told) and I am dating a gorgeous man. I am 34, and he is 31. I am bottom only, and he is top only—so it’s a good match. He seems sincerely interested in me and we are talking about being together. But here is the thing: He noticed that I have a rather small penis. I am under the average, and his dick is quite big and long....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Tuesday, November 22, 2016. Newly ordained Catholic cardinal Blase Cupich tackles gun violence, brings Pope Francis’s vision to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Governor Bruce Rauner, Senator Dick Durbin and Illinois supreme court justice Anne Burke were all at the Vatican in Rome over the weekend to watch Pope Francis officially make Blase Cupich a cardinal of the Catholic Church. The Atlantic published an interesting feature on Cupich’s important role in Chicago and his efforts to curb gun violence....

A&E Jaclyn pretends she’s not grossed out by her new husband, Ryan. There’s a groovy old Billy Joel song called “The Stranger,” and it’s all about how we reveal to other people, even our lovers, only what we want to be seen. We’re all hideous, selfish monsters hiding behind masks of decorum, empathy, intelligence, and charisma, not to mention superficial things like makeup, hairdos, and chemically whitened teeth. Is Billy Joel a cynic?...