Posts

In a recent article for the London Review of Books titled “You Are the Product,” John Lanchester takes a rather skeptical view of Facebook and Google, arguing that these sites don’t exist to bring people together or provide information, but rather to collect data on their users that they can sell to advertisers. Lanchester goes so far as to deem Facebook “the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind,” adding “it knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government agent has ever known about its citizens....

On a mild morning in early May, two teenage boys sat on the porch of a house in West Humboldt Park on busy Chicago Avenue. From there, they could see a string of abandoned stores, boarded up and painted in bright colors. Occasionally, a CTA bus would pass in front of them, carrying commuters from the distant edges of the city to the Magnificent Mile shopping district eight miles to the east....

After my first listen to last year’s, Forever Neverland (Columbia), the latest full-length from Danish singer-songwriter MØ I realized that I had stumbled into a bizarre experiment. When I listened to the electro-pop album on Spotify, I hardly noticed the typically disruptive between-song ads (no, I don’t have a Spotify subscription—what of it?). I read this result a couple of different ways, neither wholly negative or positive. Ultimately, though the record is being spun as a sort of art-pop tour de force in line with the work of luminaries such as Grimes, it’s mostly just a bunch of middle-of-the-road club bangers....

“There’s no reason a mother should be burying her kid,” the mother of Marc Anthony Nevarez, who was killed by the police last October, shouted into the microphone. “Enough is enough! We need justice!” Her hands shook, her eyes glistened with tears. The anger and pain in her voice was palpable. She was still grieving. Surrounding the Logan Square monument, speakers including Únete La Villita organizer Karina Solano, police torture survivor Mark Clements, and the families of police shooting victims, blasted racist and violent tactics by the city’s cops and a lack of meaningful action by powerful local politicians, including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who made an early appearance at the protest....

Matchess It’s always nice when a solo project comes into its own, and Whitney Johnson, aka Matchess, has taken off into the stratosphere. Better known as the singer and violist of psychedelic Krautrockers Verma, Johnson has been performing as Matchess for years, using prepared tapes, delay-treated vocals, minimal beats, cosmic keys, and viola to pursue her interests in the paranormal and sound art. To make a lazy comparison, she sounds like Nico of Velvet Underground fame lost in the darkest regions of outer space....

In 2013 mathy Chicago emo band Mountains for Clouds dropped their debut album, Maybe It’s Already Everywhere, just as the scene underwent major changes. Fourth-wave emo was on the rise, and went on to become the toast of indie rock: emerging bands started selling out midsize venues that reunited indie-rock veterans often struggled to fill, and several fourth-wave groups issued era-defining albums, among them the Hotelier, the World Is a Beautiful Place, and Foxing....

The premise of Gary Younge’s new book Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (which will be released on October 4 by Nation Books) is both very simple and very chilling: on any given day, on average, seven children age 19 and younger will be shot to death somewhere in this country. Younge chose a random date, November 23, 2013, and set out to find all the kids who died from gunshots that day and document their lives....

Black Button Eyes Productions presents the Chicago premiere of Dave Malloy’s 2014 song cycle, which gleefully compels four friends to shape-shift through centuries of haunted evocations of love, longing, loss, and friendship. In a brisk 90 minutes presenting more than 24 numbers introduced as tracks on four “sides” (like a double LP), this utterly absorbing show (directed by Ed Rutherford) manages to name-check Edgar Allan Poe, Thelonious Monk, Little Red Riding Hood, the Arabian Nights, and untold other poetics of the human condition while hardly breaking a sweat....

If you’ve ever wondered what Motown would sound like if it had been born not in Detroit but on the streets of Karachi or Kingston or in the surf dens of late-60s southern California, you might like Houston collective Khruangbin. On their new third album, Mordechai, bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, guitarist Mark Speer, and drummer DJ Johnson (their band name is the Thai word for airplane, which directly translates to “engine fly”) bank the soul-infused psychedelia and transnational rhythms of Khruangbin’s previous efforts in favor of an unrushed but risk-taking approach, which uses more of Ochoa’s powerfully reflective lyrics....

Gossip Wolf is pretty keen on local DIY label Grandpa Bay, which just reached a milestone on Friday with its 39th and 40th releases: Lemonade, by Evasive Backflip multi-­instrumentalist and vocalist Jamarcus, and Lately, You, by Chicago indie outfit This Is Lorelei. Both releases are available on cassette, and the cover art for each poses a different young man in the same coat and sunglasses, lying on his back with his eyes closed and surrounded by music gear and a giant clock....

Lucinda Williams writes raw, visceral songs filled with beaten-down people liberating themselves from bullies. “I changed the name of this town / So you can’t follow me down,” she sings on “Changed the Locks,” from her 1988 self-titled album. Her new record, Good Souls Better Angels, takes on similar demons, though its antagonists don’t just pick on individuals but seek out victims on a global scale. Williams snarls truth to power on “Man Without a Soul,” a protest song that recalls Phil Ochs: “All the money in the world will never fill that hole,” she sings to an unidentified man (she recently told NPR that she thinks of her target as Donald Trump, but he could just as easily be Mitch McConnell or anyone else who uses their power to abuse others)....

Tomorrow night at 8 PM, Chicago Filmmakers will screen the 2010 documentary Mountains That Take Wing as part of their ongoing “Dyke Delicious” series. The film is subtitled “Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama: A Conversation on Life, Struggles, and Liberation,” which more or less sums up its content. Directors C.A. Griffith (who will take part in a Skype conversation with the audience before the film) and H.L.T. Quan assembled the movie from two encounters between Davis and Kochiyama—one shot in 1996, the other in 2008—in which the legendary activists reflected on their experiences and political beliefs....

Vibraphonist Mulatu Astatke has a seamless way of fusing the music of his native Ethiopia with jazz and Latin music (and you can hear a little bit of R&B in that mix too). On paper this esoteric brew might seem like an acquired taste, but in reality it’s just one worldly step away from Lonnie Liston Smith, Atlantic-era Les McCann, or any other 70s musician who tweaked jazz to follow popular tastes without watering down their sounds....

Last year pianist Brad Mehldau dropped Blues and Ballads (Nonesuch), the first new album in four years from his long-running trio featuring bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. In recent years his admirable artistic reach has resulted in electronically driven jazz-funk with drummer Mark Giuliani and thoughtful duets with expansive bluegrass mandolinist Chris Thile, on which he even sang a little (something I don’t need to hear again). For me, this trio remains his best vehicle, where his introspection and melodic grandeur achieve their most sublime platform....

Since they got their start in Philadelphia’s underground scene in the early 2000s, Los Angeles-based band Man Man have been an undeniably unique voice in off-the-wall rock ’n’ roll. Led by singer, songwriter, and pianist Ryan Kattner (aka Honus Honus), known for his idiosyncratic sing-scream vocal style, Man Man spent their first decade morphing from a group specializing in oddball Tom Waits-ian tunes with a vaudeville vibe into a decidedly polished pop ensemble with a broad approach....

The posi vibes of bop can spread like a Dlow viral video, but for all the times the dance and its music have lit up parties or landed on TV, they seem to have hit a glass ceiling when it comes to public familiarity. Sure, Dlow’s “Bet You Can’t Do It Like Me” keeps growing—the bop king’s latest video is closing in on 50 million YouTube views. But a recent Wall Street Journal profile on Dlow makes it sound like his dance moves and his music sprang into being without precedent, which is a frustrating level of ignorance to see from such a respected outlet....

When Leela James released her first album, A Change Is Gonna Come (Warner Bros.), in summer 2005, she was widely heralded as the newest incarnation of the classic soul diva from times gone by. This would be a lot of hype for anyone to live up to, but James obviously had the chops to do it. She was right in the vanguard of the entire neosoul trip of that era, and since then, she’s enjoyed fairly steady success....

Mike Sula Pholourie, Taste of Trinidad My friends over at LTHForum beat me to the punch about Taste of Trinidad, a new spot in Rogers Park that brings the number of places in the city where you can access the food of Trinidad and Tobago up to precisely two. That the menus are almost identical might have something to do with the fact that Grand Boulevard’s excellent Cafe Trinidad is owned by the brother of ToT’s proprietor, according to Taco Scholar Titus Ruscitti....

Nat Gelb grew up in a house off a dirt road in a tiny town in upstate New York. “Really off the grid,” he says. His family never went to restaurants; his parents cooked all their food. When he moved to New York City, he says, “I was blown away by all the amazing restaurants, but I missed being able to form a human connection to the people who were making the food I was eating....

Ted Cruz was first out of the gate among the Republican presidential contenders insisting that President Obama should keep his hands off the nomination of Antonin Scalia’s successor. “Justice Scalia was an American hero,” Cruz tweeted, when the news of Scalia’s death was an hour old. “We owe it to him, & the Nation, for the Senate to ensure that the next President names his replacement.” Scalia would have been a more influential justice, pundits have observed, if he’d been more political, forming coalitions and seeking middle ground....