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Lee Ranaldo has always had literary predilections. During his years in Sonic Youth he was the guy who’d often unleash quasi-Beat language in carefully spoken rushes, and in recent years his solo projects have made it obvious that he was the source of his previous band’s classic-rock flirtations. Both of those qualities are slathered all over Electric Trim (Mute), his latest album with his working band the Dust—guitarist Alan Licht, bassist Tim Luntzel, and drummer Steve Shelley, his former Sonic Youth cohort....

“Rahm Emanuel wants to spend another $95 million on Chicago Police and we are fed up! We want schools for kids, not cops! We want police accountability, not more resources for the police. A fancy new building will not end racism. We want real safety in our communities. That means investing in programs and services like quality schools, quality health care, jobs for teens, childcare for all, living wages.” Some youth from Mitts’s ward disagree....

Chicago’s improvisational music community has launched plenty of transformational figures over the decades. But while iconic individuals such as Sun Ra, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill have all changed the way people around the world approach music, a thriving scene also needs players who keep the fires burning every week in local clubs. Keefe Jackson (tenor and sopranino saxophone), Jim Baker (piano and synthesizer), and Julian Kirshner (drums) have spent most of their careers playing regularly in Chicago....

Q: I met a guy right around the time my boyfriend dumped me. I met him on a dating site, but he was really only interested in my boobs and me giving him head. I really like having him in my life and he’s very attractive, but he won’t do anything with me other than let me give him head while he watches porn. I’m very insecure, so I feel like part of the reason this has been going on for so long is because I’ve never had someone so attractive be into me....

Q: My roommate is a gay man who is into getting fisted. A lot. We were FWBs until he moved into my place, at which point we agreed it would be better for us to not have sex anymore. It’s worked out fine, and he’s been here for a year. Here’s the problem: About two years ago, he got into fisting and he has someone over every night to fist him....

Natural realism has been the holy grail of animation since the 1920s, when Winsor McCay established the art of character animation with his groundbreaking Gertie the Dinosaur cartoons, and the 1930s, when Walt Disney elevated it to a new level with the supple, emotionally precise character movement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The quest lives on in the age of 3-D digital animation, when motion-capture technology offers a new frontier in creating hyperrealistic characters....

In a 2013 LA Weekly feature on the flurry of teenage rappers transforming hip-hop using no promotional machinery grander than their own Internet connections, writer Jeff Weiss took a particular interest in one MC: “The most gifted of them all might be Chester Watson, a 16-year-old phenom from St. Louis, who describes himself on Facebook as a ‘producer, playwright and rapper.’” Watson recorded his first mixtape at age 14, after abandoning an intense three-year study of ballet....

Eastland disaster footage On July 24, 1915, the Western Electric Company chartered the steamship SS Eastland to ferry a few thousand employees from downtown Chicago to a company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. Four stories tall and nearly the length of a football field, the Eastland was as spectacular as the Hindenburg—and just as poorly designed. It capsized on the Chicago River before it even launched, and 844 people died, the greatest loss of life from any tragedy in Chicago history....

Algren and Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All ​ The past year brought not one but two documentary portraits of Nelson Algren, the bard of Division Street: Michael Caplan’s Algren, which premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, and Mark Blottner, Ilko Davidov, and Denis Mueller’s Nelson Algren: The End Is Nothing, the Road Is All ​ , which debuted here at Gene Siskel Film Center in April....

While Chicago postpunk four-piece Deeper was working on the follow-up to their 2018 self-titled debut, guitarist Michael Clawson quit the band. The remaining members—guitarist-vocalist Nic Gohl, bassist Drew McBride, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti—wrapped up the album as a trio. This past fall, after they’d finished, Clawson took his own life. Many of the songs on the new Auto-Pain (Fire Talk) became memorials, informed by the bandmates’ experience with a close friend who privately wrestled with depression....

Chicago rapper Roy Kinsey has long known how to make it feel like his voice is the most important in the room. When he appeared on “Loverboy,” a track on Big Dipper’s 2013 Thick Life mixtape that’s anchored by a perfect Sade sample (an idea that came straight from Kinsey), his persona radiates so strongly that while he doesn’t exactly steal the spotlight, I think he comes pretty close. With February’s Blackie: A Story by Roy Kinsey (self-released), he asserts himself as an impeccable, observant lyricist....

While watching New Zealand’s Connan Mockasin play sensual, luxurious psych-pop at the Empty Bottle in 2014, Adam LP—who’s now been making seductive indie-pop songs as Wavy ID for a little over a year—had an epiphany: “I started rethinking different ways to make music, different sounds you can make, different kinds of emotions you can convey—you can be sexy, you can be gentle,” LP told me over the phone. “It seemed like in the [Chicago] music scene there was a lack of that....

Electric Guest’s cofounders, vocalist-instrumentalist Asa Taccone (a Danger Mouse mentee) and drummer-producer Matthew “Cornbread” Compton, like to say they met in 2011 when they both rented rooms in a Los Angeles house that essentially functions as a dorm for musicians. An October profile in Paper magazine suggests that Compton decided he wanted to collaborate after hearing Taccone’s music in the house, but their professional and personal lives had already intersected in other ways....

Even though Wayne Watts is fighting leukemia and is tethered to a dialysis machine three days a week, he frequently makes the 20-minute drive from his home in Hazel Crest to Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, to visit the grave of his nephew, Stephon. “I stand there and I talk to him,” says Watts. “I just tell him that we’re still here fighting for you.” After the incident the two officers were put on paid administrative leave....

When we first meet Jo March in director Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, she is standing outside the door of a newspaper office in New York as an adult, pausing to take a deep breath before entering, as she prepares to sell her first story to the editor. The most surprising performance comes from Florence Pugh, who portrays youngest sister Amy. In earlier adaptations and in the novel, she has typically been portrayed as a spoiled and vain child—from here Pugh transforms her into a smart and practical woman as an adult, who is almost similar to Ronan’s Jo in how deeply she feels the limitations placed on her as a woman....

As you may recall, my first run as a political talk show host didn’t end so well. It was a Thursday afternoon—December 27, 2018. I’d just finished a show and the station’s bosses called me to the conference room to say . . . “Get out—and don’t come back!” Making it worse—there was tons of stuff to talk about. I mean, just think about some of the wacky shit that went down in the weeks since I got fired....

This week I previewed a knockout bill on Saturday night at Thalia Hall that’s organized by the folks at International Anthem. As part of the show, powerful quintet Irreversibile Entanglements (with members in NYC, D.C., and Philadelphia) make their Chicago debut, celebrating the physical release of their self-titled album. I’ve previously written about the group’s galvanizing vocalist, inventive poet and sound artist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), but alto saxophonist and fellow Philadelphian Keir Neuringer is no less riveting on his own....

A lot has happened for country queen Kacey Musgraves since she last played Chicago, in the opening slot on Harry Styles’s 2018 tour. She presented at the Oscars, guest-judged an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and—oh yeah—won the Album of the Year Grammy for her third record, 2018’s Golden Hour. As pop music’s current golden girl, Musgraves is back on the road headlining the “Oh, What a World” tour. And as her star power rises, she seems poised between a before and an after, like that instant between lightning flash and thunderclap....

In December 2016, a fire ripped through Oakland arts space Ghost Ship, killing 36 residents and guests who were attending an underground electronic show. As the tragedy was picked up by mainstream media, misinformation and misrepresentation of DIY artists and venues resulted in a backlash felt across the country. Shortly after the fire, the Denver music community was hit hard when arts hub Rhinoceropolis was shut down without warning, displacing its occupants to face the high rents and gentrification that already threatened the city’s creative scene....

Steeped Emperor’s Lemon Saison is one of three Moody Tongue beers to start shipping in four-packs this month. The Reader has been on top of Moody Tongue from day one, though when I say “the Reader” I don’t mean Beer and Metal—I mean our food writer Michael Gebert. He’s thoroughly interviewed Jared Rouben, who left his position as head brewer at the Goose Island brewpubs in early 2013 to found this Pilsen operation....