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In the past decade, Chicago hip-hop has elevated many talented acts to the national stage, among them rapper-producer Tremaine Johnson, better known as Tree—and his wildly idiosyncratic sounds set him apart from most of those newly minted stars. The Cabrini-Green native specializes in calamitous productions whose tough-as-nails percussion frames honeyed vocal samples warped till they sound ghostly; it’s a style Tree calls “soul trap.” This sound enriches his storytelling, giving his worldly-wise perspective more heft and making the detailed snapshots from his youth feel as tangible as flesh....

“Literally everyone has a podcast,” says Chicago Podcast Festival producer Elizabeth Amdahl. She’s not far from wrong. When all you really need is a recording device and a YouTube channel, it’s become easier for any- and everyone to become an audio star. The Chicago Podcast Festival is here to introduce you to at least a few of those luminaries—specifically, the funny ones. “Unfortunately, that was just the way this year panned out—sometimes booking podcasts and booking comedians and dealing with agents can be really tricky,” Amdahl says....

At the Chicago International Film Festival in October, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) announced local filmmaker Daniel Nearing as the first Independent Film Initiative (IFI) Filmmaker in Residence at the Chicago Film Office. As part of the yearlong residency, Nearing will direct an adaptation of the 1900 novel Sister Carrie, which will take place in Chicago, Paris, and Montreal. In addition to a $10,000 cash grant, Nearing will receive several other incentives from the Chicago Film Office, including a package of industry discounts on equipment rentals and permits, meeting space at the Chicago Cultural Center, and advisory assistance from a team of industry professionals....

Some filmmakers—be they full-fledged auteurs or studio journeymen—seem to reinvent themselves regularly, whether consciously or out of necessity, each new film different from the last. On the other hand, there are filmmakers whose oeuvres are remarkably consistent, exploring the same formal, thematic, and emotional terrain over and over again, to varied effect. A recent example of this kind of filmmaker is the American independent writer-director Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt’s seven features contain numerous throughlines and comprise an astoundingly lucid body of work....

Raven Theatre’s Cold Town/Hotline, the Chicago holiday play it commissioned from writer and director Eli Newell, features one extraordinary kid actor—fifth-grader Jonah Kaufman—and the mostly happy ending requisite for family-friendly Christmas-season shows. Ah, yes. The grocery store. But Menendian told me, “That’s not really true. They wanted to celebrate us [at a gala, etc]. And we did not want to be celebrated, given the acrimonious terms under which we left. But it had nothing to do with saying ‘please eliminate our names from the history of Raven....

It’s been five years since Pittsburgh instrumental duo Zombi released Shape Shift. In May, they whetted the appetites of their long-suffering fans with the single “Breakthrough & Conquer,” which features guitar solos from Trans Am’s Philip Manley, and this month multi-instrumentalist Steve Moore and drummer A.E. Paterra have officially slid back onto the scene with a new sixth album, 2020—a 40-minute joy of crunchy riffs and beautifully layered electronics. Zombi’s music tends to fall across a dichotomy between the aesthetic of 70s art-house horror films on one hand and muscular, sci-fi-inflected hard rock and space rock on the other....

Thinkstock Is it unethical to snoop? I don’t think so. The weekly conversation among the Ethicists in the Sunday New York Times Magazine is usually pretty interesting, but the one this past weekend surprised me with its opacity. The upshot is our correspondent has the valuable ring and it’s burning a hole in his pocket. What’s more, he spotted a notice on Craigslist asking for a reward for a missing ring and he’s pretty sure it’s the ring he’s got....

The true mark of a musical icon might be the power to move intergenerational audiences with a signature song, even decades after its original release. Take soul legend Gladys Knight: she often ends her concerts with the 1973 hit “Midnight Train to Georgia,” a tribute to those who follow their dreams and fail. Born in Atlanta, Knight had her first brush with fame in 1952, when at age seven she sang on the TV show Original Amateur Hour (a precursor to the likes of America’s Got Talent)....

Album artwork for Rebel Heart We’re barely a week into 2015, and Madonna may have already embarked on the most tasteless album campaign of 2015. In anticipation of her 13th album, Rebel Heart, tentatively set for release on March 9, the longstanding pop icon posted a series of images to Instagram and Twitter depicting political figures like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr. wearing the ropes that bind Madonna’s face on the record’s cover....

A few weeks ago saw the rerelease of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing on the occasion of the film’s 30th anniversary. In addition to being one of the great American films, it’s also one of the movies that best captures the feeling of summer heat. Cinematographer Ernest Dickerson, when I interviewed him a few years ago, explained that he and Lee achieved this effect by eliminating any “cool” colors from the film’s palette and by using the brightest lights they could find to shoot the daytime scenes; the mounting feelings of anger and frustration become palpable through the filmmakers’ aesthetic choices....

I sometimes wonder if Mr. Bungle have been trolling their fans since day one. Their self-titled debut full-length, released in 1991 by Warner Brothers, is a blur of funk, ska, world music, and death metal that flips from Morbid Angel-influenced riffs to zany circus music and back on a dime. Formed by high school friends in Eureka, California, in the mid-80s, these legendary genre hoppers (the understatement of the century) introduced the world to wildly prolific vocalist and composer Mike Patton, though he got famous first with Faith No More—he’d landed a side gig with that better-established band in 1988, and when they broke out, it helped Mr....

UPDATE Saturday, March 14: this event has been canceled. Refunds available at point of purchase. To get an idea of just how convoluted the legal and moral attitudes toward sex work are in the United States—the self-professed global leader of civil liberties—consider the 2017 trial of Jeffrey Hurant. Under arrest for his role as CEO of RentBoy.com, Hurant stood before a judge in federal district court, who praised his contributions to the queer community, namely, providing a safer avenue for escorts to manage their own business....

Pipeworks partners Kaighan Pigott, Gerrit Lewis, and Will Johnston Like a lot of Chicago beer weenies, I got pretty heated up about Pipeworks Brewing in their early days. Heck, I started writing about them almost two years before anybody could buy their beer—first to review their appearance at Goose Island’s Stout Fest in March 2010, then again in December of that year, when they were raising funds on Kickstarter. In June 2011, I included Pipeworks in the Reader‘s Best of Chicago issue, declaring them the Best Craft Brewery That Doesn’t Exist Yet....

Twenty years ago, rye whiskey was all but dead in the U.S., having long since fallen out of favor. In 2009 Imbibe magazine published a prescient piece titled “The Comeback Kid: Rye Whiskey,” noting the spirit’s current lack of popularity and predicting its imminent return. In the article, a representative for Heaven Hill distillery—which at the time was making three brands of rye, including the now much-beloved Rittenhouse—was quoted as saying, “We spill more bourbon in a day than we sell rye in a year....

As is usual during pretrial hearings in the case against former Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, advocates for police reform packed the pews in Judge Vincent Gaughan’s courtroom last Thursday. Among them was 45-year-old Tyrone Williams, an activist with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. Though Van Dyke, who faces first-degree murder charges for shooting and killing 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in October 2014, was the center of attention, plenty of other defendants were also waiting for hearings in front of Gaughan....

Listening to music causes our brains to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that increases our ability to feel pleasure and motivation. It can also positively impact heart rate (among other functions) and help control nausea, which is especially helpful when every day brings a new litany of disgusting GOP malfeasance and cruelty. Though neuroscientists believe that any music you love can trigger these chemical changes, not all songs are equal in the “feel good” department....

When a band hit the road to celebrate a milestone anniversary of a monumental album, they’re of course trafficking in nostalgia—and the musicians usually share in that rosy glow with their fans. This tour by UK trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack is belatedly celebrating the 20th anniversary of their beloved third record, 1998’s Mezzanine (Virgin), but in this case the fans may be the only ones looking back fondly—the production of Mezzanine was plagued by intraband tensions, and it received middling reviews when it finally dropped several months after its long-anticipated release date....

I’m not a homesick Brit, but I’ve read enough English novels, both historical and contemporary, to feel like I could be one. There’s probably a German word to explain the feeling of nostalgia for things you’ve only read about but never experienced in real life, and I felt a wave of this the first time I went to Spencer’s Jolly Posh, when the cafe was still in its original location on Irving Park Road....

Community members are sounding the alarm at Weiss Memorial Hospital’s plans to sell a surface parking lot, which they say could signal a plan to shutter the Uptown hospital that boasts a novel surgery center for transgender patients. “I am thankful that the committee voted to delay the vote, which allowed us two weeks to gather feedback on the building’s design and send that to the developer,” she says. “It also allows more time for each of the members of the zoning and development committee to be able to outreach the neighbors that they each represent to see what their feedback is about this proposal....

Correction: This story has been updated to correctly reflect the games for which Gordon McGladdery hired John Robert Matz to compose. No one had ever commissioned Babbitt to write music, and he’d never collaborated with people who didn’t make music themselves. “I had no idea what I was getting into,” he says. “It was like, ‘Why wouldn’t I want to write a couple pieces of music for this thing and get paid a bit of money?...