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Correction: This item has been updated to include details about Renaldo Domino’s new Colemine Records single “No Laggin’ and Draggin’,” whose upcoming release the show celebrates. In a just and perfect world, Renaldo Domino would be as widely revered as legendary Chicago soul greats Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, and Gene Chandler. In my opinion, the only reason the south-side native isn’t a household name is that he simply didn’t get as many chances to record as some of his peers....

Earlier this year Strut Records released Ghetto Madness, a collection of material from recently revived Chicago electronic label Dance Mania. Ghetto Madness is Strut’s second compilation of tracks from the label that birthed ghetto house; it follows last year’s Hardcore Traxx, a 24-track release spanning the years 1986 to 1997. The 15 songs on Ghetto Madness are drawn from Dance Mania’s 90s catalog, and the tunes are made by many of the producers whose raunchy and raw dance cuts transformed ghetto house into an underground phenomenon....

Hannah Ii-Epstein hunches over when she talks, her voice soft and vaguely otherworldly, but her eyes are sharp and deep, and she looks you straight in the eye as she speaks, picking her words with a care that makes it clear she packs meaning in every syllable she emits. Her plays are the same way. Their stories unfold with a misleading informality, accentuated by the fact that most of Ii-Epstein’s characters speak Hawaiian pidgin English, the creolized mix of English, Hawaiian, Cantonese, Japanese, and other Asian and Pacific Island languages that is spoken by everyday Hawaiians....

Every few years there seems to be a wave of think pieces that herald a new age of “women in rock.” That’s great in principle, but in practice, writers have often bolstered their case for the latest wave by erasing the many, many women who’ve led the way for it, which results in an ahistorical mess that throws generations of women rockers under the tour bus. Cherie Currie and Brie Darling aren’t having it....

There’s a very real Chicago thing that happens in early-stage relationships where you have to decide if the person is worth leaving your neighborhood for. As you get older it switches to worth leaving the house for. — Salem Collo-Julin (@hollo) August 6, 2020 You would have thought I tweeted the cure for cancer or something. Never seen so many of you respond with so much gusto, either for or against the idea of someone being “Geographically Desirable” (a tip of the hat to previous Reader contributor Ted Cox for bringing that up)....

Chung Ha’s unmistakable ferocity is palpable immediately upon hearing her music or watching her videos. She’s among the biggest K-pop artists of the moment, and her rise to stardom wasn’t exactly a surprise. She was introduced to the world on the reality show Produce 101, and her first audition was a major highlight—the judges immediately recognized her as a star in the making. Chung Ha eventually became one of the program’s 11 winners and ended up in the resulting K-pop group, I....

Last Flag Flying, now entering its second week in Chicago theaters, reminds me of Neil Young’s 1990 album Ragged Glory. It’s a rough, but casual, meditation on American themes, made with relaxed, subtle mastery. If the film feels a bit underwhelming on first encounter, I suspect it will gain from repeat viewings—it’s full of subtle characterizations and charming grace notes, and these things can become more resonant once they’re more familiar....

Approaching the halfway point of 2015, one local hip-hop release has taken up an unexpected slot in my rotation: Ty Money’s Cinco De Money. I say “unexpected” because I initially balked when the rapper dropped this mixtape on May 5. The title and its corresponding release date initially struck me as cheesy, and it took a couple weeks to get past my knee-jerk reaction and give it a full listen. Somewhere down the line I found myself cycling back to Cinco De Money on a daily basis....

No one is better at intimate than Writers Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam, who made a 50-seat playhouse out of the back of a Glencoe bookstore, grew it over two decades into what the Wall Street Journal has called the best drama company in the country, and is about to move it into a $31 million home designed by starchitect Jeanne Gang. They had wound up in Glencoe by chance. Someone introduced Halberstam to Pat Rahmann, who was a partner in the bookstore and was looking for someone to host play readings there....

Gossip Wolf somehow failed to cover local trad-metal masterminds Satan’s Hallow before they went on hiatus in 2017, but thankfully four of that band’s five members kept going as Midnight Dice. If you enjoy banging your head till it falls off, cutting the sleeves off denim jackets, and making out with a hottie while blasting Dokken, then you’ll dig Midnight Dice’s new five-song EP, Hypnotized. This wolf especially loves the delightfully punishing “Starblind,” with Mandy Martillo’s lacerating vocals and a ripping solo from guitarist Steve “Lethal” Beaudette....

If you’ve ever seen Chicago ensemble Chandeliers, you’ve seen Scott McGaughey hunched behind a bunch of black boxes and patch cords. Chandeliers have long taken an ecumenical approach to electronic music, weaving together clattering drum programs, squelchy funk punctuations, and long, proggy melodies; the closest they get to a rule is that hardware, not software, determines the sounds. Synthesizers are also the dominant sound source on McGaughey’s first solo LP, but he’s swapped Chandeliers’ frequently lengthy jams for carefully layered constructions that sneak hints of complicated emotions into their catchy tunes....

You know that ominous, quasi-psychedelic, galvanizing music that plays when they introduce the Bulls before home games? Well, the band that created that song is playing Saint Charles on Friday. It’s the Alan Parsons Project, consisting of the man whom the band is named after, keyboardist Eric Woolfson, and a rotating cast of session musicians; Parsons is arguably more famous for being an engineer on and important contributor to the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon....

This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout....

One of the easier riddles to solve in Rupert Holmes’s 1985 musical comedy is why so few theater companies ever seem to produce it. Its orchestral and vocal bars to entry are significant—in true 80s Broadway form, Holmes’s score mashes up operatic arias and ornate harmonic chord progressions with toe-tappy, whistle-able melodies. Its required cast size can be prohibitively large for smaller companies, its plot is often inscrutable, its humor is irony-free, and its obscure source material—Charles Dickens’s last work—is literally unfinished....

M. Spencer Green/AP Photos Senator Mark Kirk oozes south-side cred. Oh, come on! It’s not just privileged, conservative white men who think it’s funny to affect the patois of people they’re not remotely like. It’s also my Sunday-morning crowd at Julius Meinl—privileged, liberal white men. It’s people of color I’ve eavesdropped on when I was supposed to be oblivious to their existence. It’s shocking, but I believe women do it too, and even the virtuous young raised from the cradle to atone for the insensitivities of their elders....

As the March gubernatorial primary approaches, two candidates have now expressed support for repealing Illinois’s Rent Control Preemption Act—a 1997 law that prohibits municipalities from enacting any form of regulation on residential or commercial rent prices. This week state senator Daniel Biss and wealthy businessman J.B. Pritzker spoke in support of a house bill that would lift the ban and allow local governments to grapple with the issue of rent control....

Local multimedia collective FeelTrip started out in 2011, running a South Loop DIY venue in a loft supposedly once occupied by the band Disturbed. Since then the collective, now anchored by David Beltran and Diana Bowden, has become home to a wider variety of projects. FeelTrip makes eye-catching apparel, including excellent shirts printed with a mashup of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures cover and the Air Jordan Jumpman logo; it presents events, such as a monthly dance night at Slippery Slope called Reptilian; and it releases records, among them Paul Cherry’s debut album, Flavour, which came out a few months before the local indie-rocker played the 2018 Pitchfork Music Festival....

Below the Belt, written by Richard Dresser and presented by Hundo4u Productions at Redtwist Theatre, follows Dobbitt (John Hundrieser) and Hanrahan (Michael Lomenick), mismatched roommates who work as “checkers” at a mysterious company in a far-off time and place. Confined to a compound, they desire purpose and connection in an environment that promotes conformity and constant productivity. At first the show relies on familiar tropes to situate the pair as enemies....

Full Disclosure With Eric Barry fulldisclosurepodcast.com Full Disclosure doesn’t just talk about sex, baby. Raw, raunchy, and touching, the local podcast takes an intelligent and humorous approach to discussing all things between the sheets, in dungeons, and in the news. Shows frequently touch on trans issues, masturbation, erotica (writing and film), sex work, BDSM, feminism, nonmonogamy. Host Eric Barry, a writer and comedian, brought along the podcast that he founded in San Francisco in 2012 when he moved to Chicago last year....

Chris Kyle, the U.S. Navy SEAL whose autobiography inspired this Clint Eastwood drama, was shot to death in February 2013—not in Iraq, where he earned the distinction of being the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history, with 160 confirmed kills, but at a Texas shooting range more than three years after his honorable discharge. An advocate for veterans, Kyle had gone to the range with Eddie Ray Routh, a 25-year-old former marine who suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder and who now faces murder charges for allegedly killing Kyle and his friend Chad Littlefield....