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On Thursday night Chicago experimental trio Bitchin Bajas perform their entrancing score to the Olivia Wyatt film Sailing a Sinking Sea live during a screening at the Den Theatre. The trio has worked previously with the bicoastal filmmaker, who specializes in a kind of experimental ethnographic work, portraying remote cultures in a poetic, abstract way that illuminates her subjects while leaving some of their mystery intact. Sailing a Sinking Sea focuses on the Moken, a tiny ethnic group that inhabits coastal areas around islands in Thailand and Myanmar....

On February 20 a scrappy bunch of teachers from the North Lawndale and Urban Prep charter schools took to the streets to announce they were trying to form a union. As you may recall, charter schools are publicly financed, privately run institutions that in most cases are not unionized. They’re also supported by a lot of rich and powerful business titans who are of the decidedly antiunion persuasion. As always, the views expressed in this column are not necessarily shared by anyone else at the Chicago Reader, most notably its owners....

Bleacher Bums This genially rowdy made-in-Chicago comedy—created by and for the fabled Organic Theater Company in 1977 at the instigation of ensemble member Joe Mantegna (now star of TV’s Criminal Minds)—focuses on a cadre of Chicago Cubs fans inhabiting the cheap seats at Wrigley Field during a game between the Cubs and the Saint Louis Cardinals. Responding to the unseen action on the ballfield below, a motley crew of day-game regulars cheer the home team, heckle the opposition, and challenge each other to increasingly high-stakes bets....

Donald Trump made his blood-curdling call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. So last week the Reader checked in with Hoda Katebi, communications coordinator for the Chicago chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, to see how her group—and the Chicago area’s 400,000-some Muslims—may be bracing for Trump’s presidency. Yeah. It’s been fairly well documented. At UIUC a Muslim girl was threatened....

Scott Olson/Getty Images Jesus Garcia, after voting Tuesday morning at Corkery Elementary in Little Village In the three months of campaigning leading up to Tuesday, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia really couldn’t tell if he was catching on with voters. The county commissioner was greeted warmly when he was out shaking hands, but, he wondered, what did that mean? Was everyone just being nice? He spent most of the morning greeting voters outside polling places on the southwest side....

Twenty-one years after releasing their debut album, Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes, emotional posthardcore sextet Cursive resurfaced in 2018 with their first LP in six years. Vitriola (15 Passenger), which came out in October, isn’t just a collection of their catchiest and most cutting songs in a decade; it’s a callback to the sound of the band’s 2003 breakout, The Ugly Organ, on which they paired discordant but infectious melodies with strings, keyboard, brass, and more....

Chicago singer-songwriter Daniel Knox knows how to write a heartbreaker—which in his case could actually mean a protagonist who digs into a lover’s chest cavity to pinch off an artery. The title track from his new album, Chasescene (H.P. Johnson Presents), kicks off with an uneasy sentiment: “Darling, I love you by the neck / In this hopeless broken wreck / I love you by the neck.” Which is promptly followed by an even darker declaration: “I love you in the ground / You’re naked and you can’t make a sound / I love you in the ground....

Dan Bejar, aka Destroyer, is well-known for being a “literary” act. The description is fitting: front man Dan Bejar’s lyrics feel like symbolist poetry, with lines of varying lengths crammed with allusions to history, film, and—especially—pop music stacked on top of each other like records in a wobbling tower. Furthermore, Destroyer albums tend to commit to a single style, such as cheesy MIDI-pop on Your Blues (2004) and late-70s Al Stewart LPs on Kaputt (2011), so that each one is distinct from the others; listening to them in succession actually seems like reading different volumes in a set of books....

Every Saturday in March, electronic-music website Resident Advisor hosts a spectacular residency at local club and dance-music institution Smart Bar. The residency is part of a yearlong RA programming effort dedicated to 12 of the finest dance clubs in the world, each of which gets a month of its own. Last Saturday was no joke, with DJ Nobu, Eric Cloutier, and Jeff Derringer, but starting tomorrow the bookings get turned up a notch....

When Common dropped Black America Again on Friday, Vulture published an interview with the Chicago rapper that said his 11th album was “perfectly timed for release on November 4.” I’ve turned that phrase over in my head ever since. What makes a recording that’s meant to become part of peoples’ lives “perfect” for a single day? Why should an album that recalls centuries of injustice only hold our attention during an election cycle?...

Few lyrics are as emblematic of drill as “Fredo in the cut / That’s a scary sight,” from Chief Keef’s 2012 breakout hit “I Don’t Like.” Guest rapper Lil Reese delivers the blunt, menacing lines with a hint of playfulness—and all those characteristics apply to the man they’re about. “Fredo” is Chicago rapper Fredo Santana, born Derrick Coleman. He’s there in the “I Don’t Like” video, bouncing around an apartment shirtless along with most of the rest of Keef’s GBE crew....

When Racetraitor formed in Chicago in the mid-90s, their uncompromisingly antiracist politics weren’t always warmly received in the hardcore scene, but after their breakup in 1999 their influence continued to spread (especially once drummer Andy Hurley joined occasional Racetraitor bassist Pete Wentz in Fall Out Boy in 2003). More than a decade later, the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement surrounding the Ferguson uprising and the white surpremacist agenda fueling Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign inspired Racetraitor to reunite to help combat the hate....

Hours before the New Year, Kanye West dropped a track called “Facts.” It begins with a 26-second sample of “Dirt and Grime,” a soul-funk number by D.C. group Father’s Children. (The tune appears on Who’s Gonna Save the World, recorded in 1973 but unreleased till the Numero Group put it out in 2011.) A shorter sample of “Dirt and Grime” closes “Facts,” but not before Kanye gives a shout-out to Timothy Jones, aka DJ Timbuck2, the Chicago hip-hop linchpin who passed away last month at 34....

Silence settled on City Council chambers Tuesday afternoon as zoning committee members voted narrowly to defeat an embattled proposal to build a new apartment building with 30 units of affordable housing near O’Hare airport. In a vote of seven to five, the committee sided with 41st Ward alderman Anthony Napolitano, who’s been trying to derail the project for the last year. Though it’s a loss for affordable housing advocates and the developer, the decision leaves opens the possibility of a federal court banning Chicago’s age-old practice of “aldermanic prerogative....

Julia Thiel Making bread has always seemed a little bit intimidating. People talk about how simple it is, and then write recipes with terms like “autolyse” and “preferment.” But several years after the rest of the U.S. caught on to the wonders of no-knead bread, I finally tried it and discovered, like the thousands who’d tried it before me, that it really is simple and delicious. I’ve been making it regularly for a year or so, but hadn’t branched out much beyond that....

It’s just a coincidence that Happy Death Day hit movie theaters not long before Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his 2018 budget with a big speech before the City Council. The film is a grisly Groundhog Day in which a college student wakes up over and over again to the same day that culminates in her getting murdered. Her challenge is to decipher the murderer’s identity and kill him before he kills her again....

If you’d seen any Pivot Gang rappers performing in the last nine months without knowing they belonged to the local hip-hop collective, you’d have soon caught on based on two phrases they pepper throughout their time onstage: “Pivot Gang” (obviously) and “Long live John Walt.” Walt, the Pivot cofounder and rapper-singer born Walter Long Jr. (he changed his stage name to Dinner With John in 2016) was stabbed to death on February 8....

Great DJs keep their ears open to the world, and Duane Powell knows how to listen. He’s been plugged into local music since 1983, when he went to his first party at Mendel High School, a famed incubator for the city’s house scene. Within a couple years, he’d landed a street-promotions gig for house DJ Lil Louis, and in 1990 he worked for the Reactor, a short-lived nightclub where techno luminary DJ Rush and house producer Ron Trent helped kick off a new era in local dance music....

This past Easter Sunday, Lou Della Evans-Reid walked across the stage at First Church of Deliverance, where the 89-year-old serves as a music adviser. Though she’s not quite four foot 11, when she leads that choir she transforms into a monumental presence. Dressed in a white robe, she stood underneath an illuminated cross and opened her arms wide like Moses parting the Red Sea, summoning a hundred singers to follow her....

The University of Chicago Folklore Society has been booking marquee acts at its annual winter Folk Festival since 1960—the first one featured legends Roscoe Holcomb, the Stanley Brothers, Willie Dixon, and Elizabeth Cotten. Coming to Mandel Hall on Friday, February 14, and Saturday, February 15, the festival’s 60th edition includes Pennsylvania-born traditional bluegrass pickers Danny Paisley & the Southern Grass, Cajun accordion powerhouse the Jimmy Breaux Trio, Tennessee golden-era country squad Bill & the Belles, fiddle-piano duo Medicine Line (who specialize in music of the Métis people along the western U....