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An hour before BTS started Saturday’s sold-out show at Soldier Field, the stadium was already ringing with fanchants, shrieks, and sing-alongs, even though at that point the crowd had little to respond to besides the music videos playing on the giant screens flanking the stage. The BTS ARMY, as the fandom of the seven-member South Korean pop band is known, has a reputation for the intensity of its devotion, and it was on full display all night....

In a recent interview with Minnesota Public Radio host Andrea Swensson, rapper Chad Heslup (aka Longshot) talked about his history of involvement in protest movements since moving from Chicago to Minneapolis 11 years ago. He was inspired to join his first march after Minneapolis police shot and killed 24-year-old Jamar Clark in November 2015, and he returned to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin on May 25....

I was unfamiliar with the work of Chinese director Feng Xiaogang before I saw Youth, which is now playing in its third week at the AMC River East. But based on this film—a handsome and sweeping period drama that looks at national history from the end of the Cultural Revolution to the mid-1990s—I can understand why Feng is sometimes called “China’s Spielberg.” Youth is formally impressive and heavy-handed: it’s clearly designed to be a crowd-pleaser....

When I first wrote about vocalist and songwriter Ella Leya in 2001, she was living in the Chicago area and promoting a new CD of her own music, Queen of Night. That recording was a mix of her many influences: American jazz, blues, and pop; Russian folk and classical music; Turkish and Persian poetry; and the mugam vocal tradition of her homeland, Azerbaijan. She had emigrated from her oil-rich native country a decade earlier, divorced the husband she left behind, remarried, and lost a son to leukemia....

Matthew Shipp can’t have had his own playing in mind when he named his latest record The Unidentifiable. With his powerful command of the grand piano’s lowest notes, his adroit manipulation of its sustain pedal, and the complex harmonies nurtured by his prodigious technique, he obtains a massive and instantly recognizable sound. The New Yorker can create extraordinary space and movement within a dense sonic field, and it’s made him an essential accompanist to saxophonists such as Ivo Perelman and David S....

On July 27, Governor J.B. Pritzker repealed the state’s 32-year-old HIV criminalization statute—a law that overwhelmingly impacted Black people in Cook County—making Illinois just the second state in the nation to make such a sweeping change. Illinois’s HIV criminalization bill was originally passed in 1989 at the height of the AIDS crisis and has been been harshly criticized since its inception as discriminatory, anti-science, and homophobic. Research shows that laws like Illinois’s— which up until this week made exposing someone to HIV without their knowledge a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison—actually discourage testing for HIV and make people who carry the virus less likely to seek treatment....

When major movements rock the course of American history, Black voices and perspectives are often left out—out of textbooks, out of major museums, and out of public record. “I think just even knowing and seeing that in that moment is understanding that our history has not always been documented, according to the dominant structures that did that type of documentation in this country,” says Williams, who is director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago Library....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Written by Tiffany WaldenPhotography by Pat Nabong Video by Jiayan “Jenny” ShiShot at Ellis Park, 3520 S. Cottage Grove Unfortunately, not everybody saw the projects that way. That’s part of why Chicago started demolishing Ida B. Wells in 2002, tearing down the last building in 2011. “A lot of people try to judge me off my music,” Katie explains....

Whether you don’t want to dirty your kitchen, are avoiding holiday cheer, or just want a dark, quiet place to sit with your family, there are plenty of restaurants, films, parties, exhibits, and more to help you avoid holiday-induced cabin fever. Here’s what we recommend: CHRISTMAS EVE Dine out Get cultured • “Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination” at the Museum of Contemporary Art • The Newberry Library’s “Creating Shakespeare”• The Field Museum’s “Tattoo”• “Making Mainbocher: The First American Couturier” at the Chicago History Museum See a show More!...

It’s just your typical night for Allie (Gabrielle Lott-Rogers). She’s invited some college friends over for dinner. Things are going fine; people like the soup. Suddenly, a rift opens in space time. Evil physicist roommate Eamon (Greg Wenz) starts stalking Allie across eternity, even tampering with past traumas to harass her retroactively. Meanwhile, putrefied zombie copies of her pals (their “echoes”) claw at the front entrance with half their faces blown off....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Wednesday, November 15, 2017. Lori Lightfoot endorses Chris Kennedy for governor The heated Illinois gubernatorial race is showing no signs of slowing down before the holiday season as Democratic candidate Chris Kennedy released his first TV ad. Lori Lightfoot, the head of the city’s Police Accountability Task Force, also endorsed Kennedy Tuesday. “It’s just not enough to say to people this is what we are against,” she said....

Singer and songwriter Whitney Rose may have been born and raised on Prince Edward Island in Canada, but her ebullient music suggests she’s easily settled into the rich scene of her adopted home of Austin, Texas. Last year’s Rule 62 (Six Shooter/Thirty Tigers) reflects the ongoing influence of Mavericks front man Raul Malo on her work, a fizzy mix of honky-tonk, Tex-Mex, and a variety of 60s pop sounds including French ye-ye and classic girl groups....

W e can all agree that on a national level, 2017 was a Dumpster fire of a year. But one silver lining is the flood of protest art that has arisen, and that’s at the root of Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre’s (MPAACT) new project 100 Acts of Resistance, a series of performances that explores how different artists define resistance. “We do these types of projects to start conversations, so that people can not only speak but listen,” Stillwell says....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, October 5, 2017. Emanuel: Services like Lyft and Uber cost taxpayers $40 million in lost revenue Ride-sharing services including Uber and Lyft have cost Chicago taxpayers more than $40 million in lost revenue, according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “This shortfall includes tax, license and permit revenue losses from other public vehicles, decreased payment in parking garage tax, motor vehicle lessor tax and lease tax, reduced ridership on the CTA and reductions in the MPEA airport departure surcharge,” Office of Budget and Management spokeswoman Molly Poppe said in a statement....

Hedra Rowan and Ari Korotkin started Chicago experimental imprint Bodymilk Tapes in summer 2017. Their motto? “No more synth bros / Bait the straights / Aspire to shred.” As Rowan says, “Genre labels aren’t as important to us as putting out absolute bangers by queers.” Bodymilk’s catalog has lots of bangers—the digital detritus on Rowan’s 19th Century Girl includes pained robot voices, scathing noise, and delightfully out-of-place Eurotrance samples. Bodymilk’s current focus is less on releasing music and more on booking a monthly DIY series in Pilsen and the annual Noise Prom....

One of the first times I saw Brett Naucke onstage was in in 2007, when he and his noisy power trio, Druids of Huge, played a Cleveland punk bar. During the first minutes of the set someone dumped an entire pint of beer on Naucke’s synthesizer, rendering it unusable. In response, Naucke cranked the dials on his amp to kick up feedback, then hoisted said amp above his head and menacingly waved it toward the crowd....

Q: Something is bothering me and I don’t know where else to turn. I’m a bisexual man. I’ve been married to a great guy for the past six years. Despite COVID we gathered safely for an outdoors Thanksgiving dinner with my family. My mom, my brother and sister-in-law, and my adult nieces and nephews and their partners were there. Each household contributed to the feast and we had a wonderful evening....

One thing you should know about the Reader‘s year-end film rankings is that, from time immemorial, we’ve limited the candidates to movies that premiered locally between January 1 and December 31—that’s why Toni Erdmann, a big awards favorite in 2016, wasn’t eligible until this year, and a handful of highly touted films premiering on the coasts now to qualify for the Oscars (such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Michael Haneke’s Happy End) won’t be considered until 2018....

Update 1/12/20:Chicago Tribune editor-in-chief Colin McMahon controls the paper’s news pages, and was the person in charge of relocating John Kass’s column from Page 2 to an op-ed section in the middle of the paper last summer. However, since the publication of this piece I have learned that Kass is now on the paper’s editorial board, and therefore currently reports to Tribune publisher Par Ridder, not McMahon. Therefore the questions and suggestions at the end of my piece should have been been addressed to Ridder....

Singer-songwriter Lilly Hiatt, daughter of gritty roots-rock favorite John, locates a moment of regret with piercing effectiveness on her new breakup album, Trinity Lane (New West). On “The Night David Bowie Died,” the news of Bowie’s death fills her with sadness and brings up memories that she wants to share with her lover—but she’s alone. As the song unfolds, she wallows in that disappointment, but it’s unclear who ended things....