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Sun-Times Officer Robert Soto was killed with a friend in 2008. Authorities say a hit was put on Jeffrey Scott for cooperating with authorities investigating the killings. When authorities arrested Jeffrey Scott in 2010, he decided it was time to cooperate and start talking. About everything—including the murders. Yet without cooperating, he could face more than 25 years in prison, away from his two young children. And he would have to keep carrying around what he knew about the killing....

In the days between summer and fall, past scorching July with Oktoberfest looming, almost nothing hits the same as a grilled sausage with mustard and a crisp beer. Chicago’s love affair with cased meats and beer is well-established; with the arrival of German immigrants in the 1850s, sausage making and its supporting condiment entered Chicago’s culinary scene indelibly. The city’s craft beer history goes back even further, to 1833. Chicago-based distributor Louis Glunz long carried Wostyntje Mustard Ale, which was regularly imported along with another Belgian mustard beer, Melchior....

In June the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a sweeping change in how it calculates rent payments for Housing Choice Vouchers, aka Section 8. Now the Chicago Housing Authority is worried that the change might lead to a mass displacement of voucher holders who would see the value of their vouchers decrease. But fair housing advocates are more worried that HUD’s proposal could prevent voucher families from moving to better neighborhoods....

Since the late 70s, veteran Chicago blues harpist Billy Branch has been leading workshops and student concerts with the Blues in the Schools program, teaching elementary and high school kids in Chicago and around the country. And he likes to start his classes with a call-and-response ritual: “The blues are the facts of life!” The Palm Tavern—or Gerri’s Palm Tavern, as the bar at 446 E. 47th Street became known—wasn’t a blues club....

About midway through Julie Ganey’s one-woman show, the author-star describes trying to make her Trump-supporting father change his views. Her dad, she repeatedly tells the audience, taught logic and philosophy and instilled in his children the importance of objectivity and critical thinking. Ganey describes spending hours trying to use these techniques on her father. They don’t work. When the Ferguson riots come up, Ganey’s father says of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed by a police officer, “That kid in Ferguson wasn’t a good kid....

Loading up a Meth. song is a prelude to being viscerally blasted; the local six-piece, which debuted in 2017 with The Children Are Watching, operate at full boil 100 percent of the time as they blend power noise, metal, mathcore, hardcore, and straight-up screaming. In 2018, founder Seb Alvarez (Cadence Fox, Tweak) told the blog Open Mind Saturated Brain that he’s always wanted to call a project Meth. because of the word’s dark, uncontrolled implications....

All of us have been witness to the slow erasure of a once legendary building. Often these structures appear to have been resuscitated by their inevitable transition into something vapid like a boutique dental office, a pet grooming salon, or a chain restaurant, when really, they’ve entered the Sunken Place. The building at 1449 S. Michigan, once the headquarters of the groundbreaking recording company Vee-Jay Records, had indeed seen its share of dark days; but now it’s home to the not-for-profit Overflow Coffee....

If you’re a fan of Pink Floyd’s most iconic albums, such as Animals and The Wall, you may have plunked down some cash to see Roger Waters in his solo show or caught David Gilmour the last time he was in town. But if you’ve got an appetite for Floyd’s early trippy material, drummer Nick Mason (aka “the heartbeat of Pink Floyd”) might be more your cup of tea. He’s currently touring as the leader of a quintet billed as Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets, which includes Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp, longtime Pink Floyd touring bassist Guy Pratt, guitarist Lee Harris, and keyboardist Dom Beken....

On March 11, prolific Chicago rapper Adamn Killa debuted a new dance on Triller that he calls “Hit the Adamn,” performing it to a sample of his new song of the same name. In the clip, Adamn cocks his arm at a 90-degree angle and leans his shoulder to one side, then makes sharp crouching movements in response to the track’s thundering, minimal bass—it’s simple enough, but the connection of the song to the dance is so unpredictable that I can’t imagine anybody actually learning it....

In July 2012, Miyagi Chilombo, older brother of LA singer-songwriter Jhené Aiko, died of a brain tumor at the age of 26, following a two-year struggle with cancer. Aiko’s recent trio of creative projects, which she’s bundled under the title MAP (for “movie,” “album,” and “poetry”), chart her path through her grief. In September she dropped the first two, a short film called Trip and a 22-track album bearing the same title, through Def Jam, and in December she followed these with a book of poetry, 2Fish, through Ulysses Press....

Update on Monday, May 4: Ratboys will appear on a special Zoom episode of Chic-a-Go-Go on Friday, May 15, at 6 PM. RSVP to host Mia Park at mia@miapark.com to receive an invitation 15 minutes before start time. “It was really exciting, because we had never done a headlining tour,” Steiner says. “We’d done DIY tours, but those don’t have as much pressure or as much weight behind you. This was a new experience for us....

For our year-end double issue, we flipped the script on our annual Best of Chicago edition with a Worst of Chicago issue, featuring dozens of essays about the worst people, places, and things in our fair city. On social media we asked you to kvetch about your own least favorite things. We asked you to tell us your #WorstofChicago and these four came up most often. Now vote for #1!...

Jay Paul/Getty Images The discredited Rolling Stone story about rape in a UVA frat house reinforces the undesirability of pseudonyms. If you come across a pseudonym in a news story, do you distrust the entire story? Blogger Steve Buttry—who’s a visiting scholar in the communications school of LSU—titled a recent post “When should journalists use pseudonyms in stories? Never.” I thank Charlie Meyerson for bringing it to my attention on Facebook....

From the mid-80s till the mid-90s, country music went through what Robbie Fulks calls an “integrity explosion.” As if to make up for the middle-of-the-road Urban Cowboy era directly preceding those years, a bunch of traditionalists and iconoclasts suddenly began coming through the door, including Marty Stuart, Steve Earle, and Dwight Yoakam. Even better, these artists got legit airplay, massively expanding their reach rather than remaining cult heroes left out in the cold....

You can’t tell the story of Chicago hardcore and punk without talking about Los Crudos. Initially active from 1991 till ’98 and sporadically reunited since 2006, the Pilsen four-piece wielded hardcore’s lunging rhythms, ricocheting guitars, and furious battle cries on behalf of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, whether close to home or around the world—they spoke not only to the Latino population in Pilsen and to the broader punk community but also to the poor, people of color, immigrants, and sexual minorities everywhere....

I first heard the music of San Diego native Abjo, aka Abraham Joseph, when I stumbled on his 2014 Soulection White Label EP. A nearly perfect hybrid of fractured beat making and laid-back R&B that simultaneously glides and staggers, it remains one of my favorite releases of the decade. Though Abjo has continued to put out new material since then, he fell under my radar, and I mostly lost touch—which was my mistake, because checking in half a decade later confirms that he’s still great....

A lot of theories about how Chicago hip-hop was supposed to operate have been shattered by the events of the past decade—the idea that only one local rapper in a generation could make it big, for instance, or the insistence that the city had a singular sound. While drill became the dominant underground wave, proving that young Chicago rappers and producers with few means or connections could build their own cottage industry outside the mainstream, a panoply of other artists showed how many dimensions the scene actually has: the Era devised “footworking with words,” DLow brought bopping’s euphoric sound to the Billboard Hot 100, and Supa Bwe mined the melodic aggression of screamo years before “Soundcloud rap” broke....

Singer, rapper, poet, author, and songwriter Margret Wander—better known by her stage name, Dessa—has been one of the most prolific and multifaceted members of Minneapolis hip-hop collective Doomtree since she joined it in the mid-2000s. Her 2018 LP, Chime (Doomtree), is one of her strongest, poppiest, and most electronic-influenced releases yet. The album is equal parts reflective ballads and emotionally charged bangers, and tracks such as “Half of You” wouldn’t sound out of place in a mix of 1980s Top 40 hits....

The Reader‘s Cocktail Challenge event series returns Thursday, this time with the theme “nostalgia.” Based on the ongoing column in which bartenders challenge each other to make a drink with a chosen ingredient, the evening at Salvage One will feature nearly 20 professionals competing to create cocktails that evoke childhood (or another period of life about which they’re nostalgic); there’ll be drinks inspired by s’mores, Sour Patch Kids, ginger peach lollipops, and Jungle Juice, among others....

Times change. Does sportsmanship? Does the code of the warrior on the playing field, or the sportswriter pondering the combat from the Olympian aerie of the press box? Once they understood that Holmgren had actually told his defense to lie down, writers were apoplectic. In the Sun-Times, Rick Telander denounced the coach’s situation ethics. “It undermines the integrity of the sport itself,” Telander wrote. “So unbelievable was it that a coach in the biggest pro game of the year ....