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Ariana Grande has dominated TMZ headlines and pop charts this year—the latter with a series of confessional singles whose lyric sheets could be pages from her diary. And Grande has had a lot to process lately. In 2017, she survived a deadly terrorist attack at her concert at Britain’s Manchester Arena. In 2018, her long-term love and ex-boyfriend Mac Miller died of an overdose. Soon after, her engagement to Saturday Night Live It Boy Pete Davidson fell apart under intense media scrutiny....

Canadian dance producer Jacques Greene (born Philippe Aubin-Dionne) broke out in the early 2010s by twisting R&B vocals into stuttering, waterlogged samples that brought complex shades of sadness to energetic club tracks. He’s since relied less on a sample-based approach, which has opened him up stylistically and helped him arrive at the free-flowing aesthetic of his recent second album, October’s Dawn Chorus (LuckyMe). Greene parlays his grasp of dance’s history into a mishmash of sounds, sometimes within a single song; on “Do It Without You” he blends the spacey affectations of early-2000s UK dubstep with ersatz drum ’n’ bass percussion....

Demilich released just one album, Nespithe, before breaking up in 1993, and its 39 minutes of music have secured their reputation as one of the weirdest, most original, and most prescient bands in technical death metal for 25 years and counting. Nespithe is a lurid, aggressively metastasizing web of alien convolutions, gonzo metrical collages, and disorienting rhythms, all of it tangled in spidery guitars that dance like the floor is covered in broken glass—and its songs still somehow groove like hell, albeit with a feel that’s more peristaltic than it is funky....

Michael Brosilow Alana Arenas and Tim Hopper Steppenwolf’s production of David Adjmi’s Marie Antoinette plunges you into the experience from the moment you hit your seat: two wide projection screens take you on a bird’s-eye tour of Versailles, swooping in and out over the colossal structures a la the opening credits of Game of Thrones. The play’s performed in the round in the intimate upstairs theater, the audience lined up on two sides as if we’re spectators at a tennis match (quite appropriately, given the Tennis Court Oath)....

Long before I realized Jaden Smith was carving out a rap career, I found his weirdness endlessly entertaining. The 19-year-old son of superstar couple Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith has been blowing up the world of Twitter since age 12, sharing his deep thoughts and musings on topics as disparate as Illuminati conspiracies and chance encounters with Owen Wilson. More recently, he’s posted about how much he loves the Twilight movies and his appreciation for potatoes....

On his new third studio album, All My Heroes Are Cornballs, Brooklyn-born, Baltimore-based hip-hop artist Barrington Devaughn Hendricks, aka JPEGmafia (Peggy for short), offers an escape from the monotony of music that’s restricted by genre. Hendricks dives headfirst into his attention-deficit-fueled opener, “Jesus Forgive Me, I Am a Thot,” which is the album’s most concise answer to the question “What kind of music does JPEGmafia make?” (either despite or because of the fact that it doesn’t stick to any specific sound for long)....

No entrance greets the eye at the intersection of Lake Street and Kenilworth Avenue in Oak Park, where Unity Temple, a fortress of an edifice in poured concrete, stands. A heavy structure in solid gray, the building almost repels with planes and right angles, and the visible windows are too high up to peer inside. To penetrate is, to borrow a phrase from choreographer Martha Graham, an “errand into the maze”—you circle the building, searching in all the usual places, and at last scurry down an unmarked sidewalk and up an unassuming flight of steps to arrive at a platform over which hangs a motto in brass, “For the worship of God and the service of Man....

The moment you start reflecting on a time that’s past, it’s no longer something you’re living—it becomes something you’ve lived. Lucy Dacus documents and interrogates her own coming-of-age on her new third album, Home Video. After being blindsided by the success of her 2016 debut, No Burden, Dacus was forced to reckon with her hometown of Richmond, Virginia, which had swiftly turned from safe haven to minefield as she rose to fame: assumptions circulated, jealousy seethed, and strangers came knocking at her door....

Montreal dance-pop duo Blue Hawaii instinctively understand what kind of sounds get people to boogie, and that’s never been more clear than on their fourth album, October’s Open Reduction Internal Fixation (Artbus). They’ve long had a flair for tastefully minimal dance tracks, but some of the songs on the new record are so skeletal they make the group’s older material sound positively florid. Blue Hawaii borrow the euphoric magic of 90s club music and the four-on-the-floor rush of house, then combine these styles into slinky nocturnal songs that feel like they could’ve filled dance floors in an imaginary but not-too-distant past....

Mike Sula Lampredotto, Nonna’s When I first visited Florence as a young whelp I was too much of a wuss to try the city’s signature panini di lampredotto, a tripe sandwich sold from street stalls all over the city. Historically a workingman’s sandwich, it was a cheap, high-protein way to fill up on the way to the olive orchards. But it’s maintained its appeal despite its filling: the abomasum, or a ruminant’s fourth stomach, which resembles “bundles of dirty dishcloths” as the The Oxford Companion to Italian Food puts it, and can smell fairly miasmic if not properly cleaned....

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made Chicago’s gun violence problems the linchpin of his “law and order” message yet again. During a 20-minute discussion about “racial healing” at the first presidential debate, Trump bypassed Hillary Clinton’s remarks about systemic racism in law enforcement and instead doubled down on calls to revive stop and frisk in Chicago and other major cities—despite the fact that this tactic has been ruled unconstitutional principally because the practice disproportionately affects minorities....

In 1996, the self-taught photographer and film artist Laura Aguilar, then in her 30s, positioned her naked body in the rocky desert landscape of southern California and took a series of self-portraits. The black-and-white series Nature Self-Portrait (1996) juxtaposes the land and the artist’s flesh: large, brown, queer, female. It asks viewers to focus their attention on the artist’s body and see the often invisible and marginal reality of someone like Aguilar....

Kanye West is a blizzard. He’s unpredictable, he seems to have little regard for social conventions, and he can send hundreds of thousands of otherwise rational citizens into hysterics—in the process, he worms his way into the thoughts of people who wouldn’t otherwise be affected by anything he does. The debut of Kanye’s Yeezy Season 3 fashion line at Madison Square Garden last Thursday doubled as the premiere of his seventh album, The Life of Pablo....

Chicago hip-hop thrives and continues to be special because of people like rapper, singer, saxophonist, and producer Sen Morimoto. Born in Kyoto, Japan, Morimoto grew up in western Massachusetts, where he learned to play saxophone under the tutelage of Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, and during his teenage years he joined the brazen outre hip-hop collective Dark World. As much as anyone else in the local scene, Morimoto understands that Chicago rappers don’t need to bend their voices to fit the stereotypes outsiders have of the city’s hip-hop artists—namely, that they either make drill or sound like they could be friends with Chance, a lame bifurcation that ignores a swath of challenging, thoughtful, and eye-opening music....

Minnesota-based folk-blues guitarist and songwriter Charlie Parr has had a long and prolific career, though he’s flown much farther under the radar than he would in a just world. He plays fluently and soulfully on resonator and 12-string guitars with a fingerpicking style in the tradition of John Fahey and Leo Kottke, and he writes lyrics with a novelist’s attention to the diamonds in the dust, creating melancholy but compassionate scenes in songs such as “In a Scrapyard Bus Stop,” “Love Is an Unraveling Bird’s Nest,” and “Cheap Wine....

courtesy of the artist David Berkman Pianist, bandleader, and composer David Berkman has been one the most interesting, gracefully swinging figures on New York’s jazz scene for a couple of decades, but his lack of flash and his tight fit within the postbop tradition (although he regularly pushes against the seams) have made him easy to overlook. There’s nothing wild or weird about him—he’s just a great musician, which is sometimes not enough when it comes to attracting attention....

Last June the comedy open mike at Cole’s Bar in Logan Square—widely considered to be the best comedy open mike in the city—celebrated a decade of consistent weekly shows. Due to stay-at-home orders across the state, Cole’s is currently closed and cohosts Alex Kumin and Carly Kane know they are unlikely to celebrate the mike’s 11th year on the stage in the back of their favorite dive bar. But they’ve found a new outlet for gathering the Chicago comedy community together to try out new material in front of eager audience members on Wednesday nights: Zoom....

Two of the art world’s most controversial current works are on display in the new exhibit “Charles Ray: Sculpture, 1997-2014,” which opened at the Art Institute last Friday. Huck and Jim never made it to the Whitney at all. It was rejected before completion, when, as Calvin Tomkins reports in a recent New Yorker profile of Ray, the Whitney curators decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to put the work in the path of the general public....

“Gezelligheid” is a Dutch word for a feeling of coziness, a sense of loving belonging. Singer-songwriter Andrew Bird has adopted it as the name of his annual hometown performance series—a rare opportunity to see the Chicago expat in an intimate setting. The low lighting in the beautiful Fourth Presbyterian Church on Chestnut, where he’s held the shows for several years now, exudes an inviting warmth that blankets the tightly packed pews, which suddenly feel very far from the cold outside....

Sorting through some old papers of mine, I came across a column I’d written for the Reader in March of 1994—close to a quarter century ago. I like to revisit old columns; they remind me of matters that seemed important at the time though I’ve long since forgotten them. And they send a poignant message to the present. The message is, You’re no big deal. We thought we were special too....