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[image-1]Chicago singer Zarif Wilder found his calling by humming. Wilder, a member of local production collective ThemPeople, told Noisey earlier this year that his colleagues in ThemPeople nudged him into singing after they overheard him in the studio humming along to Mick Jenkins‘s “Shipwrecked” while the rapper recorded it. In August 2014, when Jenkins dropped his breakthrough mixtape, The Water[s], it included vocals from Wilder under the name the Mind (he prefers to style it “theMIND”)....

It might blow up, but it won’t go pop.” So goes the refrain that plays throughout hip-hop trio De La Soul‘s 1993 album Buhloone Mindstate, a reference to how the group’s music could appeal to a devoted audience but would never translate to popular success. The Elmhurst Art Museum’s latest production, “Blow Up: Inflatable Contemporary Art”—a traveling exhibit that debuted at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek, California—retools that mantra: the artworks blow up (literally) and go pop (figuratively)....

Q: I’m a man from a very liberal background. Recently, a girl I started dating—a girl from a similar background—mentioned that she has “a thing for Black guys.” She also met my childhood best friend, a man of Korean descent, and commented to me that she found him handsome despite not typically being attracted to Asian guys. The position I’ve always held is that we’re attracted to individuals, not types, and that it’s wrong to have expectations of people based on race—especially when it comes to sexualizing/fetishizing people....

J. Zunz is the solo project of Lorena Quintanilla, best known from Mexican electronic-infused psych duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete. Her new album, Hibiscus, was born out of a period of personal and political crisis, but while darkness and anxiety permeate its tracks, it also offers hope with a cinematic sense of wonderment that lightens its heaviest moments. Moody opener “Y” pairs crawling keyboard melodies and sinister layers of fuzz, while Quintanilla’s singing builds from a whisper into a resolute declaration about leaving a broken relationship behind....

Love & Mercy is a very entertaining biopic of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, and hardly the screaming train wreck I expected when I heard that the legendary songwriter, producer, and arranger would be played by two different actors—Paul Dano during Wilson’s glory years in the mid-60s, ending in his complete mental and physical breakdown, and John Cusack during Wilson’s traumatic experience as the patient of bullying psychiatrist Eugene Landy in the early 90s, from whom he was rescued (or so the movie asserts) by Melinda Ledbetter, an LA car dealer who has become his second wife....

Practice safe sex. COVID-19 or not, we should all practice safe, consensual sex every time. Be sure to use protection to avoid unwanted pregnancy and to take precautions against STIs. If you need birth control, Planned Parenthood can help—and you don’t even have to come into a health center to get it. Here are some suggestions for staying safe in these uncertain times: Exercise caution with someone new. People can have COVID-19 without knowing it or showing any signs....

Veteran guitar-pop whiz Matthew Sweet rolls into town Friday for a concert at Park West. (Opening the show is a reconstituted version of Material Issue called Material Reissue, and though I still find it incomprehensible that there could be a version of the band without founder Jim Ellison, name change or no, but that’s a discussion for another time.) Sweet is finishing a new album tentatively titled Tomorrow Forever, due early next year, and I imagine he’ll give fans a preview....

If A Walk in the Woods, Lee Blessing’s 1988 play about the private talks between two diplomats—one Soviet, the other American—got cozy with Noël Coward’s country-home comedy Hay Fever, the result would be similar to J.T. Rogers’s 2017 Tony-winning play. Set in 1993, Oslo traces the back-channel negotiations between Yitzhak Rabin’s Israeli government and the PLO instigated by a Norwegian diplomat, Mona Juul (Bri Sudia), and her think-tank-director husband, Terje Rød-Larsen (Scott Parkinson)....

The sad fate of Jazz Record Mart has provoked plenty of tributes and memorials in the press and on social media, all of them richly deserved. The venerable store closed on Monday, and its remaining inventory and fixtures (as well as the business’s name) were purchased by online retailer Wolfgang’s Vault in Reno, Nevada. Countless record shops, each with their own quirks and personalities, have vanished over the past decade, but few could match the status of JRM, which billed itself as the largest jazz and blues store in the world....

Adapted by Marilyn Abrams and Bruce Jordan from the original play Scherenschnitt, (scissors cut), by German playwright Paul Pörtner, Shear Madness is not so much a fully realized work of comic theater as a kind of silly party game writ large. The premise is reminiscent of interactive murder mysteries: setting—a beauty salon; characters—a brace of stereotypes (gay hair dresser, ditsy beautician, bulldog homicide detective); McGuffin—the murder of an upstairs neighbor. But the real mystery is why we should care about the death of a character we never meet....

Contains less than 1 percent Buddha juice by volume Every so often in Beer and Metal, I review something that’s clearly not a craft beer, either because I’m having a snit about an evasive press release from a macrobrewer or because I’m hoping to stumble across a bargain in an unlikely place. (The less said about the Super Brew 15 fiasco, the better.) I’ve accomplished little in the effort, but it has produced some ridiculous columns....

A girl walks onto a stage that’s bare but for a suitcase in the center. Like any teenager entering a room, she’s looking down at the small flat object in her hand. There’s a chime that sounds like a text message coming in. But it’s not a cell phone—it’s a virgencita, an icon of the Virgin Mary. “Have you seen one of these before?,” she asks, before launching into a story, half-told in Spanish, about her family history....

I read Theorem in the bathtub. My feet were propped up as I made sure I didn’t get the bottom of the pages wet (a bad habit I have). The book opens with an image of a red cube and an off-white cylinder. “At 13, I fell in love with the tidy solution of geometry,” reads the text. Theorem is not what you may expect from a book of poems. The long text is a push-pull relationship between writer and artist....

As far as shitty tenants go, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt has nothing on the men and women of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 2012, as part of an unregistered sting dubbed Operation Fearless, agents rented a storefront in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood-disguised as a clothing and housewares outlet-in order to ensnare low-level criminals by luring them into a gun buyback scheme. The operation was a model of ineptitude: guns were stolen, wrongful arrests were made, and Chauncey Wright, a mentally handicapped man who worked for the agents and sold them guns and drugs, ended up serving six months of house arrest and four years of probation....

On his previous two albums virtuosic Tuareg singer and guitarist Oumara “Bombino” Moctar worked with American producers Dan Auerbach (Black Keys) and David Longstreth (Dirty Projectors). Each of these auteurs left an imprint on his desert blues without muting his inviting soulfulness and beautifully scuffed sound—a bit of organ-stoked soul from Auerbach on 2013’s Nomad (Nonesuch), a bouncy, syncopated sheen from Longstreth on 2016’s Azel (Partisan). Like the best Tuareg artists who’e made inroads in the rock world, the Nigerien musician has never lost direction, but for his new record, Deran (Partisan), Bombino returned to Africa to record his rippling grooves in Casablanca, Morocco....

Words by Tiffany Walden / Video by Morgan Elise Johnson One of the most distinctive characteristics of the west side’s Douglas Park is the rows of Chicago-style two-flats lining the perimeter of its 218 acres. Like many of the beautiful green spaces around the city, the park was created for the neighborhood that surrounds it—in this case North Lawndale, a predominantly black, blue-collar enclave. On any warm day, the concrete porches of these homes fill with families gossiping, laughing, and enjoying the sunshine while their little ones play in the big park across the street....

Salem seemed briefly ubiquitous in 2010, but history has been kinder to this midwestern electronic trio than anyone would’ve predicted from their rapid rise and equally rapid dismissal. That’s largely due to timing. The members of Salem—vocalists and producers Jack Donoghue, John Holland, and Heather Marlatt—fused narcotized, chopped-and-screwed hip-hop to even drowsier dance music, and their messy, torpid debut album, King Night, caught a certain kind of lightning in a bottle, defining a microgenre called “witch house....

Q: I’m a gay guy in my late 40s with a straight sister in her early 50s. She’s been married for a bit over two decades to guy who always registered as a “possible” on my average-to-good gaydar. But I put “BIL,” aka my brother-in-law, in the “improbable” bucket because he actively wooed my sister, was clearly in love with her, and fathered four boys with her, all in their late teens now....

Chris Crack has released five albums of no-frills trash-talking hip-hop in 2020 alone, but he’s not worried about saturating the market. When he talked to Audiomack’s Matthew Ritchie upon the release of his first album of 2021, Might Delete Later, the west-side rapper quipped, “Did Aunt Jemima make too much syrup? Can Clorox ever make too much bleach? Hell no. Because that shit works.” Crack is one of many rappers who embrace the “always in the studio” work ethic modeled by Lil Wayne during his legendary late-00s mixtape run, which has proved well-suited for the pandemic....

Ethan Hawke in Good Kill About a third of the way into Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill—currently playing at the Siskel Film Center and the Wilmette Theater—comes the saddest love scene I’ve seen in a movie in some time. An icily controlled camera pans across the bodies of Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke), an Air Force pilot now operating fighter drones from a base outside Las Vegas, and his homemaker wife (January Jones) as they dutifully couple in their darkened bedroom....