Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place. Older strips are archived here.
You may have heard about the instigating event of the 1919 Chicago race riot. On Sunday, July 27, Eugene Williams, a Black teenager, inadvertently floated across an invisible line into the “white section” of the water at the 29th Street Beach, where he was stoned by a white man and drowned. A week of rioting followed, ending with 38 more people dead and more than 500 wounded. During the second decade of the 20th century, with the advent of World War I and the Great Migration, Chicago’s Black population grew significantly....
A large crowd braved a snowstorm to come out to Savage Love Live at Boston’s Wilbur Theatre last week. Questions were submitted on index cards, which allowed questioners to remain anonymous and forced them to be succinct. I got to as many of them as I could over two long, raucous, boozy hours. Here are some of the questions I didn’t have time for. A: Relationships end for all sorts of different reasons—boredom, neglect, contempt, betrayal, abuse—but all relationships that don’t end survive for the same reason: the people in them just keep not breaking up....
If you blindfolded me and played me the self-titled debut from Aurora thrash band Sour, I’d totally believe it’d been recorded in 1984 with a cassette four-track in a dusty garage. They recall thrash metal’s glory days with guitar shredding that makes you want to skateboard off your roof, drumming that erupts with cavalcades of cymbal crashes, and vocals that fight through the nonstop din as little more than half-swallowed grunts....
Yesterday two kids, brothers who both look younger than ten, were at Pokémon Go Fest. Today they’re at the River watching drag queen Elektra Del Rio literally swing from the rafters, totally overwhelmed by the loud music and the experience of being the only children in a screaming crowd of 150 adults. They are the toughest audience I’ve seen at any of my four drag brunches. Brunch of Bitches satisfies that craving with exhilarating performances and a celebratory atmosphere....
From Foehammer’s Facebook page Left to right: Joe Cox, Ben Blanton, and Jay Cardinell How much poorer the nomenclature of metal would be had Tolkien never written! Doom trio Foehammer, from Annandale, Virginia, takes its name from the sword Glamdring, which Gandalf found in the trolls’ cave (along with Sting and Orcrist) toward the beginning of The Hobbit. Elrond of the elves calls the weapon “Foe-hammer that the King of Gondolin once wore” after translating the ancient runes on its hilt....
Tom Cruze/Sun-Times Adam Dunn, whiffing in April 2013—one of his 720 strikeouts in four seasons with the White Sox Having scrutinized the White Sox on the field and on film, manager Robin Ventura last night diagnosed the south-siders’ problem: “We have to score some runs to be able to win games.” And sometimes, bad weeks and bad months. With their latest losing streak at five, the Sox are napping in the basement of the AL Central, seven under ....
Like Hot Doug’s, Murray’s Dat Dog featured top-loaded encased meats ground from a variety of animals that so enthralled the Crescent City that adherents lined up and waited for them. Dat Dog multiplied itself, opening several Louisiana locations and one in Texas before Murray stepped away and started eyeing Logan Square. One does have choices. There are some two dozen toppings to customize any sausage, including three different vegan options and a “C-Dog”—actually battered and baked cod on a bun....
For the past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting the music of Boston band Karate. I discovered their fluid explorations of indie rock in fall 2004, after moving to Massachusetts for college. That August, Karate had released their final studio album, Pockets, and the following summer they’d break up. I never even saw them play—I was too young to get into many of the shows I wanted to see, and traveling to Boston proper from suburban Waltham, where I lived, proved to be a challenge too....
With his recent Manic Revelations (Rounder), Saint Louis roots maven Pokey LaFarge hasn’t surrendered his love of a simpler musical era, but he seems to have decided that polishing up his sound might net him a broader listenership. I enjoyed his 2015 album Something in the Water, which was made by a crew of skilled Chicago time travelers including members of the Fat Babies and Flat Five—artists who routinely balance their romance for American’s roots music past with a sly postmodern sensibility....
Today the press release every food site and section in the land is rewriting is the announcement of the 2018 James Beard Award nominees for media and chefs and restaurants.* Sun Wah has been nominated in the America’s Classics category.
In Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Rob Fleming asks, “What came first—the music or the misery? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?” A similar quest for truth is the basis of The Effect by Lucy Prebble (a writer for the HBO series Succession), now in a Chicago premiere with Strawdog Theatre. Two long-term, sequestered test subjects wonder if their desire for each other is a result of real love or the antidepressants they are given....
Honky Tonk Angels In performance style and attitude, the heroines of 20th-century American country music are about as theatrical as they come. Here, under the music direction of Jeremy Ramey, a trio of crystalline voices at Theo Ubique brilliantly capitalize on the live, unplugged, raucous energy of the western repertoire. Ted Swindley, author of the tribute show Always . . . . Patsy Cline, loosely ties together more than two dozen singles with some zero-sum plotting surrounding the formation of a girl group with characterizations and speeches that don’t add much but are harmless....
One of the worst things about Disney’s recent screen adaptation of Into the Woods is how it mangles a perfectly good Stephen Sondheim score. In the movie’s overblown orchestrations, too many instruments serve to reinforce the vocal melodies, drowning out Sondheim’s brilliant use of counterpoint and dissonance—much as Rob Marshall’s grandstanding direction papers over the unsettling narrative themes. By contrast, the movie version of The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s popular stage musical (which debuted at Northlight Theatre in 2001), derives much of its emotional force by preserving Brown’s minimal arrangements....
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the pandemic has been uniquely hospitable to the proliferation of condiments and therefore dangerously enabling to those of us suffering from Condiment Acquisitive Disorder. That’s where Padanilam was born and lived until he was six, when his family emigrated to Springfield—not a hotspot for Keralan expats. But he really didn’t become an avid home cook and student of the food he grew up eating until he moved to Chicago to study accounting and history—specifically post-colonial theory....
In this age of identity, when so many people are obsessed with their ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual selves, Tim Wardle’s documentary Three Identical Strangers hits like a thunderbolt. Wardle tells the incredible true story of three 19-year-old men in New York, all adopted as children and complete strangers to each other, who discovered that they were triplets and had been separated at birth by a prominent Jewish adoption agency. When their story broke in 1980, the young men—Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland, and David Kellman—became a media sensation, appearing on numerous TV talk shows and, inevitably, opening a restaurant together....
A few nights ago, several buildings in Wicker Park were pasted with black-and-white posters featuring a shirtless Vic Mensa with a target on his chest, his body surrounded by bullet holes—a block of them took up a brick wall next to streetwear store Saint Alfred, where posters of the cover art for Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book had previously hung. These posters, which include the phrase “There’s Alot Going On,” followed an Instagram photo from late May that Mensa posted of himself crouching over a whiteboard laid flat on the floor, apparently working on track lists for an album and a tape—its caption reads “mark your calendar....
Raise your hand if you’re familiar with the work of Alice Childress. I thought not. Me neither. Sure, it’s easy enough to ID her as one of a constellation of black playwrights who flourished in New York during the civil rights era. But until I checked I’d have had a hard time telling you what exactly it was that she wrote. Childress’s ten plays died before her own death, in 1994....
Unlike musicians, dancers never put their instruments down. That’s especially true of Red Clay Dance, where the intersection of art and activism falls under a luminous spotlight. Red Clay performances are instigations as well as entertainment, and have been since founder Vershawn Sanders-Ward brought the company to Chicago in 2011, where it made its local premiere at a dance concert at Grand Crossing’s Harold Washington Cultural Center. (A Chicago native, Sanders-Ward founded the company in Brooklyn in 2008; it’s now based in Hyde Park....
As I walk to Wrightwood 659 in the early afternoon, I hear the sound of recess coming from the school to my left, but I don’t see the students. I just see the brick building where they spend most of their day. After a few moments I realize that they are on the roof of the school, where a tall wrought iron fence wraps around where they spend recess. Their voices bounce off buildings that are a barrier on either side....
