Chicago rapper Queen Key wants to get across two main points with Eat My Pussy. The title of the June release—her debut studio EP—takes care of the first one, she admits with a laugh. “Besides the title, the message is basically ‘Queen Shit,’” she says. “It’s my attitude—how I feel about what I feel about.” Queen Shit is also about what Queen Key does—which includes projecting a don’t-fuck-with-me charisma, a might-be-dangerous sense of mischief, and an unapologetic no-exceptions ownership of herself and her sexuality....

When I hung out with the Aquanaut guys in Bowmanville to write last week’s column, we got to talking about the Half Acre facility going in across Damen, and they mentioned another new neighbor—Empirical Brewery, seven blocks away at Foster and Ravenswood. The neighborhood seems to be turning into a sort of brewers’ row; if it weren’t for the Metra tracks, you could pretty much hit Metropolitan with a rock from Empirical’s loading dock....

When we put out a call to readers to nominate the most inspiring power couples they know to be featured in our Valentine’s Day issue, the question on everyone’s lips seemed to be, “What the hell’s a power couple?” We specifed that we didn’t mean like “Michelle and Barack or Rahm and the City Council (hoo-ah!),” but to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we knew exactly what we were looking for until the nominees started rolling in....

Chicago is well-known as an incubator of house music, industrial, noise rock, emo, and drill, to name a few. But the city’s decades-strong legacy of groundbreaking metal has only just begun to get its due in recent years, as a variety of heavy music styles have come into a blackened sort of vogue. The latest evidence of this is Forever Deaf Fest, conceived of as an annual metal festival in Chicago dedicated not to hyped-up touring bands but rather to homegrown talent....

The average music fest can live and die based the strength of its lineup, but North Coast Music Festival is no average festival. Now in its ninth year, North Coast has found a sweet spot in our crowded music festival ecosystem by providing a place where veteran jam bands, rising rappers, electronic stars, and indie-centric pop acts can all intersect. Its organizers haven’t so much manufactured an audience as shown one the ways these worlds can—and sometimes do—naturally collide....

This weekend’s Fed Up Fest, held at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, featured some of the most aggressive programming in its four-year history—just days after President Trump attempted to ban trans people from military service and Jeff Sessions’s Justice Department argued that LGBT employees aren’t protected from workplace discrimination by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Fed Up Fest is dedicated to increasing the visibility of radical queer, trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people in the punk and hardcore scenes, and the need for events like it gets clearer with each passing week....

Best known for her work as part of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s string section, Montreal-based violinist Jessica Moss stands beautifully on her own with her new solo LP, Entanglement (Constellation). Shedding the complex, overwhelmingly knotty arrangements of Silver Mt. Zion, the two pieces on Entanglement show how striking and powerful Moss can be when she’s operating with as few components as possible. On the record’s first side, the 22-minute track “Particles,” Moss creates an all-encompassing, cinematic soundscape with only a processed and looped violin line and a little bit of vocal humming....

Though at first glance the matching suits and Mexican wrestling masks favored by Los Straitjackets might point to the contrary, the Nashville instrumental rock group are anything but a one-note gimmick. If their novelties got your attention, more power to them, but with or without the visuals, Los Straitjackets do a fantastic job extending the legacy of late-50s instrumental groups such as the Ventures and the Fireballs. Led by guitarist Eddie Angel, last year they released What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and ....

Director Jaume Collet-Serra and cinematographer Flavio Labiano are both Spanish, which might explain why Non-Stop, the new Liam Neeson thriller, feels more like recent genre entertainment from Spain than from Hollywood: the filmmaking is playful without feeling jokey, the narrative stuffed with fun complications. Like Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007), J.A. Bayona’s The Orphanage (2007), or Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211 (2009), Non-Stop exhibits showmanship in its construction and execution alike—one gets the impression the filmmakers had good fun putting it together....

I’d never spent any time seriously listening to the music of Oklahoman John Moreland until I got a copy of his new album Big Bad Luv (4AD), but in some ways I feel like I’ve been listening to him most of my life. His work is shot through with the influence of various deeply American singers, whether Bruce Springsteen or Steve Earle, and his dusky blend of folk, country, and blues—all filtered through a rock sensibility—sounds as familiar as rain falling....

Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids was about beginnings, her early years in New York when she and her artistic coconspirator Robert Mapplethorpe made art and explored the world and rose from poverty to rock stardom. In her newest, M Train, she’s still working and making art and exploring, but now she’s alone and grieving for the many things she’s lost: photographs, a favorite camera, a perfect black coat, a neighborhood, a coffee shop, her brother, Todd, and most of all, her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith....

Chicago soul singer and karate instructor Doug Shorts might not have the audience he enjoys today had he not met Brian “Robust” Kuptzin in the late 2000s. As I explained in a 2013 feature on Shorts, the singer had put aside his decades-long pursuit of music stardom when he met Kuptzin, a rapper with releases on local hip-hop indie Galapagos4. They became friends while Shorts worked as a doorman at a condo building where Kuptzin’s girlfriend lived, and Kuptzin introduced Shorts to beat maker and record buyer Andrew Brearley....

Did you notice that we live in an age of outrage? There was a book by that name published in 2008, and another book called Protecting Children in the Age of Outrage published five years later. Google just fetched up a couple of intriguing, recent, zeitgeisty headlines: “Comedy in the age of outrage: When jokes go too far” was one; “The Age of Outrage is Ruining Worthwhile Debates” was another....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Alderman Natashia Holmes has some challengers in the 7th Ward. No sooner had my post on the aldermanic cheat sheet hit the street—metaphorically speaking, of course—than I got complaints from readers wanting more. So in order to feed his ravenous appetite for aldermania, I will randomly open my cheat sheet and write about whatever ward I see. Here goes . . . Sandi Jackson—wife of Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr....

Few improvising musicians can match the transatlantic prolificacy of Norwegian bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. Since moving to the U.S.—first to Chicago in early 2006, then to Austin, Texas, in late 2008, where he still lives—he’s stayed busier on two (and sometimes three) continents than most folks do on one. He’s equally expert on electric and double bass, whether playing tunes or freely improvising, and his imperturbable grooves are just as powerful as the thrumming energy and gnarled turbulence of his solos....

Just as neurotic bookworms like me have nightmares about showing up to a big exam late and naked, I’m sure professional musicians lose sleep to terrible dreams about their instruments breaking down in the middle of a career-making performance. At Lollapalooza last year, that nightmare came true for local experimental-pop production duo Supreme Cuts. They were supposed to play right after Kendrick Lamar, on a nearby stage where they would definitely draw some of his huge crowd, but their equipment failed less than a minute into their set—and within moments, audience members with short attention spans began wandering off in search of more beer or something that sounded like Mumford & Sons....

On August 8, 2007, the Chicago Independent Radio Project—affectionately known as CHIRP—held its first public meeting, hoping to recruit people to its project of establishing an independent low-power radio station in the city. At that point CHIRP was led by a handful of former community volunteers from Loyola University’s WLUW, at least one of whom had been ousted when the school decided the station should focus more on students. It was a broadcast outlet in theory alone—no licenses for low-power FM stations were available in Chicago, or in any other urban center....

Courtesy Slippery Slope Slippery Slope The good folks behind Scofflaw have been teasing details about their upcoming new Logan Square bar for months without naming it, but last night the neon was lit, and this afternoon the press release went out: it’s called Slippery Slope. The two-floor space at 2357 N. Milwaukee will be sort of an homage to the dance-party action at the late, great Bonny’s or “Double Deuce from Roadhouse without the violence,” if you will....

Michael Gebert Rob Levitt and Tom Mylan on the patio at Honey Butter Fried Chicken “I learned a lot about cutting meat, but I also learned a lot about what kind of meat shop I wanted to open,” Rob Levitt says to a group of meat-eaters huddling inside Honey Butter Fried Chicken after being temporarily chased off the patio by a passing rainstorm. Levitt, the co-owner of the Butcher & Larder, was telling the crowd of about 50 about staging at Tom Mylan’s Brooklyn butcher shop the Meat Hook a few years ago, prior to opening his own Chicago butcher shop....

What do we mean when we say Drake’s music is “dancehall-inflected”? Plenty of publications have described tracks on Drake’s new More Life “playlist” as influenced by the Caribbean pop style of dancehall. However, a closer look shows that’s not quite accurate. What, The Fader asks, are we really saying when we paper over the variety of black diasporic traditions? [The Fader] The electronic music performance style “controllerism” reflects a desire to turn our regular interactions with computer interfaces into an “art....