Chicago rapper Probcause is known for rapping in speedy vocal loop-the-loops that can bring vibrancy to a droll beat. But it’s a real pleasure to hear him do the opposite—vibe off an instrumental that bustles and burns— as he does on his latest single, “M.I.A.” Producer Drew Mantia fuses liquid synth stabs, incandescent soul melodies, and bone-snapping percussion for a jubilant end-of-summer jam that Probcause takes to with ease. Ace local MC Saba also gets in on the fun of “M....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Monday, August 21, 2017. Happy solar eclipse day! Rahm: Trump administration is “playing politics” to promote its law enforcement policies Mayor Rahm Emanuel says President Donald Trump’s administration is “playing politics” in order to promote its stringent law enforcement policies, and claimed the White House is using a “racial component” to link big cities like Chicago and high violence rates. “They use cities as a way of describing violence, as a characterization which they never use around the violence associated with opiates and the drugs that are in suburban and rural communities,” the mayor told former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod on an episode of the Axe Files, a podcast from CNN and the University of Chicago Institute of Politics....

Writer-director Adam McKay’s passel of broad comedies and more recent sociopolitical satires have three interesting attributes in common. The first is a focus on wayward American men, fictional and actual, and a hankering to dissect them and flesh out their trajectories. The second is iconoclasm, evident in the zeal with which McKay’s films explode popular institutions and ideologies, ranging from NASCAR to the nuclear family to trickle-down economics. The third is provocation, by which the viewer is poked enough to feel considered, challenged, and perhaps even culpable for the on-screen action....

There was an ad that ran during the 90s that really creeped me out. It was from AT&T or some other remnant of the Bell Telephone monopoly, and it proclaimed that WE’RE ALL CONNECTED. I’ve rarely felt connected to individual people, much less all people, so the mental image the ad produced—millions of cables and signals tethering and binding us to each other—was alarming. I paid little mind to the Internet....

Polish director Krzysztof Zanussi must be one of the smartest people ever to make movies. A child prodigy, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a PhD in physics by the time he was in his mid-20s. While in school he also found time to teach himself filmmaking and produced more than a dozen shorts, several of which won prizes at amateur film festivals; on the strength of their success he was accepted into the world-renowned Lodz Film Academy, where he earned his third degree, in directing....

Charalambides: Tom and Christina Carter (Drawing Room) is the first album of new music in seven years by the Texas-based duo, and, like its title suggests, one of their most elemental. The Carters first played music under that name in 1991, and since then they’ve covered a lot of musical territory, including densely arranged psychedelic epics, straightforward folk songs, freely improvised feedback duels, and austere, wordless chorales. The new album, like its predecessor, Exile (Kranky), is a double LP, but the two releases couldn’t be more different....

In “Looking at the Present: Recent Works by Jim Dine,” at Richard Gray Gallery‘s newly opened warehouse space in West Town, Jim Dine presents a series of figurative paintings made within the last two years. Earlier in his career, Dine was famous for his depictions of objects such as robes, tools, and especially hearts, but before “Looking at the Present” he’d spent several years working in a purely abstract style. The more recent pieces present a subtle return to the body, undefined figures and faces ground into the surface with power tools and a thick application of sand-mixed acrylic and oil paint....

Mike Sula Nashville hot, the Roost Lately, amid the ongoing fried chicken wars, a special caliber of ordnance has been deployed by some of the newer combatants. I’m talking about Nashville hot chicken, a nuclear option if it’s prepared right. Its creator and best-known purveyor is Nashville’s Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, its recipe allegedly born when owner Andre Prince’s great-uncle Thornton’s jealous girlfriend exacted vengeance for his philandering by preparing him fried chicken dredged in a lethal hot-pepper paste....

Brian O’Mahoney/for Sun-Times Media Pipkins, in a game last month against Huntley in an Elgin tournament. The Bogan junior “has the heart of a lion,” his coach says. It looked like Luwane Pipkins and his Bogan teammates were in for a long evening Friday in the gym at Harlan, at 96th and Michigan. The Bogan Bengals, one of the city’s top high school basketball teams this season, rely on Pipkins, a skinny 17-year-old guard with a deadly outside jumper....

Before Gabe Klein resigned his position as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation last November to reenter the private sector, he spent two and a half years overseeing a handful of projects that have nudged this city away from automobile centrism and toward a more progressive, inclusive transportation plan. The cycling enthusiast and former Washington, D.C., transportation chief helped bring to Chicago the bike-share program Divvy (which led to some claims that his past consulting work for the company behind Chicago’s program, Alta Bicycle Share, corrupted the bidding process), about 50 miles of protected bike lanes, on-street bike parking “corrals,” pedestrian plazas and “people spots,” and the first phase of Bloomingdale Trail construction....

At the end of “Crown,” on G Herbo’s debut album, Humble Beast, the Chicago rap star ad-libs an anecdote about walking home from school one day as a child and becoming starstruck at the sight of Terrance Boykin, aka Bump J. In the 2000s, few local rappers cast as big a shadow as Bump, leading hip-hop mogul Lyor Cohen to track him down and offer him a $1 million deal with Atlantic....

One of the best things about Schaumburg, aside from the sheer volume of chain stores with a lower sales tax rate than Chicago’s, is its absolute blandness, which makes it really easy to imagine yourself somewhere else—like, say, Ponyville. “There are boys coming in!” she informs her mother, Cindy. “They feel that they put so much time and effort into this niche collecting community, and then all of a sudden bronies come out and start getting all this attention,” Hayes told Collectors Weekly in 2012....

One morning in 1855, residents of Columbus, Ohio, noticed a “low-pitched hum” in the distance, and clouds gathering on the horizon. The sound increased, according to a later telling, “to a mighty throbbing. Now everyone was out of the houses and stores, looking apprehensively at the growing cloud, which was blotting out the rays of the sun. Children screamed and ran for home. Women gathered their long skirts and hurried for the shelter of stores....

This bill brings together two veteran eccentrics who’ve been indie-rock staples since the late 80s: Mark Eitzel, who made his name with American Music Club, and Howe Gelb, who usually records with a revolving cast under the name Giant Sand. Each is supporting strong new work, and neither has shown any inclination to reduce himself to nostalgic resuscitations of his more popular early catalog. Eitzel’s Hey Mr Ferryman (Merge) is as good as any of his solo records; the sleek, richly melodic songs employ the often hilariously self-aware sense of pathos that’s always distinguished him from indie rock’s mope brigade....

The lineup for the Latinx-oriented Ruido Fest came out Wednesday afternoon. Headliners include 90s norteño icons Intocable, reggae-rockers Cultura Profética, Mexico City rap-metal group Molotov, and singer Julieta Venegas. Further down the lineup you’ll find Bomba Estéreo‘s electro-inflected cumbia, Alex Anwandter’s agitpop Chilean house, Lucybell’s shoegazy alt-rock, and the agitated techno-punk of Titán. Ruido Fest spans generations, including artists already on revival tours and others just getting off the ground—it’s a compelling reminder of the oft-underserved scope and depth of Latinx music....

American literature’s most annoying classic was inspired by real-life events. Herman Melville based his epically digressive Moby-Dick on an 1820 incident in which a monster whale turned on a Nantucket whaling ship, the Essex, and rammed it—twice!—causing it to sink into the Pacific Ocean. We meet Captain George Pollard and first mate Owen Chase; young “greenhands” Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Thomas Nickerson; as well as an array of others, from boatswain and purser to carpenter and boat steerer (a job that, interestingly enough, did not entail steering the boat)....

On “Only Songs,” the opening track from their new album The World We Built (Dualtone), the three bright-voiced singers of Wild Reeds proclaim that “the only thing that saves me are the songs I sing,” a sentiment their ebullient, richly harmonized delivery confirms. Kinsey Lee, Sharon Silva, and Mackenzie Howe perform with a gusto that feels downright therapeutic, but while the trio’s spirit is infectious and they’re lovely to hear, the songs themselves don’t quite measure up—they often push a shinier, bigger sound that glosses the group’s rustic roots with a generic, indie-pop polish....

Gossip Wolf is sad to say farewell to Wrekmeister Harmonies main man J.R. Robinson, who’s moving to Astoria, Oregon, this week. Robinson says that after 20 years of brutal cold, it’s time to move on. “I think I feel like Saul Bellow probably felt,” he explains. “This is an amazing, truly American city, but one where ‘No realistic, sane person goes around without protection.’” He picked Astoria not just because it’s where Goonies was filmed but “because it’s an incredibly beautiful area of the country....

The club is. . . Writing this 12 O’Clock Track post is almost like writing a eulogy for an old friend. Yesterday it was announced that Ohio lo-fi indie-rock legends Guided by Voices had called it quits. Sure, they’ve done this before, so there’s always the chance that it won’t stick—front man and sole constant member Robert Pollard has seen more than 15 members pass through the band since 1983, so inner turmoil is the sort of thing that seems to fuel GBV’s brilliance....

Drazin cites Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Arsenal (1928) as one of his favorite silent films. Yesterday I posted the first half of my conversation with longtime silent film accompanist David Drazin, in which he discussed his musical background and how he got started playing for silent-film screenings. In the second half, Drazin shared some of what he learned about the silent era from three decades of accompanying films. The previous post left off with Drazin admitting that, for the first ten years of playing to movies, he never rehearsed before a screening....