After spending pretty much my entire summer immersed in Grateful Dead culture, I discovered a huge collection of Dead covers by Ryan Adams, and one thing became very clear to me: Adams can do a great fucking cover tune. So when I heard about him covering Taylor Swift’s 1989 front to back, I was immediately interested. A track from the record leaked yesterday, Adams’s rendition of recent smash single “Bad Blood,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track....

Few grassroots Chicago hip-hop artists play as well with others as Clinton Sandifer, aka ShowYouSuck. His collaborations tend to turn into friendships, and those friendships lead to new collaborations—not just in hip-hop but also in punk, pop, indie rock, experimental R&B, electronic music, and even stand-up comedy. His warmth, positivity, and enthusiasm act as catalysts for all sorts of genre-crossing hybrids that might not exist without him. Hood Internet producer Steve Reidell recruited Show for his group’s 2012 album Feat—specifically “Nothing Should Be a Surprise,” which also features Arizona rapper Isaiah Toothtaker....

I was only mildly aware of the band Toto on the Tuesday in May when my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. I’m a child of the 80s, and we all know at least “Africa.” It was an omnipresent hit in the early days of MTV, when music videos were low-budget affairs: usually stitched-together concert footage, surrealistic short films, or a disjointed combination of the two. My relationship to Toto changed suddenly and permanently on May 30, the day doctors delivered my father, Mark, a surprising but unequivocal death sentence....

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer Chicago has spent the last couple weeks preparing for Halloween, and there have been no shortage of horror movies on the city’s repertory schedule, but aside from one or two exceptions, locally shot and produced offerings have been absent. Plenty of great films have been shot and set in Chicago, and horror films are no exception. Personally, I’d like to see a Music Box of Horrors/Terror in the Aisles-esque movie marathon dedicated to locally shot horror movies, of which there are dozens of worthy titles....

Reuben Atlas Hypnotic Brass Ensemble performing at the Shrine On Monday night at 10 PM, WTTW will screen Reuben Atlas’s Brothers Hypnotic, a lively, music-soaked documentary about the Chicago-bred Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. The group, which moved to New York in 2006, consists of eight sons fathered by trumpeter, bandleader, composer, and visionary Phil Cohran—an early member of the Sun Ra Arkestra, a cofounder of the AACM, and the man behind the Affro-Arts Theater....

University of Illinois Press Chicago, as the cliche goes, is a city of neighborhoods. New York likes to make this claim too, as do Saint Louis and Seattle and probably every other city in America that can be subdivided into distinct areas, each with its own special cultural and architectural character that attracts its own special stereotypical resident, easily identified by race, ethnicity, age, social class, and degree of hipsterdom....

You know about the largest food event happening downtown this weekend, so let’s go straight to the second largest: the Windy City Smokeout, a barbecue, beer, and (mostly country) music fest taking place at Grand and the Chicago river, which food-wise will include barbecue from locals like Smoque, Chicago Q, Lillie’s Q, and Bub City, as well as visiting teams from Austin’s the Salt Lick and “winningest man in barbecue” Myron Mixon....

Surfrider Chicago responded last Monday to U.S. Steel’s attempts to hold off the environmental advocates’ lawsuit, claiming that the consent decree reached between the Pittsburgh-based steel company and the U.S. Government will not address the violations that are still taking place at the company’s Portage facility. Namely, that chromium in the groundwater near the plant is still migrating towards the Burns Waterway, according to a July report with the IDEM only recently made public by U....

My esteemed colleague Leor Galil and I caught a chunk of the all-day Two Piece Fest at ChiTown Futbol in Pilsen this past weekend, arriving right in the midst of the hour-long “Dinner Break.” We were told that many of the day’s acts were loud, thrashy, and powerviolence/grind-themed, though there had been some exceptions. One that was absolutely not an exception was Philly’s +Hirs+, the first duo to play following the break—an abrasive 12-minute set....

Opening this Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center for a two-week run, Minding the Gap is one of the strongest American documentaries to play Chicago this year. Director Bing Liu begins with a seemingly limited subject—skateboarders in their late teens and early 20s in Rockford, Illinois—and pursues it with such diligence and curiosity that the film ends up addressing a number of major issues. Minding the Gap is at once an elegy for urban, blue-collar America and a sobering meditation on domestic violence....

I track the passage of summer through the things that make me happy at the farmers’ market. First come strawberries, then garlic scapes, then tomatoes, then cherries and corn, and I celebrate them all initially with an idiotic little song-and-dance routine, and then with cakes and pestos and sandwiches and pies. And finally come the apples and pears. I know they should make me sad since they’re the harbingers of the end of market season and the onset of winter, but instead they make me happiest of all....

An empty bottle of 2014 Dark Lord on the festival grounds. This is what you might call “status litter.” This year Dark Lord Day, the annual beer and metal festival that’s also the only place (and the only day) that Three Floyds Brewing of Munster, Indiana, sells its famous Dark Lord Russian imperial stout, fell on Saturday, April 26. Readers with eidetic memories will recognize that as the same sentence (with the exception of the date) that opened my Dark Lord post last year—and if you haven’t been keeping up, I’d recommend you go back and read it now....

When the video featuring University of Missouri professor Melissa Click came to my attention, I wrote her an e-mail introducing myself as a Mizzou journalism grad and offering her a “forum” to explain her behavior. She didn’t reply. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote that the students “showed leadership in trying to rectify a failure of leadership. But moral voices can also become sanctimonious bullies.” PEN’s Suzanne Nossel, writing in the Times, expressed sympathy for both Tai’s side and the students’, but observed that “some student rights advocates seem convinced that their needs and safety can be assured only by restricting speech....

This local “psychedoomic” outfit share spiritual space with some fellow travelers, but really they’re in a league of their own. Heavy as fuck and blending their plunging, slow doom riffs with an industrial flavor a la Godflesh, Drug Honkey live in a much more serious zone of multifaceted darkness than the silly name would have you believe. Their latest album, Cloak of Skies (Transcending Obscurity)—with its trippy Bosch-like cover art and long, cinematic tracks—further develops their progressive side via a rich variety of tonal flavors created by synthesizers, eerie vocals, and, on the title track, the wailing, damned-soul saxophone of Bruce Lamont (Yakuza, Bloodiest)....

When the alarm buzzed Rosa awake, she knew she wasn’t going to give the old man extra sugars that day. Every Saturday, he asked for ten packets. She had begun calling him Sugar Pop. Nobody in their right mind would dump ten packets day after day into one small Styrofoam cup of coffee. Allison was thin, maybe 30 or a little older. She ran all day between the kitchen and the built-in tables where people ate their long johns or crullers and drank their coffee....

As if to prove one of the points I just made about the popularity of food lists, last week an actual food-list scandal occurred. A Fox News list of the “most influential BBQ pitmasters and personalities” came in for grief when someone who was actually on the list, Texas Monthly barbecue editor Daniel Vaughn, noticed that while barbecue is noted for its rich heritage in the African-American community (you could make a movie about the way barbecue’s history intersects with African-American history in Chicago), the list was as white as a plate of cream cheese sandwiches at a D....

Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma A few days after I watched Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin for work, I revisited Mamma Roma (1962) at the Pier Paolo Pasolini retrospective currently underway at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I found the films complemented each other rather nicely—both hinge on the perverse spectacle of a world-famous actress playing off a cast of everyday people. Mamma Roma stars Anna Magnani as a former prostitute from Italy’s rural poor; Under the Skin stars Scarlett Johansson as a space alien undercover in Scotland....

Whoever dreamed up the double bill of Hall & Oates and Tears for Fears deserves a DeLorean as a reward. Though they play different styles of pop music—Hall & Oates are experts at soft rock and blue-eyed soul, Tears for Fears deliver ambitious synth-heavy sophisti-goth—the two acts share a few similarities. Both are duos with one dominant member (Daryl Hall and Roland Orzabal); both found their greatest success during the 80s....

Boots Aquaria (Columbia) This lighthearted soul LP, recorded in 1979 and reissued this month by the Numero Group, is a fortuitous by-product of a broken system. Edge of Daybreak formed in 1976 at the Powhatan Correctional Center in Virginia, which imprisoned a slew of talented African-­American musicians but allowed at least some of them access to instruments. As Numero’s Jonathan Kirby explains in the re­­issue’s liner notes, some members of the band had been locked up under dubious circumstances....

Michael Gebert Guests visiting the kitchen at El Ideas Before we talk about the semifinalists for this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards, some perspective is in order. The list, released yesterday, is a short list for the even shorter list of actual finalists, and includes lots of people who aren’t really going to be up for an award. The finalists list is full of people who will spend years waiting to get an award, if they ever do....