Rhiannon Giddens first gained international recognition in the late 2000s as a founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, an acoustic combo dedicated to honoring the African-American string-band tradition. During the heyday of these bands in the early 20th century, they incorporated a wide range of influences, among them antebellum slave songs, acoustic blues, popular tunes, fiddle breakdowns, creole music, and Celtic reels—though most modern listeners simply characterize the banjo-and-violin melodies of string-band music as “hillbilly” or “country....

Courtesy of Wikipedia Foo Fighters in 2009 A few minutes into the premiere episode of HBO’s Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways front man Dave Grohl pitches the concept behind the band’s forthcoming eighth album. “This all started with one idea,” he says, “that the environment in which you make a record ultimately influences the end result. Not just the studio, but the people and the history.” Two decades into their career as the Foo Fighters, Grohl and company decided to spice things up by recording each of the eight songs on the forthcoming Sonic Highways in different U....

Content warning: sexual assault Hess says she remembers hearing about the Orwells as early as two years ago, but the sketchy rumors that reached her barely scratched the surface of what the band has since been accused of doing. “My boyfriend told me that they had a bad reputation, but it was more for being violent or having crazy raucous shows than anything else,” she says. “He had been at the show at Bonnaroo that got cut off mid-set because the crowd was absolutely insane and Mario was egging them on instead of controlling anything....

The layout of the Pitchfork Music Festival is logistically pleasing. There are just three stages (count ’em, Lolla: one, two, three), and each is close enough to the others that you can scoot from one set to the next without hustling so hard you have to skip out on a serendipitous photo op with Carly Rae Jepsen. As an arbiter of cool, Pitchfork has served itself well by keeping its flagship event relatively small, confining it to Union Park for its entire history rather than allowing it to bloat to fill the biggest space available....

Peter Margasak,Reader staff writer Various artists, Jazz Gems From Gennett-Champion One of the few good things about moving is stumbling across things you’d forgotten you owned. This week I rediscovered this entertaining compilation of early jazz cut between 1928 and 1934 for Indiana label Gennett and its imprint Champion, both owned by the Starr Piano Company. Most of the bandleaders were minor (though some of their sidemen, including Herman Chittison and Al Sears, would become well-known in jazz circles), but the music is vibrant and fun....

I don’t publish anything on Thai food before running it past Friend of the Food Chain Leela Punyaratabandhu. In English, no one is writing more authoritatively on the subject than she. For readers of her blog SheSimmers this has been evident for years, and it was only cemented with the publication of her first cookbook, Simple Thai Food, which was a come-to-Jesus for anyone familiar with the broad array of disparate dishes that seems to appear on the menus of Thai restaurants everywhere in the world—except for Thailand....

For months evidence had trickled out suggesting ties between the White House and the botched Watergate burglary, and pollsters found that the public simply didn’t believe President Nixon’s repeated promises to get to the bottom of it. But Ronald Reagan, the aging California governor and former B-movie actor, was so out of step as to be amusing. On May 15, 1973, two days before the Senate Watergate committee began televised hearings, Reagan issued his latest statement dismissing the investigation as a partisan political stunt that was “blown out of proportion....

In the early aughts, David Buss, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, asked 5,000 average, presumably nonhomicidal people if they’d ever vividly fantasized about murdering anyone. The test subjects overwhelmingly answered positively. When Buss went on to ask about the circumstances that had provoked the thoughts, nearly none resulted from having been physically harmed or threatened by the object of the murderous fantasy. More often, the daydreams were rooted in the scariest thing of all: humiliation....

Mark Haddon’s 2003 smash-hit young adult novel was a notable staple on bookstore best-seller tables throughout the aughts for a handful of reasons, not the least of which was its stark brevity. First, the atmospheric kind: using the unadorned first-person voice of Christopher, a 15-year-old boy presumed to be on the autism spectrum, Curious Incident unravels a domestic whodunnit from an unsentimental—yet often heart-wrenching—point of view. And second, the literal kind: the book can easily be read in one or two sittings....

Rahm Emanuel ducked out of City Hall alone on Tuesday afternoon, his usual security detail walking slightly ahead of him. The calm, matter-of-fact way that Rahm’s rule is coming to an ending is shocking—particularly so if you compare it to the mood of eight years ago. In 2010, Obama’s former chief of staff returned to Chicago from the White House poised as a conquering hero ready to assume his rightful place on the throne....

Mike Sula Medio pollo, Piko Riko Each morning, at around nine or ten, the atmosphere on the blocks surrounding the intersection of Montrose and Troy in Albany Park is saturated with the narcotic aroma of roasting chicken. If you happen to pass by the esteemed Colombian restaurant Brasa Roja, you can see for yourself the formations of bronzed chickens spinning over the smoldering coals in the front window. It’s a Pavlovian stimulus nearly as compelling as the invisible cocoa clouds that spew from the Blommer Chocolate factory, but it’s not even the best pollo a la brasa in the neighborhood (see: D’Candela)....

Even if you’ve never seen a Wes Anderson movie, you’ve probably seen the American Express commercial he made in 2004, which was ubiquitous on American TV: between takes on a movie set the hip young director marches around giving instructions to his actors, noting the makeup job on a geisha character, conferring with his prop man on a suitable weapon for a scene (“Can you do a .357 with a bayonet?...

For certain species of north-siders, suburbanites, and tourists, Chinatown might as well be in China. The reasons are manifold. The very idea of navigating the Land Rover around the south side is out of the question. Didn’t someone say someone found bedbugs on the Red Line? Why spend money on an Uber when you could drop it on that sweet Tilted Kilt wife-beater? OK, I don’t know if that last part is true about Ben Ruiz, but I do know he’s been the chef at Bar Marta for a while....

Jammy New York band Woods aren’t any sort of a political combo, but that doesn’t mean the members don’t feel the overwhelming weight of last year’s election. In preparing to make their latest album, Love Is Love (Woodist), they made the deliberate choice to respond by embracing the titular emotion rather than the rage that enveloped so many of us. In a liner-note essay for the new record, music journalist Sam Hockley-Smith wrote, “There will be parts of life where we will watch as events unfold and we will feel helpless....

Heat rises in shimmering waves off the barren white plains. A thin crust of translucent salt coats the racetrack surface where motorcyclists gather to compete at the Bonneville Salt Flats. A young woman, her face turned toward the sun, poses against a waxed-down 250cc motorcycle. “I was out there racing and just happened to look good in a bikini,” Frances Stark laughs. “I was really a weirdo, not some hottie.” The photograph, titled Total Performance (1988), was the artist’s ticket into art school....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, May 4, 2017. Rahm promises to block the sale of the Thompson Center Mayor Rahm Emanuel has vowed that he will block the state from selling the Thompson Center in the Loop until he’s sure that local taxpayers won’t have to pay for rebuilding the CTA station below the building. “I’m not going to stick that tab on Chicago taxpayers,” the mayor said at an event Tuesday....

JIM NEWBERRY Beau Wanzer is the one with the pot on his head. Local electronic wiz and synth (and chili) enthusiast Beau Wanzer keeps turning out tracks as part of Streetwalker and Mutant Beat Dance, and he’s always working away on his solo postindustrial dance cuts. In fact, Wanzer just dropped his self-titled debut LP, which culls together songs he put together between 2002 and 2008. Beau Wanzer is only available on vinyl (though you can listen to some samples of it online), so today’s 12 O’Clock Track‘s is an older number from Wanzer: “Balls of Steel,” which is off a self-titled EP that chic label Long Island Electrical Systems (better known as L....

Few Chicagoans know as much about local government as Lyle Benedict. The 57-year-old can tell you when the City Council slimmed down from 70 aldermen to 50 (1923). He knows the role of the vice mayor (“To wait for the mayor to die”). He can even explain the property tax multiplier. For 31 years, Benedict has fielded questions about the workings and history of Chicago government, first for the municipal reference library on the tenth floor of City Hall, then, after the city shut down that operation in 1993, at the Harold Washington Library Center....

Speedy Ortiz Tomorrow night the National kick off their four-night stand at the Chicago Theatre—every performance is sold out but there are plenty of other opportunities to see some great shows. “For the past ten years Justin Broadrick has made music as Jesu, combining warm shoegaze with wall-of-sound postmetal. Jesu records are so lush and beautiful that it’s easy to forget you’re listening to the same guy who spent the late 80s and all of the 90s fronting pioneering industrial-metal act Godflesh, one of the most brutal bands ever to exist,” writes Luca Cimarusti....

Gossip Wolf is sad to report that Phillip Pelipada—better known to Chicago’s dance-music community as Phil Free Art—died last week at age 44. Pelipada was well-known in town for his inimitable positivity, for giving out copies of his intricately hand-drawn rave zine, Free Art, and for DJing scorching sets of house, freestyle, and jungle in clubs and on Vocalo and WHPK, among other places. Pelipada posted several DJ sets to Mixcloud—this wolf is particularly fond of “Do I Still Play Hardcore,” an expert blend of pile-driving mid-90s happy hardcore and gabber....