Jade Jackson reveals her relative inexperience in songwriting when she opens her debut album, Gilded (Anti), with the couplet, “I grew up my father’s daughter / He said, ‘Don’t take no shit from no one.” The 25-year-old artist may well be relaying a genuine experience for all I know, but those banal lines set the tone for an album by someone who admires country music but isn’t yet able to add anything to the tradition....

The annual “Freshman Class” issue of XXL magazine aims to predict hip-hop’s future stars, but it increasingly spotlights artists who are already hot. The 11 rappers in the 2019 class, which was announced in June, include the two most sought-after MCs of the summer: Houston’s Megan Thee Stallion and Charlotte’s DaBaby. In the XXL Freshman Class freestyle cypher that the two rappers shared with YK Osiris and Lil Mosey, uploaded to YouTube at the end of July, they both scorch every second they’re on the mike; DaBaby, who claims about half the video’s four minutes and 30 seconds, tears through the dreamy beat like Wile E....

Noel Vasquez/Getty Images for Hennessy Started from the bottom now we here Reader staffers share stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us. • About a day—sort of—in the life of the New York Times? —Aimee Levitt • That Vice has named its first female editor in chief—and that she’s promising “more female correspondents”? —Mara Shalhoup

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. PAIN TEENS Born In Blood by Bliss Blood Curtis Roads, Microsound This seminal 2004 book by Curtis Roads covers the history, theory, and compositional practice of microsound—which not only dissolved the familiar building blocks of music but also laid the groundwork for what we now call granular synthesis. Roads lays out meticulous recipes for exploring the realm of sound particles briefer than one-tenth of a second—a kind of quantum sonic world....

If Big Thief had only given us May’s U.F.O.F., they already would’ve been one of the most compelling indie bands of 2019. Then in August, the folk-leaning Brooklyn four-piece dropped the feverish, slow-boiling rocker “Not” and announced the release of another full-length, the brand-new Two Hands (4AD). The albums feel tethered together, as if they’re responding to each other. Big Thief recorded U.F.O.F. just outside Seattle with engineer Dom Monks and producer Andrew Sarlo, wrestling together stripped-down melodies that alternate between fragile and austere; front woman Adrianne Lenker balances the two on the otherworldly “From” when her trembling voice breaks into a growl....

In a futile attempt to justify the unjustifiable, Trumpsters have resorted to grave robbery. In his June 11 column, Kass argues that Black Lives Matter activists who take a knee to protest police violence against Black people are members of a cult threatening to destroy America. “I’m no theologian, but my ancient Greek Orthodox Christian faith teaches us to condemn racism and support the oppressed. We’re judged on sins we commit as individuals....

Courtesy NFL The Draft Town fest in Grant Park features areas where fans can watch the draft for free. Back on December 2, 1963, the last time the NFL draft was held in Chicago, there was no television coverage. Nothing on the radio either. And there certainly wasn’t a fan festival like the Draft Town event happening in Grant Park this week, which takes place while the league’s teams make their selections across the street at the Auditorium Theatre....

It was a powerful moment this morning when a mostly African-American crowd gathered in the soaring atrium of the Harold Washington Library Center’s Winter Garden to honor Chicagoan Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist, anti-lynching activist, and suffragist for whom Congress Parkway, the southern border of the Loop, was officially renamed today. It’s the first-ever downtown Chicago roadway to be named for an African-American woman. Also in attendance at the ceremony were South Loop alderman Sophia King and downtown alderman Brendan Reilly, who proposed the ordinance for the street name change; Illinois lieutenant governor Juliana Stratton; Cook County Board president and mayoral hopeful Toni Preckwinkle; and attorney Chaz Ebert, widow of film critic Roger Ebert....

I’m thankful for the first full-length collaboration between Chicago rappers SD and Brian Fresco, the new Muddbruddas (Empire). Its mere existence takes a wrecking ball to the tired cliche that the local scene is split into two camps, “drill” and “alternative hip-hop,” that are isolated from each other’s sound and influence. When Chief Keef kicked off the drill boom in 2012, SD was part of the crew around Keef’s label and collective, Glory Boyz Entertainment....

Rapper-singer Rich Jones and producer Montana Macks have been friends for nearly two decades, which surely helps explain how the Chicagoans’ new self-released album, How Do You Sleep at Night?, hits so smoothly. For the past few years, Jones has leaned into the downy plushness of his voice, more and more often rhyming in a relaxed croon—and he’s also one of the few MCs who can drop Yiddish into the middle of a verse without sounding fakakta (the exact word he uses in “Clicksonmyphone”)....

It’s one of the funniest scenes in Singin’ in the Rain. Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen are a pair of 1920s movie stars at an advance screening of their first sound picture—their first “talkie”—when there’s a problem: the sound is messed up. Onscreen, Kelly’s clothes squeak like rubber boots, Hagen’s pearls clink, and her shrill voice comes in, then fades out, then comes in again. In their seats, Kelly and Hagen shift anxiously as the audience laughs and cheers and heckles like it’s watching a slapstick comedy instead of a drab costume drama....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, December 30, 2016. Have a great New Year’s weekend! Rahm considered a Chicago-only lottery to generate revenue Mayor Rahm Emanuel considered launching a Chicago-exclusive lottery to help the city get out of its financial crisis, according to the recently released trove of his e-mails. Former Illinois Lottery director Michael Jones suggested the idea in a memo to senate president John Cullerton, who then forwarded it to Emanuel, who passed it on to deputy mayor Steve Koch and Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool....

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) thought herself ugly yet couldn’t stop painting self-portraits. Not many of the forty-some pictures in “Portrait of the Artist as a Landscape,” now at the Elmhurst Art Museum, attempt to render Abercrombie’s actual features, but almost all of them try to depict her mental or emotional states. They are indeed overwhelmingly landscapes, as the title of the exhibition states, but of anxiety, fear, and loneliness rather than of sea, sky, or earth....

Greenbeard are a grimy-sounding stoner-rock trio from Austin who riffed their way onto the scene in 2014 and have produced three albums since. Like its predecessors, last year’s Lödarödböl (Sailor Records) has a confident swagger in its crunchy, crusty hard-rock, psychedelic custom-van boogie. It clocks in at less than 40 minutes, and not a second of it is wasted, though the band stretch out their grooves with the calm of a stoned occult guru on a waterbed....

For Grizzly Bear’s first album in five years, Painted Ruins, the band broke from its independent roots to join forces with major label RCA. Produced by bassist Chris Taylor, the new music has a glossier surface finish than ever, and the band hasn’t simplified its intricate style. In fact, the tension between the world-weary lyrics of Ed Droste, Daniel Rossen, and (for the first time) Taylor and the churning grooves, ethereal harmonies, and sparkling melodies of the music does nothing to reduce life’s complexities into digestible bites....

Hogtown In this week’s long review I complain about not being able to masturbate during a multiplex screening of Fifty Shades of Grey. My mother will be so, so proud. Also, we’ve also got medium-length reviews of The Last Five Years, a musical romance starring Jeremy Jordan and Anna Kendrick, and Daniel Nearing’s period Chicago dramas Hogtown (2014) and Chicago Heights (2010), both screening at Gene Siskel Film Center in honor of Black History Month....

The Block Beat multimedia series is a collaboration with The TRiiBE that roots Chicago musicians in places and neighborhoods that matter to them. Everything about Chicago rapper Ric Wilson is rooted in the Baptist church. As a teenager, the 22-year-old began working as an organizer for Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide, and his drive to fight for black lives arises from his upbringing in the black church—placing his activism in the tradition of the civil rights movement, also born from the black church....

On Sunday night the Morton County Sheriff’s Department escalated its conflict with Standing Rock Reservation protesters opposed to the North Dakota Access Pipeline by spraying crowds with water cannons in 26-degree weather. Since April, when protesters established the Oceti Sakowin Camp in support of the Standing Rock Sioux (whose reservation straddles the North and South Dakota borders), resistance to the NDAPL has steadily grown—now more than 1,000 protesters live in the encampment, hoping to stop the imminent construction of an oil pipeline that the Sioux say will threaten their water supply and thus their health and home....

On December 8, Chicago’s outstanding sludge doom-metal quartet Pale Horseman started another apocalypse with the release of their fourth full-length, The Fourth Seal (Black Bow). The album finds new drummer Jason Schryver, who joined the band in 2016, adding muscular propulsion to the solid team of bassist Rich Cygan and twin guitarist-vocalists Eric Ondo and Andre Almaraz. Pale Horseman’s live shows are generally pulverizing—and riff monsters like the record’s leadoff track “Final War” will be devastating onstage—but what really gives them depth is their ability to go beyond formula....

Chicago foursome Ovef Ow evolved out of Me Jane, a postpunk band that specialized in the kind of chilly, danceable melodies that emanated from Manchester in the 1980s. For the name of their new project, bassist-vocalist Marites Velasquez and drummer-vocalist Sarah Braunstein took an angular logo Timothy Breen had designed for their old band and turned it upside down—the results looked like a couple nonsensical words, “Ovef Ow.” Rounded out by Kyla Denham on synths and Nick Barnett on guitar, Ovef Ow transplant the cold aura of Me Jane to the beach; on their latest EP, Crash the Party (Midwest Action), they build surf-rock vibes out of bright, shout-’em-out vocal harmonies, choppy Farfisa lines, and riptide guitars....