While watching New Zealand’s Connan Mockasin play sensual, luxurious psych-pop at the Empty Bottle in 2014, Adam LP—who’s now been making seductive indie-pop songs as Wavy ID for a little over a year—had an epiphany: “I started rethinking different ways to make music, different sounds you can make, different kinds of emotions you can convey—you can be sexy, you can be gentle,” LP told me over the phone. “It seemed like in the [Chicago] music scene there was a lack of that....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Friday, September 22, 2017. Have a great weekend!

Electric Guest’s cofounders, vocalist-instrumentalist Asa Taccone (a Danger Mouse mentee) and drummer-producer Matthew “Cornbread” Compton, like to say they met in 2011 when they both rented rooms in a Los Angeles house that essentially functions as a dorm for musicians. An October profile in Paper magazine suggests that Compton decided he wanted to collaborate after hearing Taccone’s music in the house, but their professional and personal lives had already intersected in other ways....

Even though Wayne Watts is fighting leukemia and is tethered to a dialysis machine three days a week, he frequently makes the 20-minute drive from his home in Hazel Crest to Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, to visit the grave of his nephew, Stephon. “I stand there and I talk to him,” says Watts. “I just tell him that we’re still here fighting for you.” After the incident the two officers were put on paid administrative leave....

When we first meet Jo March in director Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women, she is standing outside the door of a newspaper office in New York as an adult, pausing to take a deep breath before entering, as she prepares to sell her first story to the editor. The most surprising performance comes from Florence Pugh, who portrays youngest sister Amy. In earlier adaptations and in the novel, she has typically been portrayed as a spoiled and vain child—from here Pugh transforms her into a smart and practical woman as an adult, who is almost similar to Ronan’s Jo in how deeply she feels the limitations placed on her as a woman....

As you may recall, my first run as a political talk show host didn’t end so well. It was a Thursday afternoon—December 27, 2018. I’d just finished a show and the station’s bosses called me to the conference room to say . . . “Get out—and don’t come back!” Making it worse—there was tons of stuff to talk about. I mean, just think about some of the wacky shit that went down in the weeks since I got fired....

Join the Chicago Reader on July 16 for the launch of Chicago Pop Stars, Hardcore Heroes, and House Legends: 10 Years of Chicago Reader Music Features by Leor Galil. Celebrate Leor’s debut book with interviews and performances by Kaina, Pivot Gang and the John Walt Foundation, Mike Kinsella of American Football, and Alderman Andre Vasquez. Thursday, July 16, 7 PM-8 PM Virtual, free, no RSVP Rewatch the event here: Learn more about the book and order your copy!...

Even if you buy into the idea that musicians should stay out of politics, how do you overlook the politics baked into everything around you? Take the COVID-19 pandemic: What’s more destructive, the virus or the leaders who don’t even try to get it under control? Preyer, the new album from D.C. six-piece Ilsa, was born in lockdown, and they use it to take the piss out of the corruption, inhumanity, and lust for power that helped drive society to this particular brink....

The instruments of some musical icons end up displayed in museum exhibits or auctioned off for charity at vast sums. Others get handed down to the younger generations to do with as they wish. In the case of Exotic Sin, the London-based duo of multi-instrumentalists Naima Karlsson and Kenichi Iwasa, that’s been a good thing. Karlsson is a grandchild of Don Cherry, who played pocket trumpet with Ornette Coleman as well as a variety of non-Western instruments on records that predicted the evolution of world music, and his wife Moki, who accompanied Cherry on tambura and executed the colorful and powerfully vibe-inducing artwork for their album covers and stage banners....

This weekend, just about the time when—minus the virus—we would have been plopping our posteriors into cushy new seats installed over the summer at the Lyric Opera House and settling in for a double bill of love gone tragically but so operatically wrong (Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci), Lyric is inviting us to boot up the laptop for something cheerier. For the Love of Lyric is a multigenre, online concert conceived and led by soprano Renée Fleming....

With President Trump primed to go after vulnerable Democratic senators in red states, it’s clear the country’s future hinges on the credibility of what political scientists call the Rich Miller Theorem. The Dems have to hold on to all of these seats to have any chance of taking the Senate from the Republicans in November. Miller concocted his theorem to explain why state rep Ken Dunkin, a Democrat, got whupped while state senator Sam McCann, a Republican, was reelected in the March 2016 primaries....

The connection led to Universal Togetherness Band, Numero’s 2015 compilation of material tracked by students in Columbia College’s audio engineering program from 1979 to 1982.

Metra commuters enjoy a number of niceties that aren’t available to CTA straphangers: padded seats, onboard bathrooms, the right to savor an adult beverage during the ride. “The use of electrical outlets on CTA property is not permitted,” agency spokesman Jeff Tolman says. “Charging stations is one idea among many customer amenities we’re exploring as we seek ways to improve service.” Safer sources of power are the outlets along the platforms of el stations, the covers of which are often unfastened....

Huddled in a corner of Harold Washington Library, a group of Chicago students from seven different high schools spoke in hushed voices Thursday as they planned the Chicago Student Walkout, a protest against gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Colorado Columbine High School shooting—Friday at 10 A.M. All of the planning so far has been done by students—although they are getting some help from one student’s parents because they didn’t realize that the money they raised from a Gofundme (about $1,100 so far) to buy supplies such as walkie-talkies and bullhorns and pay for vans wouldn’t be available in time....

Since protests against the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis spurred a reckoning over racism and white supremacy in almost every industry, employees at companies around the country have come forward demanding changes in corporate culture that leaves people of color, and especially Black people, feeling unwelcome, undervalued, and often actually underpaid. The real estate industry is no exception. Magana details two occasions in 2018 when Reich “suggested hiring ‘illegals’ because they will accept less compensation,” and resisted Magana’s recommendations for which employees should get raises, allegedly saying, “‘aren’t these guys illegal?...

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

When news of David Bowie’s death broke this morning, I found out not through social media or a news outlet—I woke up to more than 20 personal messages offering condolences, making sure I was OK. (The first thing I had to do was figure out what terrible thing had happened.) My Reader colleague Kevin Warwick even brought me a doughnut, knowing I’d need sweets to ease the emotional pain. Whether because I’ve told them myself or just because of how I live my life, everyone around me knows how much Bowie means to me....

Fetty Wap, King Louie, J. Cole, and Wiz Khalifa are among the legion of rappers who have declared in song that their lives are “like a movie.” The new FX dramedy Atlanta—which is ostensibly about hip-hop, but largely about black life in the titular city—swiftly bludgeons the rap cliche with scene after scene of routine normalcy, which exists even in the most trying of circumstances. At the beginning of episode two, when Alfred Miles (Brian Tyree Henry), a small-time drug dealer who raps under the name Paper Boi, posts bond following a shooting, he inquires about his cousin, Earnest “Earn” Marks (show creator Donald Glover), whose paperwork remains in processing....

Drummer Jim Black has one of the most immediately recognizable styles in jazz—his wonderfully unhinged playing bears the mark of the rock backbeat, but he makes it special with a clanking, disruptive quality that forces his collaborators to heighten their reflexes. I first heard him as the infectiously sputtering engine behind Tim Berne’s fantastic quartet Bloodcount, but Black’s roots reach back to Seattle, where in 1987 he cofounded Human Feel with reedists Chris Speed and Andrew D’Angelo and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel....