The first Chicago Dyke March took place in Lakeview in 1996, and from the very beginning, its intentions were radical. That first march, its organizers said, was conceived as an alternative to the “corporate, white male dominated Chicago Pride Parade.” To this day, it has no corporate sponsorships and doesn’t allow police officers or politicians to participate. Its original intention was also to increase dyke visibility, which in recent years has expanded to include queer, bisexual, and transgender folks....

Like its New York predecessor in the late 70s, Chicago’s mid- and late-90s no-wave scene scrambled the accepted precepts of rock and jazz to create addictively noisy, thoughtfully bent, and crassly hilarious music. Its bands included the Flying Luttenbachers, the Scissor Girls, Math, Duotron, Lake of Dracula, and Dot Dot Dot, many of whom shared members. They gigged at long-gone venues such as Czar Bar, Milk of Burgundy, and the Magnatroid, but within a few years most had fallen apart....

Cook County is attempting to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes from several small Chicago music venues, claiming that the establishments should not have been exempt from a county amusement tax because the shows they book do not constitute “live cultural performances.” More than a decade ago, the City of Chicago attempted to collect an 8 percent amusement tax on DJ performances from multiple music venues, claiming that such performances didn’t fall under a similar city exemption....

None of these flaws really matter, though, because at the center of the production is Diana Coates, an actor so strong and so perfectly cast as Henry that she makes up for the production’s missteps. From the moment she enters the play, she dominates, standing with regal bearing, stalking the stage like a true warrior-king, confident of her strength, always poised for action. And when she speaks, she reveals in every word and pause the full power and poetry in Shakespeare’s lines....

Since it opened in 1957, the Old Town School of Folk Music has survived economic downturns, social upheavals, and disco. But in 2020 it faces perhaps its biggest challenge yet. After years of internal strife that have pitted the faculty against the administration and board—they’ve fought over transparency, unfair pay structures, and management decisions, among other things—the teachers are attempting to secure their first-ever union contract. One teaching artist, who asked not to be identified, calls the administration’s behavior “bullying” and says that unionization “brought about all this corporate-defense shit into the equation, which is something we never had to deal with before....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun by Ben LaMar Gay Bill is curious what’s in the rotation of . . . Culture Power45 Culture Power45 is more than a record label-it’s an epic movement! Some of Chicago’s premier producers, DJs, and MCs have come together to create straight-to-vinyl hip-hop gloriousness. It’s a revolutionary thing to put hip-hop on vinyl in the MP3 download era....

About a year ago, Meghann Mossell and a friend were watching a show at the Empty Bottle, sitting side by side at the bar. A man they didn’t know kept walking by, and each time he passed, he’d rub their backsides with his hand. “I thought he must have been high,” Mossell recalls. “Why would someone do something like that?” She says she talked to one of the bartenders, who immediately found the man and kicked him out....

Goodbye Christopher Robin, Simon Curtis’s biopic of Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne and his only child, Christopher Robin, is stuffed with weighty topics: war and PTSD, the writing life, the crippling emotional reserve of the British. But the movie’s focus on the caustic effects of celebrity make this narrative set in the first half of the 20th century particularly relevant for the media-frenzied 21st—especially in the wake of nonstop news stories about camera-mad parents and their needy offspring....

ARTIST: Jay Ryan SHOWS: Mountain Goats American tour, including Fri 11/17 at Riviera Theatre MORE INFO: thebirdmachine.com

Sun-Times Media Martin Luther King Jr. speaking at Soldier Field in 1966, the year he and his family took up residence in North Lawndale If Chicago truly were a meritocracy—where planning decisions were based on an idea’s virtues as opposed to clout—Mayor Emanuel would be steering the Obama Presidential Library to North Lawndale. So in the name of gaining a library, we lose some parkland. Maybe that will convince a black voter or two—other than your faithful City Council factotums—to actually vote for you in the coming mayoral election....

I was honored to appear with Esther Perel at the Orpheum Theater in Vancouver, BC, a few weeks ago to discuss her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. Questions were submitted on cards before the show—some for me, some for Esther, some for both of us—and we got to as many as we could during the event. Here are some of the questions (mostly for me) that we didn’t get to....

Q: I’m a 67-year-old gay man. After a breakup 15 years ago, I believed the possibility of emotional and sexual intimacy with a partner was over for me. Then, a couple of months ago, my desire for sexual contact increased dramatically. For the first time, I began using apps, and I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store; it seemed strangely similar to when I first came out in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the early 1970s....

It wouldn’t be a Bongripper album if the Chicago doom squad didn’t give it some sort of crass title that parodies metal’s predilection for the vehemently vile and violent. Their new Terminal (Great Barrier) follows the great tradition they established on previous releases such as 2007’s Hippie Killer, 2008’s Hate Ashbury, 2010’s Satan Worshipping Doom, and 2011’s delicately named “Sex Tape” b/w “Snuff Film” seven-inch. Which is to say, it offers more of the same Bongripper: gargantuan sounds that treats doom like an obelisk that’s heavy and imposing in all the ways you can hope in this corner of the music spectrum....

Chicago rapper D2x has poured all 23 years of his life so far into his debut album, The Color Blue. Across its 13 tracks, he delivers lines about his childhood in the south suburbs, his time playing basketball as a student at Western Illinois University, his struggles with depression, his faith in God, his recent marriage—and his desire to make a classic album that sums it all up. D2x began releasing music in 2017, and since then he’s stood out with a cohesive combination of soulful beats and focused verses....

In a self-aggrandizing public announcement last month about the return of Lollapalooza, Mayor Lori Lightfoot tweeted a cringey promotional video where she played music for Department of Public Health commissioner Allison Arwady onstage at the Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park. Early in the clip, Lightfoot changes the soundtrack from a Foo Fighters tune to Polo G’s “Rapstar,” which had debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 in April. But I don’t believe that this mayor, who violently upholds the status quo, has ever considered Polo G’s lyrics or even listened to the songs that have propelled him to international fame....

This story was originally published by City Bureau on October 16, 2020. With Mayor Lori Lightfoot set to unveil her 2021 budget on October 21 along with her plan to fill a $1.2 billion deficit, City Bureau presents a guide to what’s going on with the budget process this year and how residents can participate in the conversation. In the past, Chicago has raised property taxes to generate revenue, upsetting homeowners and property managers....

Welcome to the Reader‘s morning briefing for Thursday, June 16, 2016. Ebony and Jet magazines sold by Johnson Publishing to private equity firm Johnson Publishing has sold its two signature magazines, Ebony and Jet, to Clear View Group, a private equity firm based in Austin, Texas. Fortunately, both magazines’ headquarters will remain in Chicago and most of the staff will keep their jobs. Johnson Publishing is not defunct: it will continue running Fashion Fair Cosmetics and the Ebony photo archive, which the company is also trying to sell....

Dutch avant-garde metal band Dodecahedron released two spectacular albums, 2012’s self-titled debut and 2017’s Kwintessens, that promised a bright future for the band with their use of disturbing dissonance, bleak synthesizer textures, and gnashing industrial rhythms. But tragedy struck before they could live up to their potential: front man Michiel Eikenaar (also of black-metal group Nihill) was diagnosed with cancer and passed away in April 2019 at age 42. That same year, cofounding Dodecahedron vocalist and guitarist Michel Nienhuis moved forward with Autarkh, which sticks with some of Dodecahedron’s tricks and expands into new arenas....

Music can instantly transport us to another time and place, but some artists sidestep the space-time continuum entirely—their work builds new worlds that straddle reality and imagination. On her third album, May’s Medieval Femme (Hyperdub), electronic artist Fatima Al Qadiri synthesizes music and poetry from a millennium apart into something immediately alluring and immersive. Born in Senegal and based in Los Angeles, the Kuwaiti composer is known for conceptual art that challenges corrupt political power structures and norms surrounding sexuality and gender as well as drawing attention to our tendency to perceive one another—and sometimes ourselves—through warped lenses....

Courtesy of Wichita Recordings Girlpool Waxahatchee played a sold-out show at the Empty Bottle last night, and this evening they play another at Beat Kitchen, this time with openers Girlpool. The stripped-down, superminimal guitar-and-bass LA duo of Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad play simple pop numbers run through a fractured, grungy filter. On today’s 12 O’Clock Track, “This Place” (off of Girlpool’s split tape with Slutever), they channel plenty of 90s sounds and cram them into the song’s brief two minutes....