Monthly
Songs For The Soweto Generation
By Rosalind Cummings-Yeates To Americans, Nelson Mandela and Dr. Desmond Tutu may be the most famous South Africans, but if you’re part of the “Soweto generation” (those born in the mid ’70s to early ’80s, just before apartheid was abolished), it’s more likely the most notable South African is Thandiswa Mazwai.
Local CD Reviews
Still looking for a fresh female voice who didn’t get her start on “American Idol”? Chicago-bred Meg Allison may have your answer. Her debut disc, Missing Piece, is full of exactly the sort of low-key, heartfelt, story-telling tracks you’d expect from an inspired singer-songwriter who waits tables by day and plays her heart out in […]
Around Hear: Part 2
Click here to return to page 1. The sophomore LP from Cameron McGill is a convincing collection that demonstrates this singer-songwriter’s potential. Street Ballads & Murderesques consists mostly of ballads evoking McGill’s softer side with achingly sentimental tunes. The intimate poetic lyricism is accompanied by simplistic arrangements of acoustic guitar, harmonica, piano, and dashes of […]
Cover Story: Neko Case
Neko Case Time Won’t Let Me In order to reach Neko Case via phone, you have to dial the least-populous time zone in the continental United States. You must reprogram yourself and remember your scheduled 3 p.m. Mountain Standard Time interview means not calling at 2 p.m. Chicago time like it would be when calling […]
Queen & Paul Rodgers
Queen Is Dead, Long Live Queen The idea of a legendary band continuing without its original lead singer is by no means new. It’s been adapted by everyone from stadium rockers INXS, Journey, and Chicago’s own Styx to the slightly modified monikers of psychedelic superstars The Doors Of The 21st Century and The Dead. On […]
Shelley Short
Shelley Short O Captain My Captain Coming here was a very intense time,” Shelley Short says about uprooting her life from Portland to Chicago in September 2004. “I moved here with a friend and another close friend lives here that I’ve known since high school, so I wasn’t all alone, but I left a lot […]
Belle And Sebastian
Belle And Sebastian Everybody’s Talkin’ “We’ve been around for 10 years, but I don’t really feel like we’re an old band. At the moment, we feel quite new and current. And I think we are reaching a lot more people. I think, to a lot of people, we are a new group.” — guitarist Stevie […]
Rhett Miller
Rhett Miller Couldn’t Leave If He Tried “If I’m not mistaken, I cannot only do the Old 97’s in the future — y’know, doing shows and albums. Obviously we won’t do an album a year, an album every two years, even, like we did at one point. But I think we’ll be able to continue […]
Low Skies
Low Skies Democracy In Action Chicago’s Low Skies aren’t in line to win any Kid’s Choice awards, nor will they ever with the musical path they’ve chosen. Swirling around Chris Salveter’s tangled-in-the-sheets headgames, the new All The Love I Could Find (Flameshovel) skulks like a fog, limiting vision to a sea of minute reflections forlornly […]
LongShot
Longshot Sure Fire When Chicago’s ever-eager Longshot was getting ready to record his third album last year, this MC/poet (legally known as Chad Heslup) made a decision most hip-hop acts would write off as flat-out ludicrous: He put his own album on the backburner to help out his fellow Chicago hip-hoppers. Even while under contract […]
Hank III
Hank III Spittin’ Image Shelton Hank Williams, or Hank III as he’s better known, will be excited to see his new record, Straight To Hell (Curb), on store shelves, but excuse him if he won’t allow himself to become too enthusiastic. “Yeah,” he says with a thick Southern drawl, “I’ll believe it when I see […]
Q&A: Blackie Lawless
Hello, My Name Is Blackie IE: If you were to release “Animal (Fuck Like A Beast)” today, would it be met with more or less controversy? Blackie Lawless: That’s difficult to say because the first impression has obviously already been established. That’s impossible for me to say, but I don’t think things have changed that […]
SXSW, T. Rex, Juvenile
MR. FORSTNEGER GOES TO AUSTIN If you get bored from the 15th through the 19th, head on down to Austin, TX, for South By Southwest. You won’t be lonely, all of the following Chicago bands will be there: Office, The M’s, Owen, Puerto Muerto, Chris Mills, a Flameshovel Records showcase featuring Bound Stems, Lying In […]
March DVDs!
The Constant Gardener Universal There’s no denying the price of prescription drugs is out of this world. What is often overlooked is the cost to bring those drugs to the market. Sure, it may cost the pharmaceutical company pennies to make the pills it offers, but it costs upwards of half a billion to bring […]
Stop, Thief!
Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering The Fisk University-Library Of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942 is an important book. Edited by writers Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, it introduces an unpublished manuscript by Fisk University professor, composer, and musicologist John Wesley Work III, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, and graduate student Samuel Adams. The three Fisk scholars had […]
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