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. Older strips are archived here.

Warning: This post contains spoilers. But back to Ego. As played by Russell, the god seems comfortable with his immortality, his strident mannerisms and loquacious line readings suggesting confidence and jovial bemusement. (His performance is easily the most entertaining supporting turn in a Marvel movie since Michael Douglas walked away with Ant-Man.) Russell makes good by Gunn’s comic dialogue, bringing a relaxed assurance to the material; he’s also good at hiding Ego’s melancholy, his aura of confidence belying how it must feel to be alone in the universe....

On the brand-new You Only Live 2wice (Empire/ESGN) rapper Freddie Gibbs, who made his name as a resident of nearby Gary before settling in LA, takes his biggest departure yet from his gangsta-rap roots—though he’s far from going soft. Packaged with this year’s best LP cover—featuring a halo-fitted Gibbs in Jesus garb levitating above a posse of cops, strippers, and “disciples” documenting the scene on their iPhones—are eight excellent tracks of psychedelic and soulful hip-hop, with beats that flow more than snap....

Charles Rex Arbogast / AP Photos Democrat Pat Quinn and Republican Bruce Rauner have raised almost $100 million in their bitter race for governor. Here is today’s $100 million question: which candidate for governor is going to get your vote? Rauner, the challenger, has never run for elected office but says he’s qualified for the state’s top job because he made hundreds of millions of dollars as a private equity investor—including huge sums managing state pensions....

When Yamani Hernandez, executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, is asked what motivated her to get into her line of work, she always tells the same story. Several years ago she worked for a summer art program for youth, and she overheard a pregnant 14-year-old offering $10 to anyone willing to kick her in the stomach. The teen already had one child and couldn’t afford an abortion. “She lives at home, and she’s saying she doesn’t have access to birth control,” Hernandez says....

There aren’t many ingredients you would associate with exactly one restaurant—helium with Alinea, I guess, and if I were to mention the Mexican herb-slash-weed papalo, Porophyllum ruderale, you might say “Isn’t that the thing they put on the sandwiches at Cemitas Puebla in the summer?” Yes it is, when they can get it at all (more on that in a minute). It’s a flat leaf, about three inches wide (at least that’s how big it is at present in one of my Earthboxes), with a medicinal-herbal flavor that invites not-that-close comparison to basil or cilantro, plus a bit of the mouth-coating effect of coriander, or of taking a big swig of after-shave....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. Low, Double Negative This venerable Minnesota slowcore trio, anchored by Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, has been inching from rock instrumentation toward electronic textures for a couple albums now. The new Double Negative abandons that gradualism for a breathtaking leap. Almost every sound—sometimes even Sparhawk and Parker’s lovely vocal harmonies—is processed, distorted, or degraded....

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn. The sticker that Reckless Records put on a copy of Iconoclast’s Groundlessness of Belief seven-­inch If hardcore label Ebullition released it, chances are I own it or want to. So when I found an inexpensive used copy of this 1994 Ebullition seven-inch by Jersey emo band Iconoclast at Reckless recently, I knew I had to buy it....

Chris Wronski The City Council took up an ordinance Wednesday that few aldermen know much about, except that it’s likely to raise the cost of living in Chicago for apartment and condo dwellers. Those who know more aren’t talking. The council passed it anyway. A few years ago Mayor Richard M. Daley realized that the city was broke and he had to do more than sell off bridges and parking meters....

Tonight we wait to hear who Illinois’s new governor will be. And probably tomorrow we wait. And again maybe on Thursday. To pass the time, we’ll be collecting reports from the streets well into the night, pausing occasionally to drink from that flask in our pocket. We’ll have reporters at both gubernatorial election-night parties, and our politics reporters Ben Joravsky and Mick Dumke are both at the Hideout, hosting a chat we’ll be tweeting about right here....

Detour Noir City, the Music Box’s annual series of rare and nearly impossible-to-find film noir, is in full sway. (If you haven’t yet, make sure to read J.R. Jones’s rundown from this week’s paper.) This year the program features a selection of foreign titles, a welcome deviation from tradition that further supports the idea that noir wasn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. Among the most distinct film genres, noir isn’t defined in the same manner as the western or the melodrama—there’s something less tangible, more amorphous about noir—which explains why it’s sort of an umbrella category that unites various subgenres and seemingly divergent films....

Once upon a time (two years ago), there were four siblings, all artists. One wanted to host a family reunion, another wanted to make a horror film, and a third was down for whatever so long so he’d get to compose the R&B soundtrack. The result is Sister, a “film conceived as dance” featuring dancers Sarah, Isabel, and Ligia Manuela Lewis, with live music from their brother, George Lewis Jr. of Twin Shadow....

The premise for Robert Longden and Hereward Kaye’s 1990 musical sounds like a parody of bad musicals—like Elephant!, the intentionally bad musical adaptation of The Elephant Man featured in the 1989 movie The Tall Guy: take Herman Melville’s much-praised, less often read masterpiece about a monomaniacal sea captain bent on killing the albino whale that bit off his leg—and musicalize it. The great British producer Cameron Mackintosh (Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera) bankrolled the original production at Oxford’s Old Firehouse Theatre in 1990....

One of the recurring tricks in the tool kit of extraordinary Chicago sound artist Olivia Block is to toy with the listener’s perception by playing with the boundaries between natural and artificial sound. Back in 2003, as part of the long-running Florasonic series in the Fern Room at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, she created a purely electronic installation that meticulously mirrored the space’s babbling water sounds before zooming into white-noise abstraction, prompting attendees to think about what was real and what wasn’t....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Queer film fans, rejoice. The Reeling Film Fest returns this Friday with 31 feature films and 19 short film programs. Now in its 36th year, Reeling is the second-longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, premiering queer-centric films that can’t be found anywhere else. “Oh, the Horror!,” one of the festival’s short film blocks, examines horror tropes and stories through a queer lens. In Little Bill’s Peep Show, the monster is homophobia....

In May local MC Psalm One (aka Cristalle Bowen) dropped an EP called Free Hugs, her first release under the name Hologram Kizzie. The title is a hat tip to Bowen’s positivity, and the EP’s artwork brings out the dual nature of the words “Free Hugs.” The cover shows a cartoon of Bowen gripping prison bars and sporting white hair and an orange jumpsuit with a nametag that says “Hugs.” “Free Hugs” is as much a posi slogan as it is a call for action—or rather a personal call for Bowen to act....

Q: I’m a 26-year-old single bi woman. Sometimes my roommate/best friend and I have drunken threesomes with men. We’ve had some great one-night stands (less scary with a friend!), but recently we slept with a man I’ve been (drunkenly) sleeping with over a period of months, my “friend with benefits.” I shared my FWB with my roommate because she wanted to have sex, and I shared my roommate with my FWB because he wanted to experience a threesome....

The loss prevention office at Brady’s, a Michigan Avenue department store that looks and sounds a lot like Macy’s, has been catching and prosecuting a lot of BMYs (black male youths) lately, and the corporate headquarters is starting to catch wind of an what looks like a definite pattern. The staff, comprised mostly of people of color, is incredulous, but after a confrontation with a shoplifter becomes violent, the group of coworkers must examine their own practices, which inevitably leads to larger questions about the corporate and socioeconomic hierarchy of who gets to watch whom....

In French, la petite mort—”the little death”—refers to orgasm and its aftermath. There are lots of little deaths (and rebirths) of both the erotic and emotional variety in Hello Again, a lush, sexy adaptation of the 1993 chamber musical by composer-librettist Michael John LaChiusa that opens this year’s Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival. Based loosely on La Ronde, the scandalous 1897 drama by Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (which also inspired films by Max Ophuls and Roger Vadim), this beautifully cast and gorgeously shot movie is a suite of sung-through vignettes exploring themes of seduction and betrayal....