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Brian Wilson performs at Pitchfork on Saturday night, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his great work of sensitive, idiosyncratic genius, the seminal R&B album Pet Sounds. OK, it’s true: Pet Sounds isn’t usually thought of as an R&B album. In fact, in some ways it’s thought of as an anti-R&B album, or even as an antimatter R&B album. Bring Pet Sounds into contact with a James Brown LP, and the two will annihilate each other—vulnerable white feyness and masculine black swagger vanishing in a puff of incompatible aesthetics....

Scenes from last year’s event: MUST be 21+ Chicago – Join us for our marquee event Key Ingredient Cook-off (#KICO) Friday, May 20th from 7pm -10pm Venue ONE 1034 W Randolph St, Chicago, IL 60607 Inspired by our James Beard award-winning Key Ingredient series, #KICO Invites you to taste dishes created by 16 of Chicago’s most outstanding chefs using one of four specific ingredients. Then you get to vote on your favorite!...

There’s plenty to do this week in Chicago. Here’s some of what we recommend: Tue 7/12: Get your lady-lit on with Sappho’s Salon, a monthly storytelling cabaret hosted by Eileen Tull and Liz Baudler at Women & Children First (5233 N. Clark) that focuses on themes of gender, feminism, and queerness. 7:30 PM For more stuff to do this week—and every day—check out our Agenda page.

Chicago politics ain’t for sissies. Neither is this game. The stakes are high. Some people think the mayor (da MARE) is the most important person in this town. But true political beasts like you know that most powerful is the chair of the Finance Committee. Not only do you control the money, the average Chicagoan on the street doesn’t know who you are, so you can serve in relative obscurity for decades, unless you do something foolish like get caught with a small arsenal in your office in City Hall....

Printers Row Lit Fest Meanwhile at Delilahs Finalists: 80 Minutes Around the World Immigration Storytelling Show, Grandma’s House Poetry

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. In 1946, Kinsey married Christine McNeal, and for a few years he put music on the back burner while they started a family. By the late 50s he was gigging in Gary and Chicago alongside Windy City legends such as Jimmy Reed, Albert King, and his idol and muse Muddy Waters....

Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) is basically Jaws with an invisible shark: Ever since the founding of the local mineral baths, small town X has enjoyed a big fat financial boom. Tourists are flocking there to take the waters. But then along comes Dr. Thomas Stockmann, the physician at the baths, who sights a great white in the form of contamination from the tanneries upstream. “All that filth,” he tells a couple of hometown newsmen, “seeps into the feed-pipes of the pump-room [at the baths]; and not only that, but this same poisonous offal seeps out onto the beach as well....

Q: I’m a straight woman and have been sexually active for about six years. I’m in my mid-20s now and about ready to become a “man-hating feminist.” I feel like I can figure out what a guy wants in bed pretty easily. I cannot remember a single time when I’ve had sex with a guy that he has not had an orgasm. I, on the other hand, have never had an orgasm....

Aldertrack aldertrack.com, @aldertrack We all know how it goes around here: what the mayor wants, the City Council rubber-stamps. But there really is more to the story, and Aldertrack reports on its many twists, turns, and central characters. Cofounder Jimm Dispensa launched the first version of the site in 2007 as a way of following the zaniness of ward races around the city. (Last month, Dispensa became 11th Ward alderman Patrick Daley Thompson’s chief of staff....

Lyric Opera of Chicago Chicago Opera Theater Finalists: Third Eye Theater Collective

Chicagoans is a first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. This week’s Chicagoans are Mark and Daniel Stein, brothers and owners of Mark Vend Co. Daniel: And he was big. Six foot three, anywhere between 220 and 250. He had these gigantic paws for hands. Remember, Marky? When he got mad, one eyebrow would go up and one eyebrow would go down, and it was like, “Oh boy....

The folks at Dumpster Tapes have a great ear for the garage and punk bands gestating in Chicago’s underground, so when Bunny front woman Jessica Viscius told me that the group were about to release a seven-inch on the label, I perked up. Viscius pointed me toward Bunny’s first video, for a tune called “Promises,” which they released last week. “Promises” certainly looks like a band’s first video—the shots can be unsteady, the cuts are often erratic, and the stream of footage is barely coherent—but the music burns....

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.

Q: I’m a 33-year-old woman from Melbourne, Australia, dating a 24-year-old man. We’ve been dating for about eight months; it is exclusive and official. He’s kind and sweet, caring and giving, and his penis is divine. The thing is, he confessed to me recently that he doesn’t really “feel.” The way he explained it is, the only emotions he feels are fear and anxiousness that he’ll disappoint the people he cares about....

Follow-ups seldom meet expectations. I’m not the fan type, but I was so awestruck by Shozo Sato’s 1983 Kabuki Macbeth that I made a keepsake of a little piece of iridescent fabric that had fallen off somebody’s costume and landed in the aisle. I still have it. Sato went on to create kabuki versions of lots of other western classics, but none of them could hold me the way the first did....

Los Lobos have spent their nearly half-century career staying one step ahead of anyone’s expectations. Formed in 1973, the group spent their early days playing Top 40 hits and ranchera on the East LA party circuit, but by the end of the decade they’d retooled their sound for the local punk scene. In 1987, they recorded some Ritchie Valens covers for the soundtrack of La Bamba, the 1987 biopic of the Chicano rock pioneer—and hit number one on Billboard with their spin on the title track....

When COVID-19 pulled the rug out from under live music in March, Bandcamp responded by passing along its usual share of revenue to artists and labels for a 24-hour period. As the pandemic wore on, the website did this eight more times, establishing the first Friday of the month as “Bandcamp Friday.” Customers were incentivized to buy music when they knew more of their money would reach the people they were trying to supports, and they spent a total of $40 million on those nine days....

On Play Till You Win (Cassandra Complex), New York singer-songwriter Cassandra Jenkins recorded a song called “Tennessee Waltz.” It’s an original, rather than the country classic by Pee Wee King made famous by Patti Page, but the older tune ingeniously turns up in her song—as she echoes its sentiment of lost love, its iconic theme haunts her solitude. That postmodern trick is emblematic of her music, which deftly collides sleepy honky-tonk balladry with ambient chill....