January 4, 2017 | The Music Issue

THE MUSIC ISSUE

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

2016 IN MUSIC I

t’s no longer an exaggeration, or an overstatement: Chicago is experiencing an artistic boom on par with the Harlem Renaissance, and its biggest and smallest artists all plowed forward this past year with an energy that was impossible to ignore no matter where you turned. You could feel it as the city watched Chance the Rapper continue his ascent to fame, acclaim, and a cool seven Grammy nominations, and indeed that’s the narrative that’s probably the easiest to find. That’s why you’ll see it covered the least here—because the truth was, you could feel it everywhere.

It was there in the ever-growing list of features and collaborations that appeared on each major hip-hop project, where artists like Akenya, Nina Tech, Eryn Allen Kane, and theMIND popped up throughout the year—curiosities on a set of liner notes today, stars of the city tomorrow. It was there in Pilsen’s most DIY venues, where punks and metalheads alike carried the legacy of Los Crudos and Metallica while reinventing what it could mean to love and live with both. It was there as the Chosen Few DJs hosted their 26th annual Chosen Few Picnic, now swelled from a gathering among some of the original Chicago house DJs to a two-day festival that hosts tens of thousands and holds a co-sign from none other than Barack Obama.

It was there in streets, on Twitter, on makeshift dance floors and grimy basements and Cellular Field alike. It was there in the Dojo, a dimly lit hub and haven for the discontented. It was there as places like Young Chicago Authors and Youmedia continued to offer homes for young poets and artists. It was there in the birthplace of footwork, the Battlegroundz, where The Era debuted their mixtape. It was even at Lollapalooza, where Savemoney rapper after Savemoney rapper brought their songs and lives to thousands night after night. It was even in the church of Pastor T.L. Barrett, who found his voice on one of the biggest Kanye West tracks of the year even as he continued, unconcerned, to preach the gospel at his church on 55th and Garfield.

What was “it”? Among other things, it was the sound and feeling of existence, of defiance.

It’d be impossible to sum up the year in South Side music through its sounds alone, or its lyrical themes, so varied and resistant to categorization as they were. So instead we’re forced to think about the resistance itself—about what is being resisted, and to where we are compelled to turn through those instead.

There exists a common truism that when we listen to musical recordings, we forget that there are people behind the sounds, but this year the South Side never did let us forget. It’s a year that made space for artists and listeners alike to find themselves and each other, to create new definitions of friendship and family, and to answer ever-pressing questions, both timely and timeless: when power impresses silence upon you, how do you manage to speak?

What makes it possible to shout?

This is an issue about South Side music, but more than that, it’s about the people who made that music possible. To those people, we say thank you—for giving us those answers, and for everything else too.

ERA TEXTILE “It’s like a footwork textile, a pattern made from motion.

I was studying the origins of cinema and photography, and thinking a lot about how to capture dance on screen.”

—William “Wills” Glasspiegel For more of Wills’s work, turn to page 10.

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Artists

2016 in

NATALIE GONZALEZ

pastor t.l. barrett

BY ZACH GOLDHAMMER

herb kent

TURTEL ONLI

BY JAKE BITTLE

NATALIE GONZALEZ

adamn killa

ELLEN HAO

BY CHRISTOPHER GOOD In the last few years, plenty of rappers have been pigeonholed for their “mumbly” voices and fondness for ad libs. Roselandraised rapper Adamn Killa was often on the receiving end of these comparisons. But in 2016, it was impossible to confuse him with anyone else, and not just because of his face tat and pink dreads. Sure, he's got a good sense of humor and a color palette that ranges from peach to fuchsia, but there's no mistaking Adamn's wordplay and his ear for melody—he's used both of them to carve out a unique space in an increasingly crowded scene. As of late, his singsong lilt has graced productions by everyone from Ryan Hemsworth to DP Beats, and that's to say nothing of his work with Swedish rapper Yung Lean. Though Adamn's influences have been global for some time now, it was a little bittersweet to see him leave Chicago for Los Angeles in 2016. But as he raps on "Again": "I'm still Chicago, man / South Side Chicago, man." There's no chance Adamn (or his audience) will be forgetting where he's from.

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

mykele deville

BY BERNADINE WILLIAMS In May, poet-rapper Mykele Deville dropped the political masterpiece Super Predator. The album, which references Hillary Clinton’s infamous comment labeling the black youth “super predators,” was a timely release for Deville and the political climate of the country. By the end of August, he graced listeners with another album, Each One, Teach One, an ode to his nine-year-old niece. With poetic emphasis, Each One, Teach One showcases the storytelling capabilities of the rapper. While actively featuring his friends and other prominent musicians on many of his songs, Deville emulates the importance of family and friendship in his music, especially during times of despair. Deville used this year to release dense, controversial responses to the ongoing conflicts in the country. The poet-rapper’s brilliance flourishes within the constraints he seeks to break down and eases all those who will listen with his words. Toward the end of the year, Deville released “Mute Feelings” (produced by Tony Piazza) and “Memory Card (Back Me Up)” featuring Jordanna. Both releases seem to be gearing up for another body of work. After a long, tumultuous year, it’s some consolation to know we can expect important music to come from Deville in 2017.

This year saw the passing of Herb Kent, a figure whose influence was too great to do it justice merely by listing his accomplishments, but one has to start somewhere. Born in Bronzeville’s Ida B. Wells project, he started DJing for WBEZ in 1944 while still a student at Hyde Park High School and stayed on the airwaves for the next seventy years, becoming one of the longest-serving radio DJs of all time and a beloved voice and presence for millions of Chicagoans. He served as the emcee for Martin Luther King’s Freedom Summer rally and used his talk show to elevate black perspectives on civil rights; he coined the term “dusties,” helped launch the careers of Curtis Mayfield and The Temptations and was cited by Frankie Knuckles as “the father” of Chicago house. He grouped classical music, jazz music, punk music, soul music, dance music under the umbrella of the “Cool School,” saying in his autobiography that “It doesn't matter if [a record is] old school or new school—there's a certain quality to some music that just makes it good, makes it timeless.” The same could perhaps be said of Kent’s voice itself, stretching as it did across generations and genres and providing, as Jamila Woods wrote in her “Ode to Herb Kent,” a “soundtrack [for] the church picnic, trunk party, Cynthia’s 50th birthday bash, the car ride to school, choir, Checkers.” Part of the magic of his shows, of hearing people talk about his shows, was that he had been around forever and seemed like he would stay around forever—indeed, one imagines he would not have been unhappy with such an outcome.

He played his final Saturday morning show on October 22 and died later that day.

One of the more unexpected developments in hip-hop this year has been the revival of Christian themes in projects from the city's two biggest stars, with the rather vengeful tone of Kanye's Life of Pablo setting a sort of Old Testament precedent to Chance's themes of (re)birth and redemption in Coloring Book. Beyond their thematic differences, there was also an interesting split in the musical sources they pulled from: while Chance brought in the contemporary gospel megastar Kirk Franklin as a feature on "Finish Line," Kanye dug deep into the archives and pulled up a sample from Pastor T.L. Barrett.

Barrett, whose four-decade career as an activist and preacher on the South Side was blemished by a pyramid scheme scandal in the late 1980s, has received renewed attention for the gospel records he recorded with the Youth for Christ Choir. His quasipsychedelic hymn "Like a Ship" had long been prized as a collector's item among gospel fanatics, but a reissue of the recording

by Chicago's own Numero Group on their excellent 2006 compilation Good God!: Born Again Funk made the record more widely available. In 2010, Seattle-based label Light in the Attic followed-up on Numero's lead and put out a full-length LP reissue of the pastor's first album, bringing another wave of attention. Interestingly, "Father Stretch My Hands," the song that was sampled on the Kanye track of the same name, was a true deep cut that didn't appear on either of the reissue records. Another strange manifestation of the pastor's musical renaissance this year was the use of his recording of the standard "Nobody Knows" in the trailer for Vikram Gandhi's Obama biopic Barry, as well as in the Harmony Korine-directed ad for Under Armour's (ugly) Steph Curry sneakers. What does the pastor think of all this? As he told Vanity Fair, “My children and grandchildren are reaping the benefits."

JULIET ELDRED

mick jenkins

BY HANNA GREGOR

COURTNEY KENDRICK

tink

BY DAVID DRAKE It was easy to see why Tink stood apart.

She bridged the chasm between hip-hop and R&B with seeming effortlessness, her confessional, diary-like rap lyrics alternating with singing that hit all the marks. It gave the impression we were watching a prodigy. The songwriting, that could come later, particularly when superproducer Timbaland hopped on board, and very publicly put all his chips on the project.

Then they released "Million," an Aaliyah tribute record—a Timbaland tribute record—and a perfect example of how not to give an artist their breakthrough. As the spotlight slipped away from Tink in the months following, West Sider Dreezy and her team at Interscope ran to radio with the R&B/hip-hop fusion Tink had pioneered.

Winter's Diary 4 was released in 2016 and received little attention—yet it's the project fans knew she had in her. While her sound had been groundbreaking, the songwriting often didn't measure up; here, whoever her collaborators were, they knew her strengths, allowing her to fill the canvas. It becomes clear that it wasn't just the novelty of her sound that captured our attention, but the heart she put into it: in her writing, in the way that every track, even a faux-"Controlla" mixtape cut, was just as important to her story. Some things can't be replicated.

cupcakke

ZELDA GALEWSKY

BY BRITT JULIOUS No one will ever accuse Cupcakke, the nineteen-year-old South Side rapper, of modesty. First and foremost, she is a lyricist. In a music industry dominated by slick, earworm-worthy beats, Cupcakke is something of a lyrical traditionalist. Each of her songs tell a story. On tracks like “Juicy Coochie” and “Deepthroat,” her sexual agency is front and center. As listeners, we forgot how rare it is to hear a woman speak so explicitly and confidently about her body and her sexuality. And rather than be sexualized by the rap community (and the music industry as a whole), Cupcakke has taken control of her own narrative. Her sexuality is not aimed at the male gaze. If anything, she is writing for an audience much like her: outsiders with a complicated interior life desperate to be heard. Besides her triumphant sexuality, she is also not afraid to use her voice as an agent of change.

On “Ace Hardware” she speaks frankly about sexual abuse and molestation, subjects too taboo for even the brashest lyricism of the hip-hop world. “They wrote all on her locker, dosed her up with flakka / Every night she getting raped by her father,” she raps on the track. The literalism that runs through her raunchiest songs also serves as a conversation-starter for the things we try to keep hidden.

For all intents and purposes, this was a banner year for Mick Jenkins: his debut, The Healing Component, suggested a mastery of mood and a radical solution to despair: that is, that anger can be healing, and that self-critique is an essential part of self-love. Yet in many ways, the album was a conceptual shell, expanding the idea of Mick Jenkins without filling it with the passion and striving so present in the songs released by his peers. At its strongest, when Jenkins manages to find a core message and sticks to it, the album’s most powerful songs like “Strange Love” and “As Seen In Bethsaida” simultaneously blossom and fume. But more often this clarity is disrupted by an impenetrable opacity. This opacity is most obvious in Jenkins’s everpresent and increasingly confusing skits, little more than extended conversations on “love” that never quite get to where they’re trying to go.

On the flipside, songs that succeed in tone and production disappoint when Jenkins drops dud lines like “Call you bae/ And I don’t mean the San Francisco type” (from “Communicate”). But Jenkins’s shortcomings only become truly clear when contrasted with Noname’s brief verse on “Angels.” It’s deadpan hilarious, elegant, and searing all at once—in a word, emotional— and it embodies everything missing from Jenkins’s own verses. In Jenkins’s attempted effortlessness, the intensity of his message is too often diluted by his moody, layered production. For example, “Drowning” turns political rage into a soundscape, but never attains the intensity of “Fucked up Outro,” in which Jenkins challenges his “underrated” status. It’s a Sisyphean problem, and one that Jenkins seems unfortunately all too unaware of: he expects so much (the world, even) of his music, leaving him in search of significance but severely lacking it.

JULIET ELDRED

ravyn lenae

BY KANISHA WILLIAMS No one is who you think they are, not even yourself. There are many lessons in seventeen-year-old Ravyn Lenae’s Moon Shoes EP to take forward into 2017; most of them are powerful ruminations on intimacy and self-definition. Throughout Moon Shoes, Lenae is often in transit—heading from Venezuela to the moon, staying until the people on the moon give you a face and a name. Using distance as a metaphor for connection, traveling far away with someone is much more intimate than sitting next to them, with them not hearing you. The EP feels like an exercise in escapism, combating the feeling of chaos that stems not only from the events that dominate news headlines, but also from letting the name and face given to you by others define you. It ends with “Something in the Air,” where Lenae finds she and her companion are parting ways. While she’d prefer if they came along, she finds herself outside nevertheless, her companion watching from the window, and croons, “When the wind blows, I move more.” The arrival of 2017 feels like a signal to keep moving.

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

ELLIE MEJIA

jamila woods

BY MAHA AHMED As this year in review goes through its finishing touches and is sent off to the press, the winter weather outside is nothing short of frightful, with a transcendent misery in the air that never fails to feel like a very bad inside joke between the millions of people who live here—a misery whose grit is only matched by the grit of our neighbors, and the grit of the city itself (as Jamila Woods sings in “Holy,” “the lover may leave / the winter may not”). And in the midst of this and the ongoing misery of the world, Chicago seems to endure, both despite and because of itself. This character, more than anything else, is what is most emboldened throughout Woods’s Heavn.

Summer is most welcome at the tail end of Chicago winter, but Woods shows us a Chicago summer and all of its ambivalences— the thawing that its sun brings us, but also the deep and painful sadness that follows in the form of a spike in deaths, increased police presences dotting the South Side, restricted childhoods, and the freedom and liberation that still comes from a dip in the lake and the sun beating down on us despite it all—no matter where we are or what season we are in when we listen to the album’s first few beats.

Publications like Pitchfork and Consequence of Sound have called Heavn a protest album, “the kind of music we desperately need in a time when chaos… dominate[s] the headlines.”But it is something more than this, something altogether distinct from merely “hope” or “protest.” On Woods’s SoundCloud page, where the album is available for streaming, she writes, “For black and brown people, caring for ourselves and each other is not a neutral act...Our healing and survival are essential to the fight.” But 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

Heavn is not just about healing, nor is it just about Chicago; for Woods, Chicago is both healing and the creation of healing’s need.

The opening harmonies of “Bubbles” reach across time and drag the listener back into the warm summer evening air into which Heavn was released last July. In this way, and not just in its slew of local features, the album is an ode to all the inside secrets of the South Side, most importantly its resilience in the face of almost dogmatic disinvestment and disenfranchisement. “The water always saves me,” she croons on the album’s titular single “HEAVN”. Water is a stand in for the Lake, for Lake Shore Drive, for the city itself, and specifically for the summertime city, when the water isn’t frozen over in an icy hellscape, but the soft and fierce lines in Heavn are reminders that just like the water, our people can and do save us over and over again too.

dj earl

ELLEN HAO

BY ZACH SWEZY I first met DJ Earl in October 2013, thanks to Chaz Allen, the co-runner of online events company SPF420. Earl and his fellow Teklife DJ, TRAXMAN, performed for the two of us and a few more friends at this gathering of about two hundred cool teens streaming all over the world through TinyChat. It was the month Hyperdub released “Double Cup,” DJ Rashad’s footwork opus, and Rashad and Teklife as a whole were finally beginning to reap the benefits of years of art-making and community-building.

People were starting to recognize footwork as a style of music and dance inseparably coupled into a refreshing step forward in a long-stagnant electronic music scene— and even better, the artists who’d lived and breathed this undeniably Chicago art form were at the front of the wave.

Now, three years later and nearly five years after Earl started out his music career touring the country with his school jazz band, he deejays sold-out shows all across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Over the past few years, Earl and the whole Teklife

family have continually toured and released music through (false) accusations of genre stagnation or inaccessibility for dancefloors and even the tragic 2014 death of DJ Rashad.

Teklife even has family members making footwork in Serbia. Year after year, the label has redefined what it means to footwork, defying expectations and changing their styles even as they bring more artists under the Teklife umbrella.

2016, though, belonged to Earl in particular. It was one of the first years he, and indeed, Teklife in general, spent collaborating with people outside of the footwork scene, including Wiki of Ratking and enigmatic New York experimentalist Oneohtrix Point Never. He even reached further than before into his own background, recasting his jazz band chops as haunting riffs sitting in the center of his best tracks. Visibly breaking from the near-deferential traditionalism of Teklife’s Afterlife album earlier this year, Open Your Eyes and the Reggie Sackz EP revealed Earl’s willingness to treat his art with both intricate diligence and the playful spirit of a Willy Wonka-style inventor—something that helps ensure the future place of both near the top of the footwork canon. Earl’s 2016 has the potential to illuminate the path for young footwork producers, teaching them the subtle ways electronic music can be given organic, human, and emotional qualities. Footwork is hard—too often emotionally just as much as rhythmically—but it seems as though Earl has found it increasingly easy to express himself through music.

vic mensa

COURTNEY KENDRICK

BY SAM STECKLOW Let's not dispute that 2016 was an incredible year for Chicago’s Savemoney crew and many of its frequent collaborators; we saw excellent releases from Chance the Rapper, Joey Purp, Brian Fresco, Jamila Woods, Saba, and Noname, among others. One member is

missing from that list, the one who at the end of 2015 seemed most poised to claim 2016 as his own: Vic Mensa. When it comes to his release, There’s Alot Going On, it’s difficult to tell what one is supposed to come away with.

There’s a lot (and somehow a lot of filler) packed into its seven songs.

Leadoff track “Dynasty” seems to serve as a kiss-the-ring moment from Vic to the founder of his label, Jay Z, paired with a shapeless but affecting personal narrative that’s continued in the final track. That track, “There’s Alot Going On,” forgoes much of the complex lyricism Vic exhibited throughout most of his career prior to the release of the Kanye-featuring single “U Mad” in 2015. (“U Mad,” you may recall, features the horrifying line “If she bad, I might hit a bitch in the elevator like Ray Rice.” He appears to “address” this, briefly, in “There’s Alot Going On,” saying it was inspired by a real fight with his longtime ex.)

Approximately forty-three percent of the mixtape is filler that seems out of place with the rest of the release. The offending songs: the yelping, Travis Scott-aping, unconvincingly R-rated “New Bae,” an apparent fuck-you to that longtime ex; the blatant Ty Dolla $ign crib “Liquor Locker,” which has the gall to feature Ty Dolla $ign; and “Danger,” which shows Vic trying his hand at something of a spiritual cover of George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone.”

The remaining two songs are dedicated to what Vic’s public persona is largely about now: activism, specifically against police brutality and corrupt government. “16 Shots,” easily the best-known track on the album, is a ferocious, hurt, ready-for-war yet lyrically clumsy song about police violence in Chicago. It is impossible to doubt Vic’s sincerity in these songs—indeed, politics has been part of his music since Kids These Days—but when listening to his album in the context of the music being created by his peers in Chicagoland, particularly that of Jamila Woods or Ty Money, it is difficult to not see Vic’s efforts as noble misfires.

It is difficult to reconcile the two Vics presented on There’s Alot Going On. Indeed, it is difficult to make much of the one presented at face value—the one behind the anger of “16 Shots” and the frankness of the mixtape’s cover, which depicts Vic staring at the camera with sixteen bullet holes surrounding his body—when faced with the one who filled the heart of his big musical statement with empty and frankly terrible half-baked party songs. To summarize it, as this mixtape does, by saying that there is simply a lot going on feels much like a cop out. There is a lot going on, Vic. What now?

1 "forever's gone", drama AUSTIN BROWN “Every girl dreams of a prince and here you stand, the perfect man… and I push you away.” Out of all the great tracks from collectives, crews, and individual artists across the South Side this year, this newspaper’s music editor fell in love with a track that’s described as “deep house” by the arbiters of taste on the web, but really sounds more like Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” when it comes down to it. The unlikely pairing of a Derrick Carter fanboy and one of Chicago’s finest moody R&B purveyors, DRAMA, made 2016 worth dancing through, and “Forever’s Gone” is their finest moment—throbbing synth pads bubble underneath Via Rosa’s sweet, darting voice, and everything from an understated piano riff to the chopped sounds of Rosa’s own vocals glide in and out of the mix with ease. If you paid attention to the lyrics, you’d notice a pretty tragic story of false love, culminating in a chorus of “you believe what you want to believe,” but Rosa’s too busy dancing to the beat to dwell on it for too long. Who needs a lover, she seems to say, when you have music?

Playlist 1

2 "girls @", joey purp LAUREN TUSSEY The pounding thumps of Joey Purp’s “Girls @” come bouncing in from the first second of the track: it’s pure rhythmic bliss that hits all the right places, scratching that nine-month-long summertime itch and stubbornly wicking away any traces of wintry blues. Purp comes in smooth, laxly rhyming and riding shotgun to producer Knox Fortune’s bonedeep beats, yet another example of the Chicago’s near-unending run of excellent production talent in 2016. It reeks of catchy-as-hell vibes, a warm summer come up, and a sound meant to be blasting out car windows. Simply put, it’s a helluva song—even before you realize Chance the Rapper has a cameo, the duo’s West and South Side rapping combo charmingly invite everybody to come bob along. If this banger from every angle is a little taste of the future of the South Side’s rap, we’re already peeping towards next summer, and what the warmth will bring then.

2

3 "ultralight beam", kanye west ASHVINI KARTIK-NARAYAN Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” is an introduction to the gospel that pervades through The Life of Pablo, but one could just as easily see it as the gateway to Chicago’s exceptional year. The song speaks to the faith and conviction embedded in both the South Side and its most prominent artistic voices: Chance the Rapper sings, “You cannot mess with the light/Look at lil Chano from 79th,” while Mr. West himself limits his own verse to mumbled incantations of “this is a God dream.” While one could reasonably imagine Chance and Kanye moving further afield from their South Side origins, they instead take this opportunity to reflect on their different roles as aspirational Chicago figures. Gospel, R&B, and hip-hop artists and producers like Kirk Franklin, Kelly Price and the inimitable Swizz Beatz all collapse together within the light, the ultralight beam, that leads a city’s—especially this city’s—people towards each other.

“This”—the beam, the faith—“is everything,” Kanye sings, and Chicago has proven him right.

3

4 "let's work", dj earl ANDREW LINDSAY If the first six tracks on Open Your Eyes are any evidence, DJ Earl is not shy about placing himself among the vanguard of footwork producers—Jlin, RP Boo, (the late) DJ Rashad—who have been (or are becoming) the faces of modern, forward-looking footwork. Aggressive and brimming with energy, yet pristinely produced, these tracks are postDouble Cup footwork through and through.

“Let’s Work,” on the other hand, is a moment of respite that looks back on where footwork has been and how far its come. While the track, which features Oneohtrix Point Never and MoonDoctoR, begins with a high energy, bass-heavy footwork frenzy, the eponymous vocal sample pays homage to classic Chicago house; the (not so) subtly sexualized repetition of “let’s work,” as well as the dated sounds of the MIDI horns sound as if they are sourced directly from this earliest ancestor of footwork. Meanwhile, the gradually emerging four on the floor kick drums move away from the cacophony of typical footwork bass. At this fast-paced tempo, memories of ghetto house and juke—offshoots of Chicago house and direct precursors of footwork—are inescapable. With a handful of well-placed musical artifacts, DJ Earl manages to conjure up decades worth of footwork history, all in about five minutes.

About halfway through the record, layers gradually begin dropping out, leaving only the drums and vocal samples when, in a stunning moment, the house-invoking kick drums cut out, pushed aside by the track’s earlier booming 808 bass. This is footwork after all, and DJ Earl is making the rules.

4

"forever's gone", drama "lsd", jamila woods ft. chance the rapper "yesterday", noname "westside bound 3", saba "owazars", mr. fingers "girls @", joey purp "spiritual alliances", hieroglyphic being "summer friends", chance the rapper "father time", jean deaux "ultralight beam", kanye west "sleep talking", ravyn lenae "you ain't gang", lil bibby "my stance", adamn killa "burnin ya boa", dj taye ft. dj manny "let's work", dj earl "jump.i", kweku collins "lildurk2x", lil durk JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

reflections

on 2016

beyond chief & chance

BY JORDAN PORTO

Four years ago, Chicago’s 2012 was near-consumed by the rise of Chief Keef, and his explosive, Internet-driven success was the first spark that opened up space for all the artists that populate the current city-wide rap renaissance. By the end of that year, drill had been established as a mainstream sub-genre of gangster rap, complete with its own visual and sonic aesthetics as well as a journalistic moral panic that pushed to reduce black youth in Chicago to a set of violent tropes. But what came after would greatly expand and diversify the state of hip-hop in the city.

The moralizing tone that ran through much of drill rap’s media coverage was often extended to the new crop of Chicago rappers, but in the opposite way. The post-drill artists were equally as young, black, and empowered by the Internet as the drill artists were, but created vastly different music. Some tried to position Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and other artists who came up in 2013 as the antithesis of drill—more positive, more conscious, less troubled, what have you. But these rappers themselves have consistently pushed back against the dichotomy of “drill rap vs. conscious rap,” and rightly so. There was certainly much that bound together the constellation of musicians who would emerge throughout the next few years, whether it was their mixtape collaborations, a shared lyrical sensibility drawn from the city’s spoken word scene, or personal friendships between the artists. The initial post-drill artists drew from a broad range of influences, making music both too diverse to fit into a single set of genre conventions and filled with a complex set of experiences not reducible to the moral opposite of drill. With Chance as the spearhead of this moment, comparisons to Chief Keef were inevitable, and the two seem to be the most important and influential rappers to emerge from Chicago in this decade. But the wave of rappers who were first bolstered by Chance’s success has never coalesced into a genre of its own, a testament to the dynamism of their music.

In the years since then, an even more diffuse third wave of Chicago hip-hop has continued along this path, with artists drawing from an even broader palette of genres and scenes including DIY, spoken word, juke, soul, gospel, jazz, and trap. This third wave of Chicago rap kept riding through 2016, which saw especially strong releases from Noname, Saba, Jamila Woods, and Joey Purp and solid projects from too many others to list. And drill itself, although never as white hot as it was in 2012, is far from narrow or dead. For every Keef copycat that didn’t achieve mainstream success, rappers like Lil Durk and G Herbo kept drill going in 2016, continuing to bring nuance, sorrow, and variety to a genre still too often pigeonholed as merely violent street rap. But it is also clear that the post-Chance constellation of rappers have become the most relevant hip-hop artists the city currently has to offer. In different ways, then, Chance and Chief Keef both opened up space for new voices to emerge and for new artists to tell their stories through music that continues to drive the culture forward.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

the state of latinx punk

BY JES SKOLNIK

The South Side’s primarily Latinx punk/DIY scene is one of contemporary Chicago’s greatest and deepest contributions to arts and culture (on scales both hyperlocal and global), and its continued vitality is something for all of us to be thankful for. From the nineties onward, it has been producing some of the most forward-thinking, community-minded groups. Perhaps the best known of those, Los Crudos, celebrated the quarter-century mark over a week this fall at Co-Prosperity Sphere, with events nearly every night and an art installation. And while DIY spaces come and go out of necessity, there’s at least one on the South Side that’s been nurturing the scene for over a decade, and its relative stability has much to do with the rotating cast of custodians taking good care of the place, as well as it being a part of the neighborhood, beyond punk. Most recently, newer, aboveground events like Villapalooza have emerged to include punk and its associated subgenres in a broader swath of Latinx-focused neighborhood musical acts, helping bring the vibrancy of many of the scene’s groups to a wider audience without sacrificing the intimacy of their performances or the integrity of their community bonds.

chicago jazz: the new guard

BY LEAH MENZER

Following an ongoing seal of approval from BBC music critic Gilles Peterson, rumor has it that Chicago’s modern jazz players are being received in England with a hero’s welcome.

Crowds churn and holler, buy records, and clamorously await new releases from labels such as International Anthem, which released Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven’s widely acclaimed album In the Moment.

It’s surprising to some that jazz would stir up a clamor, but if you were at Makaya’s March 14 European send-off tour concert at The Hideout, you could understand the overwhelming force of emotion that electrifies a crowd at a jazz concert. Dance halls and clubs teamed with jazz and dance across Chicago when greats such as Sun Ra decamped on Chicago’s South Side in the forties, and some of today's players are the true heirs to this American tradition.

Jazz at its best calls forth from the universe the primeval storyline of all human history.

That show on March 14 featured Makaya on drums, Junius Paul on bass, Matt Gold on guitar, and electrifying standouts Greg Ward on saxophone and Justefan on vibraphone, and had a packed crowd on its knees until the wee hours of the morning, indicating that the new guard of Chicago jazz will continue to reach a wider audience in 2017.

Freedom Lurks Around Us

BY SASHA TYCKO

T

wo nights before the end of a wild, rocky year, I watched Patti Smith, Godmother of Punk, tear through her seminal debut album Horses. It was her seventieth birthday. She started out by calmly moving through the album, until about halfway through, when she started to talk about the thing she couldn’t not talk about.

“Not my fucking president!” she howled, and bang: for the next hour or so the agenda was rock ’n’ roll, love, and freedom: songs written in 1975 twisted for the present age. “Land: Horses/Land of a Thousand Dances/La Mer (De)” was reformulated as prophecy for the new generation: “They will rise up with a new optimism never seen before!”

Over and over, Patti declared that love and music would defeat evil and make us free, and we enthusiastically agreed. My friend J, my bandmate and a longtime veteran of Chicago’s DIY rock scene, clutched my hand, and together we screamed.

We knew that when Patti talked about the young artists who would lead the new revolution, she was talking about us. She moved into her last planned song for the night, “People Have the Power,” but as the crowd swayed and clapped along, the spell broke for me and my friends: the white, fifty-something person next to us raised a single fist. My friend turned to me and said, “I’m sorry, but I hate white people.”

Patti pulled us back in with an electrifying performance of the Who's "My Generation," but my friends and I still felt mixed emotions upon leaving the Riviera Theatre. we were enraptured with the power of music and the possibility of revolution, but also squirmy about the hippie clichés we had seen on display, and suspicious of the grown-up punk rockers, the almost entirely white and middle-aged audience. Over cheap pizza and beer, my friends and I shared how this ambivalence comes out in our creative projects: we’re stuck somewhere between “People Have the Power” and “My Generation”— too skeptical to make art that hopeful or that angry.

Too self-conscious to call what we do revolutionary.

But a revolution is what people need right now, and what people want right now. Patti Smith knew this, and she fueled her performance with the knowledge of our desire. Revolution is also what Chicago’s world of DIY art and music is already doing. This is a world that bypasses established cultural institutions, a world where people set up concerts and art shows in their homes, publish zines, run their own recording studios and record labels, become sound engineers, curators, and stage

managers in basements and converted warehouses that don’t publish their addresses online. But this is a revolution that refuses to claim itself as such.

In the past year or so, people have been doing significant work to make this DIY world more organized, safe, and inclusive. There were the DIY town hall meetings to discuss safety at shows and the role of underground venues in Chicago’s residential neighborhoods. The Feminist Action Support Network (FASN) started up again to address sexual violence in the scene, taking on ambitious and risky projects and making some missteps; old and new volunteers are currently working on reforming the group with those missteps in mind. The Pretty Pit started hosting monthly workshops for women and femme folks in skills ranging from playing the bass to car maintenance. In response to the tragic fire that destroyed the Oakland DIY venue Ghost Ship, The Dojo began training its volunteers in fire safety and emergency protocols. There were benefit shows for #NoDAPL, Planned Parenthood, Chuy Garcia and Bernie Sanders, plus canned food drives. Hostel Earphoria recently embarked on a zero-waste sustainability project.

What these people aren’t doing is casting their work for these DIY venues and events in terms of radicalism and freedom. As we critique our predecessors in underground rock movements and continue to sharpen our standards of responsibility toward each other, we’ve come to fear ego. The sixties love children were naïve and high, the early punk scenes were too masculine, the riot grrrl movement was too narrow in its concept of womanhood, and all of these movements were far too white. But we’re making progress: we are demanding safety and accountability in DIY venues, blurring the lines between activism and art, thinking critically about the space we take up in the city. Importantly, as in the case of FASN, we are willing to learn from our mistakes and keep moving. But a reluctance to make bold declarations keeps us from greater unity, clarity, and purpose.

We suffer from a failure of imagination and faith that something other than the way things are is possible. The radical proposition of any utopiadreaming movement is that something other is possible, and even realistic. I think if people in the DIY scene of Chicago were to view their work through a radical lens—to see more clearly that what we do is not just an escape from the present reality, but an argument for a future reality—we could be more focused, work even harder, and make

our argument even stronger.

To be honest about the mixed emotions my friends and I felt at the Patti Smith concert is to acknowledge that we partially blamed the older white people at the concert for the current state of affairs. This is based, perhaps unfairly, on the assumption that most of the people in attendance that night are truly mad and scared about a Trump presidency, but have stable incomes and moderate politics and don’t go around ripping strings off electric guitars and starting revolutions with music.

These people remind us of a society that devalues the work we do: making art and organizing communities without the blessings of the state.

They are our parents and aunts and teachers and local politicians; they worry about our security and so want us to live more normal, less idealistic lives.

But Donald Trump is about to be president, and we cannot afford to not be idealistic, in politics and in art.

There’s a moment at the end of “Sonny’s Blues”

by James Baldwin when the narrator finally begins to see and understand his younger, musical brother: Then they all gathered around Sonny and Sonny played. Every now and again one of them seemed to say, amen. Sonny’s fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

Can we, as Patti said we would, “rise with a new optimism” in these dark and cynical times? Can we believe (without embarrassment) that love and music will help us be free? I think we already do.

We are doing the work of building and organizing a movement—all we need to do is listen to and trust ourselves.

Sasha Tycko is a DJ (Sasha NoDisco), a member of the band Warmth, an editor of The Sick Muse zine, and a curator of the Corner event series, which happens every Monday at the Promontory in Hyde Park.

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

the era

a year in the life photography by william "wills" glasspiegell

“From the alley to the art gallery, we spent the year putting footwork on the map wherever we could. This photo was from a video shoot for ‘Lifeworlds,’ a song dedicated to footworkers who have passed away.” —Jemal “P-Top” De La Cruz

IF IT WASN’T footwork crew The Era’s In The Wurkz stage show, which brought the “life of a footworker” to Englewood’s Hamilton Park, something else in their jam-packed 2016 would floor you: their multimedia gallery on the genre’s history at Columbia College Chicago; or their In The Wurkz FM EP, where they sucked hip-hop and footwork into a vortex as unprecedented as it was trunk-rattling; or the time they taught footwork in Kuwait. This much is clear: no longer rising stars, The Era are true innovators and masters of the form. Why don’t we let them speak (and wurk) for themselves.

“Crisp outlines. Elegant poses. It’s like footwork as fine art. Many of our best photoshoots have been by the lake, not too far from where I stay on the South Side.” —Brandon “Chief Manny” Calhoun

(TOP) “The Era at Lollapalooza after killing our guest appearance with Towkio from Savemoney, showing the crowd true Chicago shit.” —Sterling “Steelo” Lofton (ABOVE) “That's me and Latisha ‘Tish’ Waters, my first dance coach. Tish is a standout leader in the Chicago dance community. She works with youth and saves lives through dance in some of the most neglected parts of our city.”

— Jamal “Litebulb” Oliver

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

(LEFT) “This photo is from when we were shooting a video for our stage show In the Wurkz. The idea is that people could see me on stage, and also see me here at work in the aisles. I’ve been all around the world footworking. Sometimes I feel like we’ve really made it. Sometimes I still have to come home to a job like this.”

—Sterling “Steelo” Lofton (BELOW) “Fresh from work and straight to the lab. This is a picture of me and Bulb cleaning up some routines in Pilsen. We’ve gotten a lot of work done in this studio with High Concept Labs and MANA Contemporary.”

—Sterling “Steelo” Lofton

(ABOVE) “Making your presence known at Battlegroundz on 87th Street is essential.

Building your legacy and name at footwork events like this, that’s how we grew into the dancers we are today. Live streaming really picked up this year as a way to broadcast footwork and everything else we do.” —Jemal “P-Top” De La Cruz (LEFT) “It’s like a footwork textile, a pattern made from motion. I was studying the origins of cinema and photography, and thinking a lot about how to capture dance on screen.” —William “Wills” Glasspiegel

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 4, Issue 13 Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Director of Staff Support Ellie Mejía Director of Writer Development Mari Cohen Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner Education Editor Lit Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Sarah Claypoole Austin Brown Julia Aizuss Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Joe Andrews, Ariella Carmell, Jonathan Hogeback, Andrew Koski, Carrie Smith, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen, Kylie Zane Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producer Maira Khwaja Web Editor Camila Cuesta Social Media Editors Sierra Cheatham, Emily Lipstein, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Layout Editors Baci Weiler, Sofia Wyetzner Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Maddie Anderson, Sara Cohen, Bridget Gamble, Christopher Good, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Zoe Makoul, Sonia Schlesinger Staff Photographers: Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Javier Suarez, Addie Barron, Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu, Zelda Galewsky, Seonhyung Kim Social Media Intern

Ross Robinson

Webmasters Alex Mueller, Sofia Wyetzner Publisher

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

THE MUSIC ISSUE no rules

“We kind of decided, either we join a gang or we join a band.” michal kranz..................................12 up from under

“ You can find yourself and be a weird little butterfly.” emma boczek...................................15 step by step

What is at first seen as a complicated dance turns into a passion. christian sanchez..........................16 trqpiteca

“I want people to feel like they enter a vortex, or they just traveled to another space or dimension.” kylie zane........................................18 why can't we daydream?

“Why are you telling the story? The girl can tell her own story.” michelle yang.................................20

No Rules

S ON OUR WEBSITE SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM

SSW Radio soundcloud.com/south-side-weekly-radio Email Edition southsideweekly.com/email

DENISE NAIM

A thrash metal scene gives marginalized voices an outlet in Pilsen and Little Village

BY MICHAL KRANZ

R

uben L. Garza, Jr. is the vocalist for Through N Through, a fourperson band of Little Village natives who write music about their experiences growing up young and Latinx on the South Side. They are not the first to do so: punk bands like Los Crudos have become synonymous with the local music scene in Little Village and Pilsen by wearing their heritage on their sleeves. But Through N Through is different. Although Garza says he prefers the label “hardcore” for Through

N Through’s music, the thick guitar tones, crushing palm-muted riffs, and cutting kick drum all show the band’s heavy metal roots bursting through to the surface, with Garza’s hardcore punk vocals adding a defiant and satisfying finish.

“I’m not gonna lie, there definitely are metal influences,” says Garza. “Don’t get me wrong, we listen to metal and we’ve played with metal bands in this area before.”

This is nothing new: the histories of punk and metal have always been heavily

intertwined, borrowing from each other since the late 1970s. While metal has never seemed quite as visible in Pilsen and Little Village as punk and hardcore have, it has been brewing in the grungy underbelly of the punk scene for years, with metalheads forging a space for themselves that overlapped with that of their punk predecessors. Over the years, they have sought to use the instrumentals of metal to express the realness, grit, and camaraderie of the places they grew up.

Before he got into hardcore music, Garza says he listened to rap and hiphop, the only genres that spoke to the marginalization and mistreatment he says he faced growing up as a Latino kid. He says the themes of metal were always a little out there for him. “The lyrics to me were ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ ” Garza says.

“I couldn’t really get into that.” But pretty soon, Garza was playing in punk and metal bands; before Through N Through, he says he performed with a local metalcore act.

Garza says playing music was more than a hobby: it was a way of coping with his circumstances.

“Little Village and Pilsen have been considered very gang-infested neighborhoods,” he says, “and a lot of us end up looking for a different out, growing up mad and angry about everything. We kind of decided, either we join a gang or we join a band.”

In this way, metal, alongside the established genres of punk and hardcore, has come to provide an avenue for kids on the Southwest Side to express their alienation through music that goes beyond the classic angst of punk.

“This city’s got a really fucking long history with metal,” says James Lonergan, a South Side native and resident of Pilsen.

“The people who drive this scene and who are from this area…those are a rowdy bunch of motherfuckers, dude.” Lonergan is the guitarist in Pilsen metal band Pig Champion, one of the big names in the metal scene. He says that while North Side metal bands often got more publicity, the South Side scene has always inhabited a separate niche.

“I’m not phobic of going to the North Side, I just don’t get the North Side,” Lonergan says. “It doesn’t feel like home to me, it doesn’t have the same atmosphere.

I think in some ways that rubs off on the music.”

Whereas the North Side metal scene largely revolves around bands that play

DENISE NAIM

“What pisses you off the most?

Seeing your brothers and sisters in pain. So might as well say something about it.”

—James Lonergan, guitarist in Pilsen metal band Pig Champion grindcore, a blindingly fast and noisy genre, as well as doom metal, its slow and brooding counterpart, the “thrash” metal subgenre reigns here in Pilsen and Little Village. Pioneered by classic metal bands like Metallica, Exodus, and Megadeth in the early to mid 1980s, thrash metal is more mid-tempo, focused on sharp tones, virtuosity, and beefy guitar riffs.

It reached the apex of its popularity in the late eighties and early nineties with releases like Metallica’s Black Album and Megadeth’s Rust in Peace. Since then, the style has largely seen its appeal decline, but Lonergan says that he and other veterans of the Pilsen scene believe they are witnessing its reinvigoration.

“When we [Pig Champion] came in, maybe it was just the calm before the storm,” he says.

Lonergan credits Municipal Waste of Richmond, Virginia with resurrecting the genre in various metal scenes across the country in the late 2000s by playing a grittier, punkier, and more irreverent

form of the genre, called crossover thrash.

“A couple years after they got popular, we started to see a lot of thrash metal come back into style,” he says. “It was the rebirth and rebranding of thrash metal. But now, like in most genres, as the scene progresses the bands get more extreme, the music get heavier, faster.”

Today, the Pilsen thrash metal scene is healthier than ever. Major touring acts are booking Pilsen bands as openers, and as Lonergan boasts, groups young and old are taking South Side thrash to dark, new depths. Yet, the scene remains highly insular, and relatively unknown to those outside it.

Braulio Correa is the guitarist of the band Savagery and a regular at Pilsen metal shows. He grew up on the North Side, though, and wasn’t always so tied to the scene in Pilsen. Correa is part Colombian, and growing up he listened his mother’s Latin dance music, until his tastes began to shift.

“When I started listening to metal, I just wanted to play as fast as they were. I

was just really intrigued by all that stuff,” he says. “When we first started playing it was just like me and two other friends from high school, but we never really thought we were going to be playing shows and stuff.

We didn’t know anyone, and we were like, ‘Yeah, we must be one of the only metal bands in the city.’”

But back in 2011, Correa and the members of Savagery went to see Clash of the Thrash, a local DIY metal show at a forsale storefront in Pilsen. After that, he says, everything changed.

“That’s basically how we got introduced to the scene down there,” he says. “It’s just no rules, anything goes.” With a timid grin, Correa describes the kinds of shows the Pilsen scene is made of: “We once played a show at someone’s house who got evicted, and it was a group of friends and like six bands or something like that. We were just in there, like windows were getting broken and stuff. The cops eventually came at the end, but someone was like ‘Yeah, this is my dad’s house,’ and they were just like, ‘… alright.’” Correa says the shows went on after that.

Most thrash shows in Pilsen happen in the kinds of spaces Correa talks about—backyards, garages, basements, and elsewhere. But the crown jewel of the Pilsen scene is the Fallout, a DIY venue that is little more than a shack behind a Mexican restaurant. “It looks relatively nice now, but before it had like dirt floors and the stage was just like wood,” says Correa.

“I remember so many times playing on that stage my foot would just go through the stage and it would get stuck. I loved it.”

For many Fallout regulars, the venue’s lo-fi aesthetic is what makes it so appealing.

One of the most prominent bands in the Pilsen scene, and one that possibly most wholly embodies the Fallout’s ethos, is Texas Toast Chainsaw Massacre, a five-piece crossover thrash band that occasionally puts on a festival at the venue called Toastamania.

“There’s this spot called the Fallout that’s basically our home,” says vocalist Josh Kandich. “The people who show up to Fallout shows are people I’ve known forever.

Like it’s a fucking family.” Kandich is able to recall countless crazy stories from shows there at a moment’s notice.

“Those aren’t even shows, they’re just parties where people play music, and it’s crazy,” he says. “We had Pig Champion play, and someone brought in [a shopping cart], and they just beat the shit out of each other with it until they broke the shopping cart, JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

DENISE NAIM

like a steel shopping cart. It was all over the floor of the Fallout.”

Aggressive moshing aside, Texas Toast shows often feel more like alcohol-fueled neighborhood get-togethers than metal shows. Guitarist Jordan Miller says that this is because, with album titles like ‘Til Death Do Us Party, the band’s approach to music is more tongue-in-cheek than that of many others in the scene. “It’s fun to bring the party aspect, the comedy aspect to it,” he says. “Serious metal, funny metal, everyone’s having a good time.”

But Texas Toast’s carefree attitude operates in the same spaces (and with the same passion) as that of Through N Through and Pig Champion, where the bands’ music is inextricable from their ideological stances.

“For me, politics is linked to my music,” Lonergan says. “We weren’t always political, but we were also speaking off of the labor rights movement, anti-statist, anti-capitalist ideas.” Lonergan grew up in a lower-middleclass family in Mount Greenwood, where he was exposed early on to the politics of class, race, and labor. “Generally growing up, especially in this city, there are so many bad

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

examples of political behavior that you see every fucking day,” he says. “[Mt. Greenwood] is full of non-racist skinheads. That was like the camp that I kind of came from. It just made sense to put those messages out there, and that was the most true to fucking life thing I could think about writing about at that time. There’s just enormous structures of unfortunate shit that inspire a lot of anger in a lot of people,” he says.

It is this shared sense of struggle with people across the South Side that Lonergan says inspires much of his band’s music. “[Pig Champion] was like therapy for a long fucking time,” he says. “We were a lot of angry dudes. It’s like, what pisses you off the most? Seeing your brothers and sisters in pain. So might as well say something about it.”

Ruben L. Garza, Jr. shares Lonergan’s sentiment. “We’re trying to spread a positive message about how reality can be changed as long as you’re willing to change it and you’re willing to find solutions,” he says, noting that much of his own anger has gradually been replaced by pride in who he is. “That

pride you have, that Latino pride, I’m brown and I can do a lot of things people think brown people can’t do.”

Of course, even though the political bent of Pig Champion and Through N Through’s music is completely absent from Texas Toast Chainsaw Massacre’s party attitude, Garza says there is a place for both approaches in the scene. “I do think it’s rooted in the same kind of energy,” he admits. “We’re all young and angry and if we can take that aggression out we’re going to do it.”

For many metalheads, simply the act of playing or moshing to metal with loved ones is a way to let off steam. “It’s just stress release,” says Josh Kandich of Texas Toast.

“If I have a shitty day at work, and I have to go play a show, it’s going be awesome because I’ll just be pissed off. I’m just yelling, so I can just yell for thirty minutes. I can’t do that anywhere else.”

“It’s kind of like getting drunk, but you’re getting drunk off of people,” says Texas Toast bassist Julian Galvin. He says performing in the Pilsen scene for him is a deeply personal experience. “Time just compresses. I’m like a very anxious person,

but when I get up on there it’s just like, let’s go.”

Julian’s band mate Jordan Miller says he’s not alone. “In the scene there are a lot of people who feel like outsiders, like they’re not a part of the main thing, and then they find this whole group of outsiders in Pilsen with the thrash metal scene,” he says. “They can go just hang out with their friends, and have a good time, and feel like they’re part of something.”

It makes the Pilsen thrash scene a uniquely vibrant and multifaceted one—a place where people from all walks of life, be they Latinx people angry with their social circumstances, alienated workingclass punks, or just disillusioned white kids looking for something to do, can come together to vibe off of their friends and mosh to each others’ bands. Garza, thinking over the scene in Pilsen and Little Village, recounts a place where barriers do not, and cannot exist. After all, he says, “We’re all metalheads, we’re all hardcore kids, we’re all punk rockers. We all go through the same struggles, and music is just an outlet no matter which side of the genre it’s on.” ¬

Up From Under

Lumpen Radio moves onto Chicago's airwaves

BY EMMA BOCZEK

A

s part of a wave of nearly two thousand newly approved lowpower stations across the country, Bridgeport’s Lumpen Radio, selfproclaimed “weirdo radio station in Chicago for weirdo people everywhere,” has officially expanded to the FM airwaves.

Previously an online-only station, Lumpen Radio offers a hodgepodge of music and talk shows by volunteer DJs and producers. A project of the Public Media Institute, the Lumpen Media Group, of which Lumpen Radio is a part, has brought counter-culture content to Chicago since its creation in the early nineties in response to “fear that the monopolization of media would lead to a stifling of dissenting opinion,” according to Lumpen co-founder Ed Marszewski.

Getting the station licensed and ready to broadcast for its November launch took eighteen months and $100,000 in fundraising. It was “like having a baby,” said station director Logan Bay, who has worked with Lumpen since 2000. “I’ve probably listened to more Lumpen Radio than any other human on the planet.”

Lumpen Radio is part of the largest influx of new stations in the history of radio, made possible when the FCC opened up a brief licensing window for low-power FM stations in the fall of 2013. The licensing opportunity came after a protracted legal and legislative battle with community radio activists that lasted over a decade.

Low-power FM stations provide coverage within roughly three to five miles, operating at a power of one hundred watts. By comparison, large commercial radio stations operate between 50,000 and 100,000 watts. Low-power licenses are designated as “non-commercialeducational,” meaning that stations can have underwriters but no commercials, and that they must have an educational mission, though the details of this requirement are not specified.

Launching into FM at a time when

TURTEL ONLI

podcasts and online music services like Spotify are ultra-accessible may seem like a step into the past, but Bay said he still sees unique value in broadcast radio. “A lot of people don’t actually listen to podcasts.

It’s such a bougie, middle-class thing—a lot of people don’t have data plans or Internet at home. FM radio is still a free source of information and content and news,” he said.

“If I talk about the Internet or even TV, you get people like ‘Eh, I like it but I hate it’… but with radio people are always like, ‘There was this time when I heard this thing and it changed my life.’ I hear those stories all the time and I’m like, ‘That’s what makes radio amazing.’ ” Leah Menzer, producer of a talk show for Lumpen Radio called EcoChicago and a co-founder of Lumpen Radio, was essential in getting the station on the air, navigating Lumpen through the tricky FCC licensing and tower-building process. “It’s the golden

age of radio, I would say, right now,” she said.

“There’s never been such public attention to creative radio art before now. It usually used to be that the news journalism tradition was the American way of doing radio. But recently it’s like—This American Life, the whole Gimlet thing, all that kind of stuff is blowing up.”

While Lumpen has traditionally been able to publish its radical content without fear of censorship, the new station is subject to FCC regulations. These regulations prohibit obscene, indecent, or profane programming, as well as any material that incites or produces lawbreaking. They also forbid “news distortion”—“rigging or slanting the news” through intentional falsification—and “hoaxes,” defined as “false information concerning a crime or catastrophe” causing “substantial public harm.”

These rules are “making us kind

of change our mindset a little bit,” Bay said. “You can’t jeopardize thousands of people’s time and effort and donations and volunteers’ work to do something super nuts now…. So we have to be very understanding of what’s going on and make those choices as a group.”

The adjustment to FCC regulations is one of the factors Bay is keeping in mind as Lumpen “come[s] aboveground from being underground for twenty-five years,” Bay said. “What does that mean for us as an organization?”

But Lumpen loyalists need not worry; Menzer says that the station’s core “weirdness” is here to stay. The hyper-local station remains “a place to find information that you can’t find anywhere else, or to be like, ‘I can talk to ghosts too!’ ” she said. “[Lumpen Radio is] a place to hear things that are not homogenized so you can find yourself and be a weird little butterfly.”

The first few months of broadcasting have “energized” the station, according to Menzer, who said she hopes to increase collaboration with other local media as well as with the newly-expanded national network of low-power FM stations.

Though the station has been getting “a much bigger reach than we expected on the north and northwest side, we’re still not getting as far south as we want to get,” Bay said. He is hoping to work on getting the station’s signal further south in the coming year, one of many adjustments he anticipates making as the station grows.

“I’m sure we’re going to make lots of mistakes and do things completely wrong,” he said. “But I also think us doing something that’s completely non-traditional radio might work in our favor and get people to gravitate towards what we’re doing.” Leah Menzer, who was interviewed for this story, is a contributor to the Weekly.

Tune in to Lumpen Radio at WLPN 105.5 FM or at lumpenradio.com

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Step by Step

CHRISTIAN SANCHEZ

At the Promontory, student club becomes salsa destination

BY CHRISTIAN SANCHEZ

O

n the third Wednesday of each month, salsa dancers from all over Chicago flock to the Promontory in Hyde Park. Deep purple lights flood the dance floor, creating a sultry ambience.

Drums pound and trumpets roar, setting a rhythm for the bodies spinning and swaying on the dance floor.

This South Side salsa event keeps on growing and people keep coming back; for many, what is at first seen as a complicated dance turns into a passion.

Salsa Night at the Promontory celebrated its second anniversary this October, and will soon be expanding to a second monthly evening at North Kenwood's Room 43. At these venues, the University of Chicago’s Ballroom and Latin Dance Association (BLDA) has worked with WHPK 88.5 FM and Chicago-area salsa DJ Earl Hall (stage name El Caobo) to create a new space for this unique genre of dance by providing 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

free dancing and lessons, free performances, and a robust music selection. As salsa finds a new home on the South Side, the new community growing around this monthly event is moved by the diasporic history of the salsa genre and a passion for dance.

M

ambo, salsa’s most direct predecessor, originated in Cuba and became popular in the U.S. during the 1950s. In the 1960s, a mambo craze took hold of the Grand Ballroom on Cottage Grove and 63rd Street. A community of African-American dancers maintained the dance scene on the South Side for the next few decades; they played a role in organizing mambo events at Room 43, where Salsa Night at the Promontory will soon expand.

Incorporating elements of Cuban son montuno, mambo, and cha-cha-cha with Puerto Rican bomba y plena, salsa comes

from a wide and rich tradition of Latin and African music. In the 1960s and 1970s, immigrants from Puerto Rico and Cuba, based for the most part in New York, created what we now know as salsa. The origins of this genre, which derives its foundational rhythm from African beats and percussion, reflect a history of migration and diaspora.

You can hear it in “Aguanile” by Hector Lavoe and Willie Colon, or Celia Cruz’s “Quimbara”—the influence is undeniable.

Lavoc and Cruz, alongside other legendary salsa artists such as Rubén Blades and Cheo Feliciano, propelled the genre to the mainstream of Latin music through the Fania Records label, founded in 1964.

Throughout the decade, Nuyoricans—New Yorkers of Puerto Rican heritage—further added elements of jazz, funk, boogaloo, rock and roll, and R&B to the dance to match the music.

UofC’s BLDA, founded in 1993, aims

to provide accessible, low-cost lessons in this unique dance. The organization hosts regular dance events for the community, and trains their competitive ballroom dancing team to represent UofC in the USA Dance Collegiate Dancesport Association. Student June Wu is the current president of BLDA. Under her leadership the club’s membership has expanded from fifteen to over two hundred, a growth Wu describes as closely aligned with the move to the Promontory: “We gained publicity, marketed our classes, and drew people in,” she says. “The popularity of the Promontory event also started drawing in performance dance teams from around Chicago, and I think their performances really invigorate the spectators to want to learn how to dance. It's inspiring.”

After a three-year residence at the Seven Ten Lanes bowling alley in Hyde Park, the monthly salsa nights started to

grow quickly in the fall of 2013, prompting the event organizers to seek out a new location. Vishy Sharma, who serves as special counsel to BLDA, worked with DJ El Caobo, to secure the Promontory as the venue. The new setting prompted greater interest: 209 people RSVP’d to the Facebook event for the first Promontory Salsa night in November of 2014.

Growth has only continued since the club first arrived at the Promontory, with three hundred people routinely in attendance during the school year and about two hundred people in attendance during the summer. As the event continues to grow, the organizers now hope to incorporate live music. Wu is hoping to add even more programming: “BLDA operates completely through the volunteered work of their members, and we always need more dance instructors,” she says.

Every Salsa Night at The Promontory starts off with a beginner class followed by performances and open dancing. The free classes are popular. “I’ve never seen so many people at a basic salsa class—it feels great to play a role in people’s first exposure to salsa,” says Sharma. He has never been a UofC student, but moved to Hyde Park after meeting members of the UofC dance group on his first night out dancing in Chicago. He had just moved from Brooklyn to Lincoln Park, but upon discovering the blooming South Side salsa scene and BLDA, he broke his lease to move closer to the action.

What was once a student club has become a destination for salsa dancers of all skill levels from around Chicago, thanks in no small part to the influence of DJ El Caobo, who lends his decades of DJing experience to the monthly salsa nights.

“The driving force of the South Side [salsa] events is El Caobo,” Sharma said.

“I don’t think the Promontory would’ve happened without his support. He is a key figure in the salsa scene.”

El Caobo’s presence gives salsa on the South Side one of the best selections of Latin dance music anywhere in the city.

He leans towards jazzier, percussive salsa, playing music that continues the tradition of the 1960s and 1970s. The selection is unique from other salsa nights in the city, and he believes it’s part of what keeps people coming back to the Promontory.

The only salsa DJ officially signed to Fania Records, El Caobo found salsa by way of romance and language. In college he studied Spanish and went on to become

CHRISTIAN SANCHEZ

The only place you’ll routinely see members of Chicago’s old mambo community come out and dance is at the Promontory. a Spanish teacher and then a courthouse interpreter. While working as an interpreter he began to dabble in marketing for a professional DJ pool in exchange for access to music, and picked up DJing as a result.

For him, learning about Spanish culture was central to learning Spanish—and a major part of learning about the culture was learning about the music.

Now, with fifteen years in radio, El Caobo is currently one of the format chiefs at WHPK (88.5 fm) and hosts his own show Radio Clasica/El Tornado Tropical on Thursdays from 4pm to 5:30pm. He began DJing for the UofC’s BLDA in 2012.

“To attract people from the community you need a DJ, and Earl [El Caobo] is the best,” says Sharma. He says the only place you’ll routinely see members of Chicago's old mambo community come out and dance is at the Promontory, due to El Caobo’s prominence.

El Caobo focused his efforts on the South Side despite concerns that it would be harder to create a flourishing salsa community there than on the North Side: “There was an open market here,” he says, “whereas the North Side was oversaturated.”

In the end, having the right venue made all the difference. El Caobo says the Promontory is a venue that has helped draw and sustain various forms of nightlife in Hyde Park. “I wanted to help create a space where people could support the area and spend money here in the neighborhood,” he said.

El Caobo’s excitement and love for the South Side Salsa events can be seen in all the groundwork he has helped to lay for them; he has created many groups on Facebook dedicated to sharing salsa history and events. He has also expanded his efforts from the Promontory to more of the South Side through weekly salsa events at the 31st Street beach in the summer, individual events on the Midway and at Ping Tom Memorial Park in Chinatown, not to mention South Side Salsa’s new monthly events at Room 43. And when the day of an event comes, El Caobo can be seen with a wide smiling face from the DJ booth.

El Caobo and the event organizers pride themselves on the elements of South Side Salsa that continue to bring people back: a large portion of each month’s crowd are regulars. That’s the goal, according to

Sharma. “We want for every time you come to salsa night for you to have a good night,” he says. “Every single time. Not just once.”

According to Sharma, there are two types of peoples in the salsa scene: the casual dancers, who show up occasionally to have a drink and dance, and those who are consumed by salsa and Latin dance.

Those in the second group travel around the city to attend different salsa events, take advanced lessons, and sometimes even join performance teams. Sharma is in this group: he has traveled the globe dancing, visiting Spain, London, Croatia, and India, which hosts one of the largest gatherings in the world for Salsa. In each of these places he says he has experienced a diverse and welcoming community of salseros.

“You can be a tourist or you can be a salsa dancer,” he says, “[someone] who wants to get in there and be instantly part of that country’s fabric, just because you dance salsa. You’re no longer a stranger.”

Sharma says salsa has become akin to a religion, and indeed, the salsa tradition has strong roots in religion and in community bonding: the word Mambo is said to mean Voodoo priestess in Haitian Creole as well as “conversation with the gods” in Kongo, a Bantu language that is spoken by the Kongo people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and Angola. The Afro-Caribbean religion Santería, which is based off of Yoruba beliefs and traditions, has also left its mark on the salsa genre.

“People go to church, I go dance,” he says. He believes there is a spiritual subtext to dancing, a thread that links people together as they move, “otherwise why would so many people gravitate to [the music] and feel the music deeply?”

In discussing salsa’s new renaissance in Hyde Park, Sharma said the importance of this new community has to do with the diasporic history of the genre.

There is something unique about it coming full circle in a philosophical sense,” he said. “Salsa music and rhythms come from Africa and for us to have a big dance community here in Hyde Park, which is an African-American cultural hub in Chicago. I don’t think that can be replicated anywhere. That’s what makes it unique.

Five or four years ago, I don’t think anyone would’ve considered driving to the South Side to dance salsa. But it’s happening all the time now.” ¬

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Razzle Dazzle

COLECTIVOMULTIPOLAR

An interview with La Spacer and DJ Cqqchifruit at the first anniversary of their tropical paradise party, TRQPiTECA

BY KYLIE ZANE

T

his month, TRQPiTECA, created

by Natalie Murillo (aka La Spacer) and Jacquelyn Guerrero (aka DJ Cqqchifruit), celebrates its one year anniversary.

The monthly event, most often held at Junior’s Sports Bar in Pilsen, is part tropical dance DJ night, part performance art, and part electric beach aesthetics (think sequins, disco balls, and blow-up palm trees). The result is a sensory paradise that revolves around the vast array of artists and performers in Chicago’s queer scene.

The Weekly spoke with co-hosts Natalie and Jackie about the inception of TRQPiTECA, the importance of Chicago’s house music scene, and dancing as a form of resistance and healing.

Natalie Murillo, aka La Spacer (they/she) Lay the groundwork for me: the history of TRQPiTECA, starting TRQPiTECA, how it came to be.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

TRQPiTECA came to be because we had done an event on the North Side at Slippery Slope that we called Boom Boom Q. There was this other dance party that happened at the Green Dolphin, maybe ten years ago, called the Boom Boom Room; I wanted to call [ours] Boom Boom Q in memory of the Boom Boom Room, because it was house music, and we just wanted [ours] to be this event with dance music, house music—and for queers to feel welcome. We only did it a few times, because the space we were doing it at, the management was pretty uptight. We brought one small party light and they were like “Oh, the owner doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want it to look like a club in here,” and I was like, “Wait, you have a huge DJ booth in here…” Like, why do they even want us here?

And I looked around at the people that would go to [Boom Boom Q]—we did it like two or three times—and most of them were from Pilsen. So we told ourselves, let’s look for a

space in Pilsen, because there’re already a lot of events and spaces being used on the North Side, and I grew up by Pilsen. I haven’t seen a lot of queer events, as far as house and techno and everything in between in Pilsen. And so we came across Junior’s space.

For my story behind the name: [ Jackie and I] were trying to come up with this event together. Jackie comes from Miami, and she missed the tropical and the warmness; the first TRQPiTECA happened in January, so you can just imagine being in Chicago in January and missing the warmth. The name also comes from wanting to play tropical music and to do some tropical aesthetic. The ‘-teca’ comes from the word discoteca, which in Spanish means a club, a disco club, like a seventies one. So, we thought, let’s call it “TRQPiTECA”—like a tropical club, also because I connect it to the club nightlife culture as well. And then we just changed the “O” to a “Q” to have a little queer-friendly symbol/message, so people

would catch on to that.

What’s the environment you want to create at TRQPiTECA? I want people to feel like it’s part of their community. It is a community. It’s a space were you go and hang out with other like-minded creatures. I want people to have an experience, not just to come for the booze. I want people to come for different reasons. If you’re really into music, you’re there for the music; if you’re really into art, you’re there for the performance art, or because of the art we create to change the environment. Like Junior’s, we change it. If you come another [normal] day, it’s not going to look like TRQPiTECA. I love that we can transform the space. I want people to feel like they enter a vortex, or they just traveled to another space or dimension. The way that I see that happening is through those tropical aesthetics—the pineapple flag,

the palm tree flag, the huge backdrop tropical installation that Jackie created, the palm trees.

But it’s very DIY. For me, little details like that are important. Sometimes we do little things on the table, sometimes I spray paint some coasters and put a palm tree that says “TRQPiTECA.” Jackie and I actually take in a bigger system in there, so people can feel the bass and really feel those tracks being played. If we were just to play using the system Junior’s has, the experience would be so much different, sound-wise. I’m really into sound, so that’s definitely something that’s a must. I don’t have to take those subwoofers and that sound system, but I do, because I love sound and I want people that really love sound and really move to the sound to have that.

It’s a lot of details, and it’s a lot of work.

And that’s what a lot of people don’t see. We don’t just get there and start playing—there’s a lot of work that goes into it.

How has Chicago’s house culture influenced you?

That’s been really important. I grew up in Chicago so I had my baby experience of listening to house music on the radio. Back then, the radio was awesome here because of that. There were a couple of radio stations that played house, and house music was born in Chicago, so [I was] just living in that time— the only thing that sucked about me being in that time is that I [couldn’t] go to the clubs.

But as a kid I would hear it all the time on the radio in the car. I had older cousins that would play it and would talk about the clubs.

So I was pretty much raised by house music.

Beat 96—believe it or not, Beat 96 played house music. My radio was that old school tuner, the one where you have to turn the knob; the 96 was right in the middle, on the line, so I would move the tuner, and boom, there it was. That was me at three years old.

It was a very, very young age. My family— they’re hardcore party people and we have a huge family. Pretty much every weekend my family still celebrates someone’s birthday, so there was always someone’s house to go to.

We would have dinner, and when dinner’s over, people were dancing [and] my older cousins would throw on a house mix.

And there were a lot of DJ shops too.

What they would sell were mixes—promo CDs or promo cassettes—and they were different styles. I still have some of those— some tapes. They had really cute covers. I have one that has a picture of the DJs and a little mini icon, and it’s hard house and freestyle mixed together, so it’s all freestyle vocals and hard house beats. It’s so good, it’s like

heartbreak tracks but with these banging hard house beats. I love that because it’s super high energy, and back then I had so much energy.

I was banging so hard to those. So hard. And juke music. I think what people call footwork nowadays, is what we would call juke. I have a juke tape. They would have all these funky colors too, so I was also interested in the aesthetics. I had CDs but they would scratch so they really didn’t survive, but the tapes did.

I even have a Latin freestyle one that’s yellow, like a see-through yellow.

In Little Village—mega malls, super malls, flea markets—all of those spots had DJ booths and would sell mixes and CDs. There’s still one in Little Village on 26th Street, right before you hit Kedzie if you’re going west.

There’s this place called Discount Mall. They probably changed a bit, from when I was a

from doing what I like. And now, times are changing, and there’re more women popping out in the house and techno scene as DJs and producers. That makes me very proud to be doing TRQPiTECA. I feel like Chicago was craving that. I was craving something like that. I’ve been to so many different events and parties and there was a lot of misogyny and womanizing going on, and it was not cute. And I realized, oh my god, is this what I have to deal with? That’s not the audience I’m trying to target. [My] audience is queer, people of color, and people that are allies. I just want to have a good time, have an experience, be somewhere and not feel judged.

One of the things right now that’s really upsetting in our community [is that] people are having a hard time giving five dollars.

And I’m not talking just at TRQPiTECA,

“Sometimes I feel like there’s a death drive that’s inherent in partying and party culture. And that’s why I think having art in the nightlife space has become an important part of what we do, because I think art is inherently a spiritual practice.”

—Jacquelyn Guerrero, aka DJ Cqqchifruit kid, but I would’ve gone in there and bought my DJ mixes. And I was really blessed, like one of my aunt’s friends told me, “I hear you like music a lot, I have a lot of my son’s tapes and he’s in jail. I don’t use them, so I’m going to bring them to you.” And he brought me a bag that had probably twenty tapes of all different kinds—some of them were house, some of them were techno. There was this other thing called “Boogie Nights,” and it was just different gangs from all over the city talking shit about each other with some background music.

So growing up in Chicago and just being into music since I was a kid, it’s definitely been an influence to me, and this is why I do what I’m trying to do. I think the only downside back then (but I don’t think it has to do specifically with music or house music) was the fact that there wasn’t a lot of women representing and being a part of it. As far as the DJ culture and the music producer culture, it was like, “Oh, you’re a woman, a woman is only good for vocals.” And growing up I decided, “I’m going to do me.” I never understood how me being born a woman was going to prevent me

but in general. I see that as a big problem. I mean, money is always a problem in general.

But I think usually when you go to college, or art schools, or you’re a part of that scene, you’re used to going to these free events and drinking your PBR; or [events are] ‘donation only,’ and how many people don’t donate if it’s not mandatory? I’m not about that life because I’m really into music and house music, and I don’t care how much I have to pay, I’m going to have an amazing time. I’m going to pay for that admission fee, because I know that if I like that sound system blasting and sounding so good, the money I’m giving is going to part of that. And the DJ that’s blowing my mind and going to take me into outer space deserves that money….

Or [people are] so used to the other situation: their friends paying at these venues and clubs that are open until 4 or 5am and have the money but don’t pay the artists— so they’re like, “Oh, I don’t want to pay. My friends are not the ones being paid, it’s going to be the owners that are getting that money.

Why do I have to pay?” I get that too, but this is not that kind of place. This is DIY, it’s a

POC event. So I think some people need to know what’s up.

So one of the things I love about TRQPiTECA is that it’s a community event, and the community is the one that’s supporting it. There’s been a few articles out there that I’ve read, saying that queer artists are not in the mainstream, probably for being queer, so it’s up to the queer community to support [itself ]. We are a market! Maybe it’s not a market that’s valued as much by the mainstream markets, but we are a market.

And ideally we don’t need that mainstream market to survive. Because TRQPiTECA is an example of how if the community is into something, it leads to something, and does its part. It can be funded by the very community that is benefitting off of it.

Jacquelyn Guerrero, aka DJ Cqqchifruit (they/she) What methods or techniques are important to you in creating TRQPiTECA? In the past I have made this installation called Glitter Beach, which is this big super tapestry that looks like the ocean and it has this sand.

So I did a different version of that, so that’s the big installation that’s up every time now, with the waves, and the beach, and the sun.

I come from a set design and lighting design background. For me, it just makes sense. And then being a part of really opulent nightlife—I mean tropical cabarets—has this really rich visual environment. The music is the other part that helps to create that zone, and then the performance is just natural, part of the equation.

It’s not the same every time with the performers. We’ve had more traditional drag and cabaret style, but sometimes we have more performance artists who do more experimental stuff and it can really impact the vibe. And sometimes people do things that are more painful expressions. I think there can be room for everything. It’s interesting to see what the effect is. Sometimes people will leave after that, it just changes the space, so it’s definitely a challenge to curate a line-up that is balanced—you know, like the best thing.

Our lives are not all razzle-dazzle, but people are going there to have a good time—but it can be cathartic.

You mentioned receiving some criticism.

What’s the criticism, do you think it’s valid, and if so, how do you change the event to respond to it?

Criticism has been around who comes, but the people who come are different every time.

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

One time, one person said that there were “too many white people.” The people that come are very diverse, in my opinion, but it also changes every time depending on who we book. But we also, every time, are featuring black and brown performers who are femmes or queer people, so in terms of who we invite and who actually comes, I don’t know what to say when it comes to something like that.

It’s a hard thing to try to process, because it’s not like I don’t want white people to come.

That’s not how I feel. I think it is diverse and it is a space to provide a platform for different perspectives, so having people coming from all different places is what I wanted, rather than a homogeneous thing.

It’s also difficult because that was a little hurtful to me. There are a lot of people who come that I don’t know, and a lot of my friends and most of the people I invite are people of color, but I can’t control who comes and who doesn’t. It’s a mixture of people that are artists, people that are queer and trans, and people of color who are coming from tropical backgrounds. There’s space for everybody. That [criticism] has stuck with me the most because that was last summer, five or six months into our programming. A lot of people in the arts scene are coming from SAIC, so I think it links to a conversation around gentrification, around who lives in Pilsen and who comes to Pilsen. But from the beginning we’ve been featuring people that are from the neighborhood and who are people of color, so I think we’ve stayed true to that intention. In our vision, the way that we describe it, is "a platform for artists working with queer and tropical aesthetics"—I think it’s pretty broad and leaves a lot of room for interpretation in terms of the music that we play, the guest DJs that we book, and our performers. So, if you’re down for that, I think you would have a good time.

How has resistance shaped your art? How do resistance and disco DJing go together for you?

The way that I’ve come about DJing is my love of dancing. I think that’s very common in terms of young—and even as we grow older—queer culture and other cultures; dancing is a huge part of the social practice.

So I think dancing as resistance, that’s it. I wanted to DJ because I was invited to be part of Chances, which for the past ten years has been a huge part of Chicago’s queer nightlife and art scene. So they taught me how to DJ and before that, I was going all the time to queer parties—Changes, FKA, Queer Park, and that was really cool, those were the main 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

ones. I went out in Boystown, but that wasn’t a place where I felt appreciated. So I think my style developed from my history and where I’m from, Miami, not from hearing a lot of tropical music there. And being in Chicago, it’s critical to have a vocabulary around house music, in my opinion. So I think all of those things are connected, so I’ve done a lot of listening to tropical music, and tropical house and learning how black and brown and queer people created and shaped those genres, and how they’ve been co-opted by Europeans. I think having an understanding about that, exploring that and trying to do research around that have been a lot of my focus.

Who have been your favorite performers?

What are you most proud of bringing to TRQPiTECA? We’ve had some very solid Chicago artists and South Side artists pass through, which I’m really proud of. But a lot of traveling performers have been very serendipitous in that they’ve been in town at the moment and we’ve been able to provide a space for them in that moment. We had one night that was memorable: Boychild and Liz Mputu, who’s a very famous online artist. And then we had this other performer, Dirty Grits, and they’re traveling around now, but they were living in North Carolina for a long time. So that night, we happened to have three different traveling performers, whose performances, together, were about the struggle—our struggle—and moving toward the healing process.

Healing was the explicit topic of Liz’s performance, and the nightlife scene can be a complicated space, because when people are partying there are so many different things that can happen and that are happening and there’s sometimes a very fine line between having a healing or self-care experience [versus] harm with substances. Sometimes, I feel like there’s a death drive that’s inherent in partying and party culture. And that’s why I think having art in the nightlife space has become an important part of what we do, because I think art is inherently a spiritual practice. Although some people have other intentions, like to make money—you know, people have different reasons for why they do what they do—but for us and our community, which is mostly queer, and mostly people of color, the art comes out of resistance and survival. The need to create art to survive is a real narrative and experience for the people in our community, so I think that having a place to express that and a place to go deeper is critical. ¬

LUKE SIRONSKI-WHITE

Why Can’t We Daydream?

Tara Betts talks hip-hop, poetry, and bridging the two

BY MICHELLE YANG

D

r. Tara Betts is a poet and professor.

She has written for and been anthologized in a number of publications, including Poetry Magazine and The Breakbeat Poets, performed at a variety of venues, and taught at several universities and for nonprofits like Young Chicago Authors.

Her newly published collection of poetry is titled Break the Habit (Trio House Press, 2016); she is also the author of Arc and Hue and numerous chapbooks.

Betts came to poetry after a lifetime of listening to hip-hop and a career in Chicago radio. Her life as a poet and a teacher of poetry is tied, in past and present, to Chicago’s hip-hop scene.

I think many people know you more for your poetry than your involvement with music, so what is your involvement with Chicago music?

One of the things that led me to poetry was music. When I was an undergrad at Loyola University on the North Side, [it] had yet to have a hip-hop radio show [on its station.]

[Lional Freeman and I] started [the show on WLUW 88.7, Loyola’s radio station], and then I came up with the name for it, [The Hip Hop Project.] In the process of doing that show, we met a lot of people who were part of Chicago's underground hip-hop scene: graffiti writers, DJs, hip-hop writers.

Some of them are still making music today.

Some of them are doing different jobs in the [Chicago] scene, in different clubs…Some of us went on to do stuff with Def Poetry Jam [and] met other artists through that, or we ended up doing performances. My friend Nikki Patin and I ended up opening for Jill Scott [once.] It’s been kind of interesting to be a poet and [interacting] with all these other musicians. There’s been a lot of overlap

with poets and musicians in the city.

What does hip-hop mean to you?

For me, hip-hop was my childhood. I grew up in the Midwest. I mean it's not like East Coast hip-hop, because it's not the same environment, but in terms of how it awakened a lot of people in my generation to storytelling, to politics, and to seeing something, it felt more culturally alive and relevant than a lot of stuff that we heard as kids.

Did you first become interested in poetry or hip-hop? Or did you become interested in them at around the same time?

You know, it's funny. I've always been a reader, so I've always loved books. Hip-hop I probably loved since I was in grade school because I remember pressing my shirts for school and listening to WGCI because I grew up in Illinois just outside of Chicago, so we would get WGCI and that was our main radio station. I remember listening to Dana Dane, Slick Rick, and Rappin’ Duke, which Notorious B.I.G references on “Juicy.”

He says, “Remember Rappin' Duke, duh-ha, duhha You never thought that hip-hop would take it this far” He's referencing an actual song that we would've known back when we were little kids, and you would laugh at it. But it’s one of those early rap songs that you heard on the radio. That's probably one of my earliest memories, and there are certain great beats that I remember. My grandparents owned a tavern. They didn't have a lot of hiphop on that jukebox, but a lot of stuff [on that jukebox] eventually ended up getting sampled.

How would you say hip-hop influences your poetry?

I think it inspired me to have a more narrative impulse and the desire to push for concrete detail. It made me think that stories by people of color were valid and powerful, and I think as a woman too, I found myself wanting to tell women’s stories because sometimes hip-hop doesn't do it for me. Or, I think there [are] other sides to the narrative. One of the poems that people know from my body of work is called

“Switch.” And it's because I was listening to a song by Nas [“Black Girl Lost”], and [asking], “Why are you telling the story?

The girl can tell her own story.” So that was the impetus.

I think it was interesting to ask my students at UIC, “How many women rappers can you name?” It was quiet for a beat, [then] they all said Nicki Minaj. A couple people said Iggy Azalea. And that's a problem, because you can probably name this person, this person, this person if we look at men.

I think [poetry and hip-hop] can influence each other, but I think they can be their own things that stand separate onto themselves. Poetry is—as much as we like to say it's an art of concision and art of words— also about what we sonically interpret from the poem. It's like, does [the poem] sing to us? And not just on an emotional level, but what do you hear when you read it out loud? I think that's when poetry is most like music. I definitely think that there can be overlap where they start to inspire each other, but they can also exist on [their own].

a Facebook page now, I don't know the hosts who run it, but the [Hip Hop Project] is still going, so I guess the vision and goal was really powerful and it stuck.

What about your childhood and experiences with hip-hop and poetry influenced you to want to create a radio station at Loyola?

Oh, but you so can! It’s been very interesting as a professor to start looking at what are the scholarly texts around hip hop, you know, by people like Mark Anthony Neal, Tricia Rose, [and books like And It Don't Stop]

by Raquel Cepeda, which is all hip-hop journalism articles. I'm also trying to get kids to look at what the genre does, because it forces you to look at details. It forces you to look at how does a writer create a scene? How does a writer create historical context? Rolling Stone, Vibe, Pitchfork, and Consequence of Sound, how do each of them cover it differently? So, you can show people, even with similar content, that there [are] different approaches to how you can talk about a subject. I think I'm kind of excited about that as well. How do you show people there's more than one way to write about the same thing?

Particularly because Loyola is still in Chicago proper, and there were all these other major universities around us that had one and we didn't. My friend Lional and I, we were very aware too. And I think in some ways hip-hop is still considered to always be a black art form, and in many ways it is.

But I also tend to think, it came from Black, Latino, and Caribbean artists, otherwise we wouldn't have it, period. This is a global art form, and how do we encourage people to respect it and treat it as such, because it was something that we really cared about.

We started [making] little pluggers—this is when you still made paper pluggers and you didn't post it on the Internet or do a GIF— and we went to all the cyphers. We hit up all the other radio shows, mailed stuff out, and just put our name out there. [This] was helpful in terms of getting us interviews with local [and] visiting artists. We got to meet Afrika Bambaataa. We had Crucial Conflict on the show. I think we had Common on the show. We had a lot of folks. And I think in that process, it was exciting because—I think now it would be more difficult to do in that way because the mediums have all changed. Even though I know the show has

When you and your friend would personally go out and look for all these hip-hop artists, how did you know who and what to look for?

We knew where certain hip-hop spots were, and we knew some people. But we would just go to [a] spot, and there would be a group of graffiti [artists] and they would be like, yeah, there's this thing on Saturday, and you go to that. Or we'd meet another DJ who would be like, I'm spinning at this. So it was a kind of structure where you would just branch off and go. You didn't have tweets or anything to tell you that. You just went and followed it organically.

Many people don't think of music as something that you can seriously study or write scholarly papers on. Do you feel music can be like that?

Could you talk a little more about the relevancy of poetry and hip-hop to life, not just as things that we just listen to and consume?

I mean, I think in some ways hip-hop [has] that same kind of function that these poems I was just talking about [have]. You're either looking for some sense of empowerment or affirmation, or you're looking for a space that feels like—I don't even want to say it's an escape—I think it's a space where

you feel it's inclusive of who you are. Some of our stories can be very real, and detail someone's reality, but some of them can be something where it's like, why can't we daydream? Why can't we imagine what it would be like, you know? And I think sometimes that's not always a bad thing.

Now for me it's like, sometimes I want it to be a little less materialistic, but I think you can say that with a lot of music. It's either too materialistic or too romanticized, so it's that fine line of being critical and aware.

On being critical of hip-hop, how have you been critical or encouraged other people to do it?

I think that was part of why I went faceforward into poetry because I got tired of fighting with people who act like women aren't supposed to be here. I just said, “OK, I feel like I can write, and I don't have to keep proving myself that I should be here.”

What no one tells you is that as a writer, people don't expect women to write, or they categorize you and say, “Oh, you're confessional, you're not serious about your craft.” Or if you're a woman and you come into a room, everyone assumes, if the person in your life is a man and does something in a similar field, he helped you with that. There are these little subtle moments of sexism—or not so subtle—where it's not much different in hip-hop or writing or any other genre.

Other than that lived experience, I think it has also been not just through conversation, but really paying close attention to what I'm listening to. I think sometimes, with most music we probably suspend judgment, but I do find myself asking questions. I think, “How does this relate to sexism? How does this relate to homophobia? How does this relate to the economic circumstances of different people?” I would like to hope that there will be more artists drawing that sort of attention. I think some hip-hop artists are good at making fun of that or doing something completely different, but they just don't get the mainstream attention. Betts will appear at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with Emily J. Lordi for a discussion on Lordi’s book Donny Hathaway Live (33 1/3) on January 13 from 6pm–7:30pm. Lional Freeman, also known as Brother El, who Betts co-founded Loyola University’s first hip hop radio show with, still makes music. He is a part of Makers of Sense and The Present Elders, an electronic music duo. You can find him at thebeatbank.net JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

BULLETIN Winter Break Back-to-School Celebration Mandrake Park Fieldhouse, 3858 S. Cottage Grove Ave. Thursday, January 5, 1pm–6pm.

Free. (312) 747-9938. mpacchicago.com

Social Media Etiquette for Small Businesses CBQ Beauty Bar, 4532 S. Cottage Grove.

Saturday, January 7, 7pm–10pm. $40.

RSVP at bit.ly/2hPmLIF. (773) 413-8348.

29elevenconsulting.com

Suitable for students of all ages, this backto-school event invites attendees to jump in a bouncy house, receive a free haircut, get study tips, and learn about job opportunities.

(Michelle Yang)

Small business owners interested in constructing or developing their business’s online presence may benefit from this class hosted by 29Eleven Consulting. Attendees will discuss how tools like analytics and content development can help them convey a positive impression online. ( Juan Caicedo)

Two DOPE Chicks: Women Working in the Cannabis Industry

VISUAL ARTS

Avalon Public Library, 8148 S. Stony Island Ave. Thursday, January 5, 6pm–8pm. Free.

RSVP at bit.ly/twodopechicks. twodopechicks.com It stands for Developing Opportunities for Personal Empowerment, of course. The cannabis education organization will provide opportunities for all, even just the “cannacurious,” to learn and network. Industry businesswomen Shaleen Title and Edie Moore are guest speakers. ( Juan Caicedo)

Bronzeville Youth 360 Summit Phillips Academy High School, 244 E. Pershing Rd. Friday, January 6, 9am–2pm. Free. RSVP required at bit.ly/Y360Summit2017. (312) 577-5555. tcbinc.org A resource fair with youth-led workshops, this summit for high schoolers covers topics including social justice and advocacy, relationships between youth and law enforcement, and art and self-image. Enjoy a raffle, some live performances, and the meals provided. (Elaine Chen)

Housing, Poverty, and the Divided City School of Social Service Administration, 969 E. 60th St. Friday, January 6, 1pm–3pm. Free.

(773) 753-4483. ucsc.uchicago.edu The First Friday Social Change Forum series is a new monthly social justice program hosted by the UofC’s University Community Service Center. The first event will discuss housing and economic development in Chicago through a Q&A and a panel consisting of Charlie Barlow, Wendell Harris, and Marisa Novara. (Michelle Yang)

22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ JANUARY 4, 2017

Riot Grrrls

Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. Thursday, December 15, 2016 through Sunday, June 18, 2017. Tuesday, 10am–8pm; Wednesday–Sunday, 10am–5pm. $12 adults, $7 students; free Tuesdays. (312) 280-2660. mcachicago.org As one would expect judging by the name "Riot Grrrls", this exhibit is a refreshingly direct challenge to the sexism that has long permeated the art world. This stunning collection features a series of abstract works by eight prolific, pioneering female painters including Mary Heilmann and Charline von Heyl, as well as works from the generation of female artists that followed. (Bridget Newsham)

Spencer Rogers: Modern Abstractions S. Rog Gallery, 739 S. Clark St., 2nd floor.

Opening reception Friday, January 13, 6pm– 9pm. Through March 10. Open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, 10am–5pm, and by appointment. Free. (312) 884-1457. sroggallery.com It takes a painter’s imagination to curate an exhibition as dazzling as "Modern Abstractions", comprised of mind-blowing macro photographs selected for interesting detail and exploded in vibrant, dripping acrylic paint. 125 copies will be made of each of these images, which will be on sale to all attendees.

Snacks also provided. (Neal Jochmann)

Onward! Movements, Activists, Politics and Politicians Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Opening reception Friday, January 13, 6pm–10pm.Through Friday, February 3 by appointment only. Free. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com

Photographer Michael Gaylord James’s exhibit spans fifty-four years of politics, from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement to Black Lives Matter, from JFK in Mexico to Obama at Chicago State. He hopes to show that there’s reason for hope in the long march toward progress. ( Joseph S. Pete)

MUSIC Basement Boogie at Punch House Punch House, 1807 S. Allport St. Thursday, January 5, 9pm. (312) 526-3851. punchhousechicago.com DJ Communicator ( Jerry Reyes) and his friends will provide a selection of “Disco / 80s / boogie” tracks as part of Punch House’s ongoing Song Selector series of nightly DJ sets. Communicator, a self-described “vinyl junkie” with a pedigree at venues across the city, DJs at Punch House on the first Thursday of every month. ( Jake Bittle)

Screamin’ End Buddy Guy’s Legends, 700 S. Wabash Ave. Tuesday, January 10, 9:30pm. $10. 21+.(312) 427-1190. buddyguy.com Screamin’ End, aka “Krazy Eddie & Friends,” is a Chicago band playing a mixture of classic rock, rockabilly, and blues, stage presence augmented by a double bass covered in skulls. Come check out their performance of their latest album Juke Joint, recorded in a Memphis studio containing Elvis’s microphone and Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano (according to the band’s own website; could not be independently verified). (Christian Belanger)

STAGE & SCREEN Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property Studio Movie Grill Chatham, 210 W. 87th St. Thursday, January 5, 7pm. $6. (773) 322-1450. southsideprojections.org Nat Turner was “troublesome property” when he led the slave rebellion now named for him, and he continues to be troublesome for those discussing him today. South Side Projections and Black World Cinema team up to present a film that intertwines documentary and dramatization, with each dramatization featuring a different actor as Turner. (Cynthia Mao)

Plato’s Phaedrus Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, January 6, 7pm. Free. (773) 702-8596. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu The worry that the comic strip Calvin once voiced to the comic strip Hobbes—“What if somebody calls us a pair of pathetic peripatetics?”—evidently isn’t shared by UofC film professor d. n. rodowick, who will be screening the second film in his experimental series about philosopher walks (from the ancient Greek peripatetikos). This one is loosely based on the Phaedrus, Plato’s dialogue about love, poetry, and rhetoric. (Christian Belanger)

“Karl Wirsum” Screening Hyde Park Art Center, Muller Meeting Room, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Sunday, January 8, 1pm–4pm. Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org Any Hairy Who devotees who happen to be in the neighborhood would be well advised to stop by while this fourteen-minute film, about one of the art movement’s earliest members, is looped at the art center where the Hairy Who had its first exhibition. Said devotees might also be well advised to bring the whole family—a companion workshop will teach participants to make Wirsuminspired puppets. ( Julia Aizuss)

Group 312 Films Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St. Sunday, January 8, 8pm–10pm. (312) 7254223. chicagoartdepartment.org After an absence last month, the filmmaking collective returns to welcome in the new year.

The monthly topic for the group’s film short screenings hasn’t been announced yet, so the only way to find out for yourself is to stop by. ( Julia Aizuss)

Open Mic Mondays Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Monday, January 9, 7pm; 6:30 artist signup. Select Mondays through April 17. Free. 18+. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org To an amateur artist who craves feedback, an open mic is a godsend, and as such events go, the Beverly Arts Center’s offering is topnotch. You simply must come have a drink, perform your songs and stories in verse and prose, and delight in other offerings during your time offstage. (Neal Jochmann)

EVENTS

38 Women Movement Workshop Hyde Park Arts Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Wednesday, January 11, 5pm–8pm. Free. RSVP at exhibitions@hydeparkart.org. Suggested ages 18-70+. Wear comfortable clothing and shoes.

(773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Dance, chat, and improvise to share your lived experiences with other women as a part of HPAC’s (Re)Public. Choreographer Philippa Donnellan, who choreographed the original 38 Women performance in Ireland, will guide participants through collaboratively inventing and performing “new narratives of your own choosing.” (Emily Lipstein)

JANUARY 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY IS MADE BY PEOPLE LIKE YOU.

S Writers • Reporters • Editors Designers • Illustrators • Photographers The Weekly is produced by an all-volunteer staff and seeks contributions from across the city.

To get involved, come to our open house

SATURDAY, 14, 2017 | 2PM-4PM SATURDAY, JANUARY OCTOBER 1, 2016 | 2PM-4PM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE CHICAGO, IL 60637 or email us anytime at editor@southsideweekly.com. southsideweekly.com | @southsideweekly