Our (fairly) regular roundup of Music & Arts related news from Chicago-based web media, featuring thoughts and insight from some of the city’s most dedicated writers.
- Preview: Thirsty Ear Festival @ Empty Bottle, 8/11
By Timothy A. Schuler
If a person camped out at the Empty Bottle for seven nights straight, they’d almost be guaranteed to see seven shows that shared nothing but the same small, corner stage. It’s a venue known for its eclectic taste and a bent toward the fiercely independent, and yet on Saturday it will open its doors for an event that will be somewhat of an outlier to its already fantastically peppered scatter-plot and will make Empty Bottle history.
The Thirsty Ear Festival, from 5pm to 7pm on Saturday, will be a showcase of contemporary classical music, featuring four Chicago-based groups, including the MAVerick Ensemble, James Falzone, Palomar, and the Chicago Q Ensemble. Organized by Seth Boustead, the executive director of Chicago non-profit Access Contemporary Music and host of WFMT 98.7 FM‘s Relevant Tones program, the “festival” will also be the first concert ever broadcast live from the Bottle.
It’s guaranteed to be one of the most unique shows of the weekend. Each artist gets a 30-minute time slot, and the music will range from a performance of work by experimental composer Iannis Xenkais by the Maverick Ensemble to Falzone’s meditative solo improvisation, Sighs Too Deep For Words. It’ll be a great chance to exercise your brain (and ears — prepare for dissonance!) before you exercise your booty when Windy City Soul Club invades the Bottle later that night.
A few important notes: If you’re going, go early. Thirsty Ear performers will be playing Ben Vida’s “Liminal Bends” from various corners of the venue before the show begins, starting at 4:15pm Also: consider biking. Not only is Tom Skilling predicting beautiful weather, but in partnership with the Active Transportation Alliance, if you prove to the doorman you biked (show him your helmet or other paraphernalia), he’ll let you in for $5 instead of $10.
The Thirsty Ear Festival will take place at the Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western Ave., on Saturday, August 11, at 5 p.m. Doors open at 4 p.m. Admission is $10, $5 with proof of bike.
About the author: Timothy A. Schuler is a writer, editor, and essayist. He’s written about Congolese trance music, homelessness in Hawaii, idea culture, and everything in between. More of his work is online at timothyschuler.com.
- Last Minute Plans: Save The Clocktower Album Release Show Friday
Last year’s full-length debut from Chicago band Save The Clocktower, Carousel, melded an impressive amount of indie-rock sub-genres into a cohesive whole. The band celebrates the belated release of synth-driven sophomore effort Through The Glass Friday at the Double Door. [ more › ]
- A 13-Year-Old Rapper Shocks the City with "Get Smoked"
Lil Mouse is a 13-year-old rapper from the Wild 100s. He’s already recorded several videos, the first when he was still 12. His latest track, “Get Smoked,” has attracted attention for its glorification of popping pills, selling drugs, having sex, shooting people and other activities not usually associated with barely teenaged kids.
In the Sun-Times, Mary Mitchell asks where the outrage is over a child producing gangsta rap. She includes a quote from Che “Rhymefest” Smith, whose first single came out when he was 20.
“This warrants an investigation,” said Che “Rhymefest” Smith, a Chicago rapper who ran a spirited but unsuccessful campaign for alderman in the 20th Ward. “This has clearly crossed over into child pornography when you have a 13-year-old child rapping about sex and about violence and drug selling. They are probably already under investigation.”
Whether it’s child pornography or not is debatable (there are no explicit acts performed in the video, only allusions to sex), but it is rather disconcerting seeing a kid whose voice hasn’t changed yet rapping about these topics. Kris Kross this is not. However, is it really all that surprising when one of the biggest sensations in Chicago hip hop is Chief Keef, who raps about the same material at 16? Surely Keith Cozart was coming up with his rhymes three years ago — he just didn’t have the media attention yet. Now that it’s here for Chief Keef and his crew, it makes sense that some of the younger members of the scene would get noticed, too.
Mitchell blames the trend on record labels “exploiting the violence,” but as far as I can determine Lil Mouse is not yet signed — and the whole scene has grown up and made it big not through label promotion but through artists self-releasing videos on YouTube.
Smith is trying to turn the tide with “The Pledge Mixtape,” a collaboration with the Black Youth Project and Power of Purpose. The album, to be produced by Smith, is a 13-song compilation album of songs from various local hip hop artists “taking back their communal power through music.” I’m not sure how much a mixtape that specifically excludes songs with violent imagery will make a difference, but giving opportunities to more positive musicians can’t hurt. Investing in schools and extracurricular activities in the Wild 100s, Lawndale and other impoverished neighborhoods would help a lot more.
Meanwhile, the surest way for the pubescent rapper trend to come to an end (or, really, go back underground) is for another city’s hip hop scene to rise to prominence. This is Chicago’s minute, but the clock is ticking.
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