The people, places, and things voted Chicago’s best—and runners-up: music festival, streaming concert series, emerging band, emerging local label, local label, local album of the year, recording studio, music podcast, gig poster designer, blues band, individual blues musician, venue for blues music, R&B artist, classical ensemble, non-orchestra classical ensemble, classical music event, venue for classical music, hip-hop group, individual hip-hop artist, hip-hop DJ, hip-hop party, hip-hop producer, venue for hip-hop, house music DJ, venue for dance music, jazz ensemble, individual jazz musician, venue for jazz, singer-songwriter, country band, international or world music act, pop artist, metal band, punk band, rock band, venue for rock music, venue for magic shows, suburban music venue, music venue, music venue bartender, LGBTQ party, new bar, established bar, lesbian bar, gay bar, neighborhood bar, dive bar, 4 AM bar, hotel bar, and more
Category: Music & Nightlife
Best nine-minute, 12-second Chicago hip-hop mixtape
I’ve known Chicago rapper Davis for a few years. I first encountered him as part of local underground hip-hop collective Why Footclan, which also runs a label for its small but mighty collection of MCs. Davis, aka Davis the Dorchester Bully (among other pseudonyms), collaborates with fellow Why? rapper Joshua Virtue in the duo Udababy, […]
Best overdue celebration
Charles Stepney shaped some of the most memorable pop music of the 20th century, including records by Ramsey Lewis, Minnie Riperton, the Dells, Terry Callier, the Emotions, and Earth, Wind & Fire. But when he died in 1976 at age 45, the composer, producer, and arranger had yet to release anything under his own name—he […]
Best place to catch a man practicing harmonica while he urinates
Sidekicks (4424 W. Montrose) is an understatedly chill karaoke joint. Flashy people sing at Alice’s or Cafe Mustache, but if you’re looking for a good, weird time singing to a mix of people that might include Bass Pro card carriers as well as homos you haven’t met at every other gay spot, Sidekicks is the […]
Best cultural programming at a museum
The International Museum of Surgical Science (1524 N. DuSable Lake Shore Drive) bills itself as “North America’s Only Museum Devoted to Surgery,” but that’s only part of the picture. It’s housed in a Gilded Age lakefront mansion based on a chateau once occupied by Marie Antoinette and built in 1917 for socialite Eleanor Robinson Countiss, […]
Best local mix series that became an Internet radio station
Early in the pandemic, Zoë Miller and brothers Cameron and Matthew Chapleau launched Beloved to release music on vinyl. The demand for the format was pushing manufacturers past their limits, though, resulting in prolonged pressing delays. Beloved’s first of two releases so far—a reissue of the 2011 EP Demonstration by Urbana indie-rock band Easter—wouldn’t come […]
Best concert conversion experience
If you care about music, you’ve surely encountered the particular frustration of finding a band you know you should like. You listen to their albums, and you can tell they’re good, but the sparks don’t fly. That was my relationship to Chicago five-piece Dos Santos—until I finally saw them live at last year’s Midsommarfest. Dos […]
Best citywide display of talent at a monthly underground hip-hop show
If you were to walk into Cafe Mustache during Skoli Moly Donut Shop, you’d have no clue you were on the Logan Square strip of Milwaukee Avenue on the northwest side. That’s because DJ Skoli, government name Ryan Roberts, curates variegated, seamless lineups of up to ten singers, rappers, and DJs from across the city […]
Best commitment to a concept album’s bit
In September, Chicago rocker Annie Fish dropped Weird Like Me, an album full of rippers that would’ve clinched 16-month leases on WXRT’s airwaves during the 90s alternative boom. She also created a parallel universe where the album was an improbable cult hit: her Bandcamp page includes a link to a fictional oral history that spends […]
Best place to escape an EDM club overrun by a Michigan State fraternity
After watching Matt Reeves’s The Batman, I felt compelled to re-create the movie’s nightclub scene for myself: I wanted to find someplace slinky, saturated in red light and bass. My friends and I headed down to River North, and after paying a cover charge of $50 per person, we landed in a subterranean nightclub that […]
Best prodigal son in a rock band
Chicago trio Facs arose almost seven years ago out of the hiatus-turned-breakup of Disappears. Bassist and singer Brian Case, guitarist Jonathan van Herik, and drummer Noah Leger stretched the icy, brittle sounds of classic postpunk over gangly new skeletons to create their minimalist dirges. Van Herik left in late 2017, after the recording of Facs’ […]
Best multihyphenate burlesque dancer, emcee, and event curator for Black femmes
I can’t remember where exactly I was introduced to nightlife icon Lynzo the Heartthrob, because they frequent so many places where it might’ve happened. Raised in Hyde Park, Lynzo is a self-taught and constantly booked drag artist, burlesque performer, and exotic dancer; an event curator; a queer and trans plus-size stylist; an activist for sex […]
Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife
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Best LGBTQ+ bar 75 steps from the Mag Mile
Look for the unassuming, narrow doorway wedged in between an Armenian restaurant and the former staff entrance to the now-shuttered Gap behemoth on Michigan Avenue, climb the nearly vertical and carpeted stairway to the second floor, and you’ve entered the best LGBTQ+ watering hole this side (or any side) of the Mag Mile. Known for […]