The postpunk generation can reel off the names automatically: Unknown Pleasures, Second Edition, Los Angeles, Dub Housing, Entertainment…I’m telling ya: it seemed like a record that blew your mind was released every week. The debut from the Violent Femmes in 1983 was one of them, and it was as weird as they come. It seemed at first just a goofy joke on punk minimalism: a nervous song cycle of rustling acoustic guitars, bass, and snare, with a drawling litany of complaints intoned above, all of it sounding unusually bare, personal, and self-absorbed by the standards of the time....

Dear Editor: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The “Panic in Wicker Park” [August 26] is a phony condition propagated by a clique of naive brats. Most of these righteous antigentrification guerrillas can afford to feign poverty because their parents’ suburban homes have already appreciated a few hundred grand. It’s hip to pity the weary droves on trash smeared streets rather than get caught standing in line at Starbucks....

In America heavy themes demand heavy music, and we’re not always trustful of even the best purveyors of the slightly different British pop tradition, which is to marry substantive lyrical themes to music that’s sometimes overly light. Blur, who hit town this weekend to promote their third album, Parklife, revel in this tradition, and U.S. response to their work (after the killer summer single “Girls and Boys” failed to break the album) has been accordingly less than enthusiastic....

After 29 years at the helm of the Contemporary Chamber Players, Ralph Shapey is stepping down. The group he founded will no doubt continue doing a fine job as an indispensable pluralistic advocate of modern music, but the maestro’s feisty touch and sagacious guidance are likely to be missed. Shapey the composer, however, is still going strong at 72. He recently completed the broad-canvased Concerto Fantastique, which the Chicago Symphony Orchestra unveiled last season, and his newest piece, Inventions, will be premiered Friday night, at the CCP’s annual Paul Fromm Concert....

ERNIE WILLIAMS & THE WILDCATS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s pretty rare these days for veteran bluesmen to be “discovered” after years of obscurity, but bassist and vocalist Ernie Williams proves that there may still be some truth in that cliche. Though he’d worked for years in neighborhood venues in New York City and Albany, Williams was unable to expand his reputation until 1993, when he assembled his rough-and-ready band the Wildcats (Williams’s old street nickname had been Wildcat Quick Ernie Lash)....

FOOT NOTES BOOT LICKS TOE JAMS Rhinoceros Theater Festival Theater Oobleck at the Curious Theatre Branch Typically Oobleck and Curious have neither borrowed nor invented formal constraints. They work without directors, and have seldom edited their works down to manageable unified wholes. Even their best works have at times seemed like unkept gardens, full of a wild beauty obscured at times by overlooked weeds. Both companies have devoted more energy to developing highly imaginative, provocative material than to devising the ingenious containers necessary to hold their idiosyncratic effusions....

Pianist Hal Galper spent a dozen years working with two of the ballsiest alto saxophonists in jazz–Cannonball Adderley and Phil Woods–and so you’d expect his ability to summon, a full-figured, densely textured keyboard persona whenever needed. But that side of his character doesn’t surface all that often in Galper’s own trio, where he revels in a light touch, subtly shaded chords, and the clean separation between his busy right-hand improvisations and the accent chords of his left....

HEY! WHOOPS. BANG! Cardiff Giant at Shattered Globe Theatre Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The main obstacle was the actors’ struggle to develop the characters. Each character is initially defined only by some personal trait. In the first scene of the first episode we met Dr. Thoron, a brilliant scientist and the victim of some side effect that made him horribly large, and his beloved assistant Debra, who’s unbearably sweet and innocent....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A friend searched the census data for “diverse” community areas, any of which has less than half the population in its largest ethnic group. He found six community areas, out of Chicago’s 77, and three “near misses,” areas with 50-52 percent of their population in the largest ethnic group. Of these nine, however, four are less “diverse” than “divided”; they straddle a boundary between two segregated sections....

INVITE THE SPIRIT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Western rhythms derive from the heartbeat, but Korean music is traditionally paced by breaths. On their self-titled album (recorded in 1983 and long out of print) Invite the Spirit brought heart and lungs together by wedding Korean music to free improvisation. Sang-won Park’s kayagum–a zither with 12 silk strings and movable bridges–established a stately pace, while percussionist Charles K....

Last November Metro announced that it was bringing in Karen Finley’s solo show A Certain Level of Denial for a two-night engagement, then canceled the gig on short notice for fear that Finley’s onstage nudity would jeopardize its liquor license. Now Finley, an Evanston Township High School alum who’s won international attention with her controversial performances, has booked herself into Steppenwolf Theatre’s studio space–for two weeks, not two nights. It’s a good match: a legit theater should attract the serious-minded audience Finley deserves, and Finley’s work will bring to Steppenwolf the kind of gutsy passion too long absent from its stage....

Music From the Motion Picture Trainspotting And now that Trainspotting is also a movie and a record, it’s ironic that one of his favorites is “Take My Breath Away,” the love theme from Top Gun. In the summer of 1986 “Take My Breath Away” topped the singles charts in the United States and the UK, spurred by heavy play of the video, which was nothing more than a Top Gun trailer (and which begged the question, Was the film much more than a long-form music video?...

Handwriting (Quarterstick), the debut recording of the ensemble known as Rachel’s, is one of the more interesting experiments carried out by indie rockers looking to go beyond their typical musical milieu. Eschewing most rock references, Rachel’s cross-pollinate quasi-jazz musings with original classical pieces, creating evocative textural explorations of a surprising succinctness, restraint, and skill. Violist Christian Frederickson and electric bassist/guitarist Jason Noble, formerly of oblique Louisville rockers Rodan, formed the band in 1991 and were later abetted by serendipitously named pianist Rachel Grimes; the band’s current, fleshed-out configuration brings together ambitious indie-rock types–members of the Coctails and Shellac’s Bob Weston–and several professional classical musicians....

Rose Goes, More Power to Tower Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The 54-year-old Rose had traditionally run the Wabash store as a stand-alone business. The rest of the chain was overseen by his cousin, Jack Rose. That chain responded to the growth of giants like Musicland and Tower with growth of its own, reaching a peak of some 50 stores two years ago. Unfortunately, the ground was shifting beneath the industry: the new challenge was coming from discount marts like Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target, which–with questionable legality–were selling records below wholesale prices as loss leaders....

This superb bill deftly counters many preconceptions about bluegrass. Although it’s often maligned as hillbilly music, at its best the genre bristles with unbounded energy and dazzling instrumental lyricism. Organized by Rounder Records, which this year celebrates its 25th anniversary as one of the premier presenters of American roots music, this package tour attests not only to the music’s vitality but to its diversity. J.D. Crowe is a banjo virtuoso whose quicksilver grace identifies him as bluegrass’s primo exponent of Lester Scruggs-style playing....

CERTAIN DISTANT SUNS 6/23, METRO In the liner notes to Happy on the Inside (Giant), a compilation of their first two EPs, Certain Distant Suns suggest that living 45 minutes outside of Chicago has isolated them from the “music scene” and allowed them to come up with something original. They neglect to mention how many record stores out there are selling English imports. You wouldn’t confuse CDS with, say, Styx, Wicker Man, or Loud Lucy, but distinguishing them from the fleet of bands aping My Bloody Valentine is a different story....

Lost all those years ago in the anthemic furor of “Slack Motherfucker” and the unabashed revival of Husker Du’s blaring formalism and pogo dancing was the fact that Chapel Hill vets Superchunk are ultimately in service to the hook. Over the course of a half dozen albums their sound has grown consistently more expansive. They’ve settled into slower material and carefully toyed with familiar structures. They continue to do these things on the new Here’s Where the Strings Come In (Merge)....

**** CALENDAR (Masterpiece) Directed and written by Atom Egoyan With Arsinee Khanjian, Ashot Adamian, and Atom Egoyan. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What has always seemed problematic about Egoyan’s slicker (and to my mind more pretentious) productions, for all their virtues, is that they exploit various sexual hang-ups more than they try to understand them. In contrast to his low-budget films, which at least on the surface are more naturalistic, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, and Exotica all have the shape and feel of allegorical fantasies, but closed, claustrophobic ones, without road maps or commentaries....

Whip-Smart in the Real World Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Whip-Smart isn’t a flop–Matador Records owner Gerald Cosloy notes that the record has a SoundScan count of more than 170,000, which is probably low considering the record’s strength in non-SoundScanned alternative record stores. “It’s doing about as well as we thought it would,” he said. But the famously bad-mannered Cosloy and his uncompromising label are no longer loose cannons: Whip-Smart was one of the first experiments in a joint venture between Matador and major Atlantic....

Strange Days With Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D’Onofrio, Glenn Plummer, Brigitte Bako, and Richard Edson. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To me, it’s a toss-up whether these dreams have to do with Strange Days or Seven or the O.J. Simpson trial and its countless spin-offs. The objection will be raised that the Simpson hoopla is about something real....