As I mentioned in my Year In Review piece on “the best things about Chicago music,” the hip-hop scene’s empire is full of exciting, vital music. It often feels excessive, and there’s stuff that always falls through the cracks. With that in mind here are five great local hip-hop releases from 2014 that I thought were overlooked in one way or another—this isn’t definitive, but these five definitely deserve your attention....

I always thought one of the best things about the Dressing Room, the Lincoln Square women’s clothing boutique, was its collection of cute shoes. I guess I wasn’t the only one: its owners just opened an offshoot devoted to footwear, bags, and other accessories a few doors down. Certain concessions must be made to the neighborhood demographic, so don’t let the rack of Crocs by the front door scare you off—there are plenty of better-looking options for comfortable footwear, including basic sneaks by Superga in sage, burnt orange, and black ($82....

The first thing that struck Tom Tomc about Keith Dukavicius was his resemblance to Egon Schiele. Like the Austrian painter, Dukavicius is gangly and naturally theatrical, and “his hair was standing straight up,” Tomc says. “In his self-portraits Schiele would distort his face a little bit, and then he looks even more like Keith. Keith looks like Schiele’s interpretation of himself.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Growing up in the Back of the Yards, Dukavicius, who’s 41, staged and filmed puppet plays with his brothers and studied music....

AN UNREASONABLE MAN ssss WHERE Music Box, 3733 N. Southport I still remember an argument I got into with a coworker when we were working a promo booth at the Old Town School’s summer musical festival in July 2000. I told her I was voting for Ralph Nader, and she tried to talk me out of it. “Do you really want to wind up casting a vote for George Bush?” she asked....

Taking a look around Eva Niewiadomski’s two-bedroom Andersonville condo, you might find it hard to believe she was ever an accountant. It doesn’t seem fitting, a corporate number cruncher living in this bright, whimsical environment, much less creating it. But that’s where Niewiadomski, who’s worked in finance and also as a brand manager for the Quaker Oats Company, would tell you you’re wrong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Who wrote the rule saying that beige and cream are business colors?...

friday30 JON RAUHOUSE The fluid virtuosity of steel-guitar specialist Jon Rauhouse has made him a first-call hired gun in the alt-country world, but on his own records he covers a lot more stylistic ground. On the new Steel Guitar Heart Attack (Bloodshot), guests like Neko Case, Kelly Hogan, Sally Timms, and members of Calexico–all of whom Rauhouse has played for–pitch in on a typically diverse mix of tunes that includes western swing, honky-tonk, torch songs, jazz standards, and the theme from Mannix....

I’ve never felt more overwhelmed by new releases than I did by the deluge of 2012. I’m not complaining, but it does make compiling this sort of year-end list feel almost pointless—how can you ever be sure you’ve heard everything worthwhile? All the same, it wasn’t hard for me to choose five favorite international recordings. Sidi Touré, Koïma (Thrill Jockey) For his austere 2011 debut, Sahel Folk, this Malian singer and guitarist recorded a collection of duets at his sister’s home in Gao....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Since so much is happening so quickly around here, we thought it made sense to add a new feature to Clout City: a daily roundup of important politics and policy news that you may have missed (and even if you haven’t, that we, in our humble estimation, think you should probably check out again). We have no intention of replacing the observations, reporting, and analysis that we’ve been doing—we just hope to add to it....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It turns out the city’s service cutbacks aren’t going to be limited to slowdowns in pothole repair or snow removal. As the Trib reported this morning (and the Chi-Town Daily News reported last week), the health department is getting ready to close 5 of the city’s 12 mental health clinics at a time when people are losing their jobs and health insurance at staggering rates....

Bobby Conn’s new King for a Day (Thrill Jockey) seems scattershot in its choice of subjects–Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, global warming, a filthy basement show where members of the band had their toes sucked by the crowd–but that’s just part of its sharply crafted artifice. After all, that lack of focus fits right in with the album’s overarching themes–solipsism and escapism. “The real world,” Conn says in the PR, “is getting increasingly grim....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most Chicago sports fans, I made the decision to watch the Bulls Wednesday. It was their regular-season finale, and with the Cleveland Cavaliers winning, if they won they’d get the second seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs and a relatively cushy first-round playoff opponent; if they lost they’d get the fifth seed and a first-round playoff rematch with the defending NBA champions, the Miami Heat....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Andrew Patner has a moving and thoughtful take on Evanston native Charlton Heston. I don’t know enough of his work to comment thoughtfully on it, but I recommend Richard Dreyfuss’s essay on Heston as a contrast to Neil Steinberg’s piece and Michael Miner’s reaction. In particular, I thought this was significant: Steinberg and Miner argue that Heston simply didn’t have that much talent....

The Reader’s Guide to the 30th annual All the other action is in Grant Park as well, and as always the music is free. Afternoon sets are at the Jazz on Jackson stage (on Jackson near Lake Shore Drive) and the Jazz& Heritage Stage (south of Jackson near the Rose Garden), where the programming includes family-oriented shows and concert-demonstrations. Friday through Sunday the New Orleans All-Star Brass Band—a group assembled especially for the fest from members of several Crescent City outfits, including the Pin Stripe, Paulin Brothers, and New Birth brass bands—plays two sets on Jackson between Columbus and Lake Shore Drive, one at 11 AM and the other at 4 PM....

As Cook County clerk David Orr released his annual TIF report last Thursday, an otherwise typical week was under way in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Wait—I want to make sure no one took my wallet while I was writing that. Orr’s report makes it clear that real money is involved. This year the TIFs will tax us $457 million. In the last 25 years, we, the taxpayers, have paid $5.5 billion into the TIF program....

Blessed with pitch-perfect control, a resonant timbre, and a four-octave range, Dee Alexander strikes a sometimes precarious balance between virtuosity and restraint, whether she’s rendering the Ella Fitzgerald/George Gershwin songbook (as she did at the 2004 Chicago Jazz Festival) or creating kaleidoscopic landscapes with her peers in the AACM (as she’s been doing lately at the Velvet Lounge). Tonight she’s paying tribute to a mentor, reedman “Light” Henry Huff, whom she credits with helping her find her “natural” voice when she was a singer and interpretive dancer in his ensemble Breath in the late 70s and early 80s....

SEPTEMBER thursday 9/10 Maryann Lesert reads from her debut novel, Base Ten. 7:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299. J. Adams Oaks reads from his YA novel Why I Fight; he’ll be joined by Gwendolyn Glover (Cast the First Stone). 4:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299. Bookslut Reading Series With Dave Reidy (Captive Audience) and Barry Schechter (The Blindfold Test). 21+. Hopleaf Bar, 5148 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I bought an old LP by American folksinger and song collector John Jacob Niles in the late 80s, when I worked in record stores. I picked up Folk Balladeer largely because the cover attracted me—it featured a black-and-white photo of square-jawed, professorial Niles holding a strange-looking lute upright, beside his face. I’d never heard of him before, and when I listened to the album I was startled by his peculiar singing, which seemed to collide folksy coarseness with academic formality....

Sean Penn in Gangster Squad I’m away in Los Angeles, and for the past ten days I’ve been driving around under giant billboards counting down the days until joy returns to the land with Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad. It’s the sort of frantic, out-of-proportion PR blitz that ensues when moviemakers realize they have a serious problem—in this case, that their brain-dead celebration of machine gun fire debuts amid a national debate on automatic weapons....

“[Paul] Street doubts that a just society is possible under capitalism or without reparations that acknowledge and reverse the ‘windfall bestowed on sections of the white community by “past” racist policies and practices.”‘ —Deanna Isaacs, October 25 What Debt Do You Owe? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This sent in response to Paul Street’s race reparations analogy, where one poker player starts playing by the rules after 300 years of cheating but keeps his ill-wrought chips [“The Racist Problem” by Deanna Isaacs, October 25]....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Highland Park has long grumbled that its resident treasure, the Ravinia Festival, has a downside that costs the city money for things like road and parking lot maintenance–complaints that the Festival seemed to meet with a deaf ear. But when city officials recently threatened to resort to an amusement tax on Ravinia tickets, the message came through loud and clear....