Your theme this week, in honor of Earth Day/Week/Month: "Being Green." This is the song that Kermit the Frog made famous, but Ray Charles did a knockout version of it, and our favorite take on the song has to be Van Morrison's version from 1973's Hard Nose the Highway. It's so good, we insist on this song being played while our casket's being lowered to the ground. Let's dive in, shall we? Moo Moo, I... more ›

There’s a decent barroom argument to be had over whether Sam Cooke or Ray Charles can rightly be called the inventor of soul music. Both men took the structures and idioms of gospel music and adapted them to create a new, modern sound. Though it took Brother Ray a few years before he moved away from aping Charles Brown and Nat King Cole, Cooke’s voice was so distinctive that when he released his first pop song, “Loveable,” under the name Dale Cook, gospel audiences immediately recognized his familiar tenor. more ›

The Pre-Show Ah, what to say. Everyone looks so...puffy. We're watching WGN because...well, we can't find the remote honestly. 6:10 PM - Do you even have the right to complain about cheesy presenters if you're watching an Oscar pre-show? Isn't that like visting a dominatrix and complaining about the pain? Still, we have a deep burning hatred of Sam Rubin. 6:17 PM - Hilary Swank going against the grain with no cleavage display. Wearing drapes... more ›

With the Super Bowl over for another year, America’s pop culture radar is now flooded with innumerable awards shows, most of which are utterly pointless aside from their function as commercials for whatever corporate entity is presenting them. In order to avoid exhaustion, Chicagoist avoids most of them except for the Grammys and the Oscars.* Not because they’re the most entertaining or honor those most deserving but because there’s not much cultural insight to... more ›

For anyone who still hadn’t seen it, the line that can be drawn as the shortest distance between the two points of gospel and soul music was sketched quite neatly in a sequence from the film Ray. As Jamie Foxx’s Ray Charles is wooing his soon-to-be wife he steps into a version of “I Got A Woman” that’s even more tinged with the rhythm and movements of gospel than the version eventually laid down on... more ›

Several years ago, Chicagoist was reading an interview with a Big Famous Movie Critic who was asked why critics sometimes fall all over themselves to single out a particular film for near unanimous praise. BFMC replied that as critics, they are required to see almost every movie that’s released and most of them are crap. So when a film (or a filmmaker) comes along with an original, intelligent work that is also entertaining, he and... more ›

You know what's refreshing about Kanye West? His total lack of humility. Oh sure, if Chicagoist picked up ten Grammy nominations we might say something like "This is really a surprise. Especially for my debut album" or even "Thank you." But that is why we write pithy comments about events in the news and Kanye makes more money than Israel's got Jews (Happy Hanukkah to ya'll). Instead, Kanye described his nominations as "amazing," "nothing to complain about" and "like a perfect score" which indeed it would be if there were only ten noninations given instead of 107. No gospel album nomination though. Thanks for sparing us the controversy, Grammy-ers. more ›