The saddest gift I ever received was an LP, a vinyl copy of Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska.” I didn’t understand just how sad this was until I listened to it. I was 11 years old, which is way too young to own a copy of “Nebraska.” I have no idea why my mother saw that album cover — bone stark, black-and-white, influenced by Robert Frank, a car’s dashboard at the bottom, the rest empty Midwest expanse and impending storm clouds — and thought to herself “gift,” but I assume she spotted the large red lettering spelling ”BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN” and figured it contained a “Hungry Heart” or a “Born to Run.”
As we welcome a new fall arts and culture season, I’m telling you this up front because 43 years after “Nebraska” was released — I received it as a Christmas gift a few months later — we’re expecting a new movie about the making of that record, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” (Oct. 24). It stars Jeremy Allen White of “The Bear.” I’m telling you this because, hopefully, maybe — you never know with these rock biopics — it’ll reverberate with the state of the world circa 2025, the way the album did in 1982.
I’m telling you this because someday, someone will look back on 2025 and pick through the mountain of symphonies and movies and novels and museum exhibits that were being offered this fall and will deduce this was what America and Chicago were thinking in 2025. But what they will really be seeing are works that were planned many months and often years ahead of autumn 2025. My point being, never mind future historians, if we’re lucky right now, the new fall arts season will resonate with the times.
Sometimes social relevance is clear, sometimes it’s shrouded by the fog of its moment.
And sometimes the relevance of a creative work acts like a time-release capsule.
“Nebraska” is a good example, because in 1982, arguably the most popular works of culture were “Thriller,” “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” and the “Jane Fonda’s Workout” video. Nostalgic, elaborate, ornate, hopeful. That’s one version of Ronald Reagan’s America.
But “Nebraska,” then and now, never fit easily into popular versions of the ‘80s. It was unexpected and remained a curiosity for years, a spooky outlier. It still is. Springsteen made it in a rented bedroom with one microphone, a guitar and an off-the-shelf tape deck. The songs are bleak, offering no catharsis or reassurance. At the peak of spotless ‘80s productions, no producer was listed on the album at all. Here was a work, released for the 1982 fall art season, about another America. As Warren Zanes, author of “Deliver Me From Nowhere,” writes in his 2023 history on which the movie is based: “Viewed in hindsight, the weather captured on ‘Nebraska’s cover was closer to the truth of the forecast.”
Just scan the lists of titles and performers we’re going to be seeing in the next few months. It should give you an idea of what people are thinking about this fall.
In theory.
It’s hard to imagine a Riot Fest (Sept. 19-21) featuring Green Day and Dropkick Murphys and a new take on the Sex Pistols all leaving politics on the tour bus. (So many Gen Xers!)
Conversely, it’s almost as hard to imagine social justice rallies breaking out at K-pop’s Tomorrow X Together (Allstate Arena, Sept. 21-22) or Tate McRae’s encore United Center performance (Oct. 21). You could even think of the extended stays of many established favorites — Lady Gaga (United Center, Sept. 15-18), Paul McCartney (United Center, Nov. 24-25), Erykah Badu (Chicago Theatre, Dec. 2-3), David Byrne (Auditorium Theatre, Oct. 28 to Nov. 1) — as lengthy cuddles against the elements. But it’s less likely to expect as much comfort from politically-inspired Nigerian superstar Burna Boy (United Center, Dec. 1), or from sold-out stands at Thalia Hall by the rising rock act Geese (Oct. 15-16) and protest singer Jesse Welles (Oct. 23-24).
Depending on how you read it, the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Medea” (Oct. 11-26) will be a stand against the patriarchy, or a paranoid meditation on the limits of vengeance — anything as transcendent as, say, Euripides will speak to its times in endless keys. But it’s pretty easy to see organizer Mike Reed’s new adventurous, avant garde-minded music festival, Sound & Gravity (Sept. 10-14), as a push on a music scene that could use variety. Even less open to interpretation: The publishing industry is going all in on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the meaning of American institutions this fall. Same goes for the horror genre: Look for Chicago author Nick Medina’s unsettling “The Whistler” (Sept. 16) and local librarian Becky Siegel Spratford’s “Why I Love Horror” (Sept. 23), with essays by many of the popular genre’s contemporary favorites.
The Chicago Theatre has some 50th anniversaries: Patti Smith plays her landmark 1975 album “Horses” in its entirety (Nov. 17-18), and Penn & Teller’s 50th anniversary show arrives on Oct. 24. But also, considering how rarely the original movie ever went away, a “Rocky Horror Picture Show 50th Anniversary Spectacular Tour” (Oct. 19) might have seemed a more humdrum affair if trans rights were not so pressing in 2025.
Intention and resonance are not always first cousins.
Silence itself can sound unintentionally political.
At Lollapalooza last month it was deafening how quiet most of the 170 or so performers were on stage, considering what’s happening in the city and country they were playing.
No matter the intention, art, to paraphrase Ezra Pound, is news that stays news.
The Art Institute of Chicago, for instance, based on the titles of its fall exhibits alone, appears to burst with topicality. There’s “Strange Realities” (opening Oct. 4), but it’s about Symbolist artists; “We Were Lost in Our Country,” but it’s a video installation by the Vietnamese-American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, on the Ngurrara people of Western Australia. “On Loss and Absence” is a gathering of 100-plus textiles exploring the various ways cultures address grief. Only its biggest show, “Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies,’” addresses politics head-on — linocut posters of Central American repression, images of activist Angela Davis. Even in this case, the exhibit’s title is not a recent quote but how the sculptor and printmaker once referred to herself in 1970 at a Northwestern University conference on Black art.
“We are as much a part of our times as artists, 30, 40, 50 or more years ago, were part of their times,” said Sarah Kelly Oehler, the museum’s curator of Arts of the Americas and vice president of curatorial strategy. Predicting relevance is part of her job. What helps, in a perverse way, she said, “is that the United States has and hasn’t changed.”
Indeed, “Elizabeth Catlett: ‘A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies’” was four years in the making. Oehler had no idea what the country’s mood would be in fall 2025. Meanwhile at the Chicago History Museum, there is “Aqui en Chicago,” opening Oct. 25, a sprawling look at the reach and persistence of Latino communities established in both Chicago and its suburbs. That exhibit became a museum priority six years ago.
In fact, it was put together because of concerns about a lack of relevance.
In 2019, a class from Instituto Justice and Leadership Academy in Pilsen were touring the Lincoln Park museum and became struck by how little Latino culture in Chicago was represented, a community that’s nearly a third of the city’s population. Elena Gonzales, the museum’s curator of civic engagement and social justice — a title created for her in 2022 — said the class was walking through “Chicago: Crossroads of America,” the museum’s centerpiece, a 14,000-square foot, nearly 20-year old exhibit, and realized Marshall Fields was receiving more attention than the entire Mexican American population.
They began a campaign to change things: Students wrote letters to the museum, contacted civic leaders and media organizations, swamped social media with outrage. Six years later, Gonzales said the timing of the fall exhibit is not really coincidental — vitriol against the Latino community is far from unique to any recent election cycles — “but I should say, it does arrive now, years later, at a time when my actual job is being made illegal and everything I do and believe is being made illegal, but if we are going to do this show in this moment, while we have a president so hateful to a third of this city, I’m glad if this is what this museum makes resonate and brings to the table right now.”
The movies have never been especially nimble this way.
The difficulty of steering a gold-plated cruise ship of an industry in resonant directions is even part of the history. The New Hollywood of the ‘70s, as lore goes, wouldn’t have been possible if the Hollywood machinery of the ‘60s hadn’t been so locked onto irrelevant bloat like “Doctor Dolittle” and “Cleopatra.” What’s curious about this fall is how the generally more immediate medium of TV now appears less flexible. The networks, faced with TikTok, streaming networks and an aging audience, are doubling down: There are spin-offs of “9-1-1: Nashville,” more slices of “NCSI.” Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, the Goofus and Gallant of late night, will also stay on brand: Expect months of political fireworks as Colbert prepares for the cancellation next year of “The Late Show,” meanwhile Fallon is premiering a new reality series, “On Brand with Jimmy Fallon” (Sept. 30). Only “The Paper,” itself a spin-off of “The Office,” set at a newspaper in decline, feels like traditional TV attempting to speak to the world, and it’s streaming on Peacock.
Of course, to some extent, I’m cherrypicking my examples here. Over on the streaming services, Apple TV+ will have both “The Lost Bus,” a film with Matthew McConaughey (Oct. 3) set during the 2018 Camp Fire in California; and “The Savant” (Sept. 26), starring Jessica Chastain as an online investigator on the trail of domestic terrorists.
But the movies, both broadly commercial and art house alike, are popping with resonance. If “Train Dreams” (Nov. 7, Netflix Nov. 21) is anything like its elegant source, the 2011 Denis Johnson novella, expect a teary take on who gets left behind when technology changes. Expect “Wicked: For Good” (Nov. 21) to expand on the theme of how the powerful like to punch down on the vulnerable. Even two kind of cheap-looking Stephen King adaptations, “The Running Man” (Nov. 7) and “The Long Walk” (Sept. 12), offer two sides of the same coin: A fascist American society.
The first film that Brian Andreotti, director of programming at the Music Box Theatre, used to anchor the fall line-up was Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” (Sept. 26), starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a former street activist looking for his daughter among revolutionary groups. “What’s unique about fall is that it’s the start of awards season,” he said, “and since we’re an art house, a lot of films are in contention. The art house is probably more attuned to the world. We want to stay in the zeitgeist and reflect what people are talking about, because we have to. But we also have limited screens to do it. A theater company might know what it wants to produce a year or so out, but what we’re working on takes years to be made, then sometimes years to acquired for distribution — and so there’s just so many variables in motion even if you want to stay in the moment.”
Another variable: Audiences often want to escape politics.
I definitely do. And I also know to expect that resonance doesn’t care what I want. Don’t go to this year’s Chicago Architectural Biennial (starting Sept. 19) — which adopted the theme “Architecture in times of radical change” — expecting to rest easy. Anyone who buys a ticket to the Goodman Theatre’s “Revolution(s)” (opening in previews Oct. 4) and doesn’t know Tom Morello, or that the Libertyville native and guitarist of Rage Against the Machine (the protest band’s band) wrote the music and lyrics, may want to read up.
But then, Broadway In Chicago, not usually a home of social relevance, has the return of “The Book of Mormon” on Oct. 14, and perhaps that acclaimed musical by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” will land differently these days — you know, because “South Park” has made its feelings about the White House pretty evident in the past few weeks. Similarly, expect the Smart Museum’s big Theaster Gates exhibition (Sept. 23), his first solo show in his hometown, to be a potent reminder of the artist’s muse: the great potential in displaced communities of color. It should be hard to get through the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Yoko Ono retrospective (Oct. 18) without being reminded of her muse: human rights. Even downtown street events, like Sundays on State (starting Sept. 7) and Arts in the Dark (Oct. 19), may take on urgency considering the autonomy of the streets are being questioned in Washington.
The Dorothy Project, a very small publishing house in St. Louis run by former Chicagoans Martin Riker and Danielle Dutton, publishes only two books a year. Being relevant is vital. Yet, Riker said, they try not to think about “headline relevance.” Instead they look to authors who “get at it what it feels like to be alive right now,” he said. The rest usually falls into place. This season, their selections are pretty sharp, Laura Vazquez’s “The Endless Week” (Sept. 30), and “The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam” (Sept. 30) by Naperville’s Lana Lin. Neither, plot-wise, is about America now. But the language of “Endless Week” is in line with online sensibilities; “Autobiography,” a take on Gertrude Stein, is set among immigrant communities and queer characters.
“I like to think art, in a way, intended or not, carries the DNA of its times,” he said.
Still, there’s nothing worse that feeling irrelevant.
Oehler said it’s the anxiety of every curator. Luckily, even when art itself doesn’t change much, we change. We shed our politics, and find our politics. What seemed revolutionary when we were 15 may sound like a shrug when we are 45. Nobody who sees The Who on its (no, really this time) farewell tour at the United Center (Sept. 7-9) will miss the point when Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend arrive at “My Generation.”
But then that’s been true since that song was released, 60 years ago this October.
Now go see a show, read a book, watch a movie, find some culture. Just doing that alone, especially this fall, is a modest rage against the machine.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
