Inhoudsopgave van December 2018 - Rolling Stone

“I’m not one of those people who say, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few, too few to mention.’ I’m riddled with regrets.”—NICK LOWE WHEN I CAME TO work at ROLLING STONE, grunge and alt-rock had given way to synthetic teen pop and the splintering sounds of electronic dance music, and the magazine was struggling to find focus in its coverage of music. One of the questions I was asked during my job interview was “How can ROLLING STONE cover classic-rock artists” — legends like Dylan and Springsteen who were still vital (and still are, two decades later) — “while also following emerging artists and genres, without seeming schizophrenic?” The answer was obvious: Covering rock & roll legends as well as the new artists defining the current moment is not schizophrenic…

ON JUNE 1ST last year, the 1975 played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. It was a huge moment for the English pop provocateurs, who had recently broken through in the U.S. with their second full-length LP, 2016’s chart-topping I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It. “There’s a picture of Michael Jackson playing the Garden right before you go on,” says singer-guitarist Matty Healy, 29. “I remember staring at that, thinking, ‘This is fucking crazy.’” Truthfully, though, Healy doesn’t remember all that much about that night. “It was a strange time,” he adds. “I mean, I was still doing quite a lot of drugs.” Healy founded the 1975 in the early 2000s with drummer George Daniel, bassist Ross MacDonald…

The voice behind the Phil Spector classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is taking her annual holiday show on a U.S. tour in December. “HARK! THE HERALD ANGELS SING” This is a big choir song we used to do in my father’s church. It’s about spreading the news about Christ being born. “JOY TO THE WORLD” At Christmas you get your joy out of singing this. When all the voices from the choir come in, it becomes a jubilee. “O LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM” This is one of my favorite songs, since it’s all about our Christian beliefs and where Christ was born. “CHRISTMAS (BABY PLEASE COME HOME)” I never thought I’d have a song that everyone would sing at Christmas. People tell me that Christmas isn’t Christmas until…

AIN’T IT HARD keeping it so hardcore? Lady Gaga is riding one of the weirdest career resurrections ever witnessed. Not so long ago, she looked totally over, coated in glittery loser dust. But look at her now — she’s America’s cowgirl sweetheart, an Oscar contender, riding the blockbuster success of “Shallow” as A Star Is Born fever just keeps raging. It’s more than a comeback — it’s a shocker twist that changes everything about the Gaga story. Even a longtime fan like me didn’t see this coming. Back when she first blew up, Stefani Germanotta was fond of saying things like, “God put me on Earth for three reasons: to make loud music, gay videos, and cause a damn ruckus.” Her music and videos might have changed, but she…

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‘I’M JUST TRYING TO FIND a balance, man,” says Mahershala Ali, actor, husband, father and star of the new movie Green Book, as he strolls through the parking lot of the Griffith Observatory, high in the hills above L.A. “Trying to be responsible with my choices, do meaningful work. Handling the influx of work opportunities, and how demanding that is to do well. Then the family thing — fighting to make sure their needs are met, your wife and your child. And then make sure I have time for myself! Because I’ve always been a bit of a loner. But my hypothesis is, if it’s all in proper alignment, you do it all better. I think there’s this magical space where it all feeds each other, until everything is…

Alessia Cara The Pains of Growing DEF JAM ALESSIA CARA cleared her throat in 2015 with “Here,” an instant teen-angst classic about hating all the cool kids at the party. “I don’t daaance, don’t aaaask,” she sneered, over a slow-mo horror-show funk loop from a vintage Isaac Hayes record. (Just to add to the vibe, the “Here” sample was a staple for trip-hop cranks like Portishead and Tricky before Cara was born.) “Here” was the surprise smash that set the Toronto teen on the fast track to a Grammy for Best New Artist. On her excellent second album, The Pains of Growing, Cara really comes of age as a major voice of young-adult disenchantment. As she asks in “Easier Said,” “So what if you’re a bit bitter before you…

Bob Dylan More Blood, More Tracks COLUMBIA RELEASED ON January 20th, 1975, Blood on the Tracks was many records — in conception, execution and rapid change of mind — on its way to canonization: Bob Dylan’s greatest album of the Seventies and, as much as the singer has denied it since, the most emotionally direct body of songs he has ever committed to a single LP. It was an album born amid a crisis of family, largely composed in retreat — on Dylan’s farm in Minnesota — and initially recorded in New York as his then-nine-year marriage to the former Sara Lowndes broke down. All but five of the 87 tracks on the six-CD super-forensic edition of More Blood, More Tracks comprise the entirety of Dylan’s sessions in mid-September…

1. Atlanta FX Donald Glover’s hip-hop comedy was so strange and surprising in its first season that a sophomore slump seemed inevitable. Instead, Year Two was even better than the first, weaving a subtle narrative thread about trouble in Paper Boi and Earn’s partnership around each episode’s formal experimentation. One week, Atlanta could be a riotous illustration of the difficulties a black man will endure to hang on to a good barber. The next — as in 2018’s single best episode, “Teddy Perkins” — it was a surreal, horrific meditation on the intersection of abuse, genius and racial self-loathing among some of the 20th century’s greatest black musical stars. Atlanta can be whatever it wants to be: the funniest, scariest and/or most thoughtful show on TV. 2. The Americans…

1. Roma What makes a movie the best of the year? See Roma, a poetic, profound and resplendently beautiful masterpiece that director Alfonso Cuarón carved from his memories of growing up in the Roma suburb of Mexico City in the 1970s. The filmmaker contrasts the drama of his divorcing parents with the era’s politics, including a student revolt that ended in violence. Then there’s Cleo (the unforgettable Yalitza Aparicio), a housekeeper who quietly holds the family together while her own life crumbles. It may be true that Cuarón, an artist at the height of his powers, will face resistance in the awards race. He’s made a black-and-white indie in Spanish that most people will see on Netflix, the streaming service that released this masterwork in a few theaters to…

What were your favorite books as a child? An early favorite was Pinocchio — not the Disney version, Collodi’s Pinocchio. And I still have my battered copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses and Uncle Wiggily. And Little Women! What do you think it is about Little Women and Jo March that every generation seems to fall in love with? Well, for me, I saw myself in her; she was sort of an awkward tomboy who climbed trees and read books and wrote. I grew up in the Fifties, and gender was very defined. I felt very estranged from the expectations of my gender, and then I met Jo and she was much like me. It was an epiphany. She was responsible and she was loving toward her family,…

“Zoë is a treasure for this generation. Mad respect to Lisa and Lenny for raising her to be such a very smart, beautiful and sweet lady.”—Erica Wynn, via the Internet Zoë Kravitz Strips Down In 1988, Lisa Bonet got naked inside the pages of ROLLING STONE’s annual Hot Issue. Now, 30 years later, her daughter, Zoë Kravitz, followed in her footsteps, paying homage to her mother’s original photograph by posing for our November cover [“Zoë Kravitz: American Woman,” RS 1321]. When Kravitz posted the cover image for her nearly 4 million Instagram followers, with the caption “Life imitates art,” her pals flooded the comments with praise and countless fire emojis. Supermodels Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford wrote “Amazing” and “Smokin!” and Bella Hadid added, “I need this framed.” DJ…

Before the summer-2016 release of Telefone, her debut album, Noname considered quitting rap. “Maybe I would’ve got my nursing degree,” she says. “That was the only other thing that I enjoyed doing.” Instead, the album — a snapshot of life in Chicago, joyful and tragic in equal measure — won rave reviews and kept her on the road for two years. “I was making a lot — thousands of dollars that I had never seen,” she says. “I had a savings account. I had sex for the first time in my life.” Her follow-up album, Room 25, revels in those new experiences. Recorded in Los Angeles, where she now lives, the LP doubles down on everything that makes Noname unique, with even more complex rhyme patterns and frank lyrics…

Dave Grohl Brings the Noise Yeah Yeah Yeahs welcomed a special guest when they played a show for progressive electoral volunteers in L.A.: Dave Grohl on the drums! He kicked their 2009 hit “Heads Will Roll” into high gear — and backed Beck on “Where It’s At” later that night. Other performers included Rufus and Martha Wainwright and actor Adam Scott. RANDOM QUOTE “Every now and then I turn the stove on & make myself a salami sandwich. I think it’s best if u all knew that.”—Bruno Mars, educating 42 million Twitter followers…

AMES READER TRIED to do everything right. No fake news, no sloppiness, no spam. The 54-year-old teamster and San Diego resident with a progressive bent had a history of activism, but itched to get more involved. So a few years ago he tinkered with a blog called the Everlasting GOP Stoppers, and it did well enough to persuade some friends and investors to take a bigger step. ¶ “We got together and became Reverb Press,” he recalls. “I didn’t start it for the money. I did it because I care about my country.” ¶ In 2014, he launched Reverb, a site that shared news from a pro-Democratic stance but also, Reader says, took great care to be correct and factual. The independent watchdog site mediabiasfactcheck.com would declare it strongly…

ELVIS COSTELLO is feeling just fine, thank you very much. Reports of a “battle with cancer” were wildly exaggerated, he says — earlier this year, doctors found an isolated malignancy that they removed without complications. He got the news three-quarters of the way into the recording of Look Now, his first album in five years, and, if anything, he just threw himself harder into the process. The album turned out to be his best-received work of this century, combining immaculate, expansively arranged pop compositions (Burt Bacharach and Carole King were collaborators) with the elegant savagery of his band, the Imposters — which is, of course, his original crew, the Attractions, with a new bass player, Davey Faragher. “This is a different group than the group I started out with,”…

IF YOU COULD design the ideal character to assure the continuing domination of Big Coal and Big Oil in America and to reaffirm their faith in their God-given right to cook the climate in pursuit of profit, that character would look a lot like acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. And the odd thing is, if you met “Andy,” as his many friends call him, at one of his popular Halloween parties at his brick house in suburban Alexandria, Virginia, you would probably think he was a great guy. He’s 53, gray hair, glasses, a stout Midwesterner with a warm and friendly manner. He is unfailingly civil to everyone, no matter if you are right, left, enviro or Oklahoma wildcatter. He is likely to ply you with homemade Cincinnati chili…