Indice dei contenuti per April 2024 in Rolling Stone

COVER STORY A Deep Connection With Peso Pluma Gustavo Soriano Photographer Mexican American photographer Gustavo Soriano was raised by a tattoo artist and an illustrator, and he’s been around art his whole life. He’s devoted his career to capturing inner-city youth culture in his native Los Angeles. “All my work stems from my personal life,” Soriano explains. When he shot Peso Pluma’s Future of Music cover, he felt an immediate kinship with the Mexican singer, admiring how the artist “best represents corridos in a way I haven’t seen in a long time.” In the cover image, Peso is serious as he adjusts the hood of his open jacket, his “All Eyez on Me” chest tattoo expertly illuminated. Much of his bare torso is immersed in shadows, something Soriano did…

“I’M JUST A soul trapped in this circuitry.” The voice singing those lyrics is raw and plaintive, dipping into blue notes. A lone acoustic guitar chugs behind it, punctuating the vocal phrases with tasteful runs. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a startup named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” To be maximally precise, the song is the work of two AI models in collaboration: Suno’s model creates all the music itself, while calling on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate…

You’re playing Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run for president. Do you find that with historical figures who reach mythic proportions, their accomplishments can supersede the more grounded facts about them? I think that’s true with any great figure. Whether it’s a slice-of-life or a cradle-to-grave biography, I’m not interested in dedicating two hours to watching [something] and walking away not feeling any different. King’s film ‘Shirley’ premiered on Netflix on March 22. What was most important to you with your approach to this portrayal? The emotional likeness and the interior of Shirley. Imitating becomes a caricature a lot of the time. The biggest thing that I was concerned about [was that] my portrayal or embodiment of Shirley would be seen as an imitation as opposed to…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS CARI FLETCHER knew something was wrong. After finishing a run of shows in the spring of 2023, she felt deeply run down — and it wasn’t just the usual aches and pains of life on the road. The singer, who performs as Fletcher, went to the doctor and learned she had Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that can cause debilitating fatigue and neurological complications. It can also result in inflammation and damage to the nerves in the voice box — meaning Fletcher was faced with the terrifying prospect of being left permanently unable to sing. “There were many, many, many moments over the last year where I was not sure if I was going to return to music,” Fletcher, who turned 30 on…

THE STREETS leading up to the Lab Studios, a recording complex in Miami’s lush Coconut Grove neighborhood, are full of bright, iridescent peacocks. Peso Pluma has set up a weeklong writing camp here in late January to work on his new album, which, he reveals later, is called Exodo and will be out this summer. It’s almost too fitting that a bunch of decadent birds with stately, metallic feathers are sashaying down the pavement. After all, the Mexican artist, whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, has blasted to global stardom by writing about things like heartbreak and romance — but his swaggering, streetwise songs about high-luxe, extravagant living are among his most popular. Today, he’s about to make a few more. Through the doors, the studio feels…

BY THE TIME YOU FIGURE out where a song by New York rapper and producer Xaviersobased is coming from, it’s usually already over. On 2021’s “115 & LSD,” which the 20-year-old cites as a creative breakthrough in his music, he builds up a cacophony of exotic-bird whistles, overlapping hums, overheard yells, exploding machine-gun shells, and blown-out 808s across just two minutes. Xavier’s songs often repeat halfway through at double speed; his voice tumbles through verses about twerking and trapping and blunt toking and Xbox. “On My Own,” from his recent mixtape Keep It Goin Xav, turns raw feedback into the bass below a never-quite-conclusive loop of beeps, the deep tones and danceable hi-hats forming an atmosphere as casual as it is intricate. “We found each other through this thing…

OVER THE COURSE of an acting career that began when he was a teenager fresh out of Georgia, Walton Goggins has played a crooked cop (The Shield), racist gunslingers (in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight), villains in both traditional superhero projects (Ant-Man and the Wasp) and off-kilter ones (I’m a Virgo), and even an elderly televangelist con man called Baby Billy on HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones. Now, he has a dual role in Amazon’s big-budget drama series adaptation of the video-game franchise Fallout, playing both the 200-year-old mutant killer the Ghoul, and the decent man he once was, B-movie Western star Cooper Howard. Goggins is different in most ways from these people he embodies. But he and they tend to share one crucial trait: They can…

FAYE WEBSTER IS KICKING my ass at tennis. We’re at the Altadena Town & Country Club in L.A. on a late-January afternoon, playing a very loose set amid pouring rain. One of us is really good; the other (me) has never picked up a racket in her life. But even though I’m pathetically outmatched, Webster is being really sweet about it, cheering from her side of the court whenever I manage to make contact with the heavy, soaking-wet ball (which is almost never). Our redheaded, bearded coach Nate is equally supportive, instructing us by using phrases like “strike zone” and “ready position.” They’re foreign to me, but not to my opponent, who eagerly nods along in an oversize white T-shirt and black shorts, her auburn hair tied back with…

THE BLACK KEYS STRIKE MELLOW GOLD Pals like Beck and Noel Gallagher help the garage-rock duo make one of their best LPs By JON DOLAN The Black Keys Ohio Players NONESUCH FOR THEIR 12TH ALBUM, the Black Keys have reset their clock with a project they’d first considered almost 20 years ago. In the early 2000s, when Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney were first hustling their way out of Akron, Ohio, they toured as an opener for Beck. They hit it off so well that the fledgling garage-rock duo and the alt-rock elder decided to make an album together sometime. In a sense, the excellent new Ohio Players is the long-ripening fruit of that idea. It’s the Keys’ most collaborative album, which is saying something for a band that…