Tabla de contenidos para July/August 2023 en Rolling Stone

INSIDE THE COVER Bad Bunny: Back to the Future Julyssa Lopez Senior Music Editor The first time Bad Bunny appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone was back in June 2020, featuring an image where he was wearing a mask in his home of Puerto Rico at the height of the pandemic. Three years later, the global superstar — a.k.a. Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is back on our cover for the Future of Music issue (p. 32). Senior music editor Julyssa Lopez was present for many of the artist’s significant moments this year: when he headlined Coachella, tried on his Jacquemus Met Gala outfit, and shot the video to his first-ever English-titled song. “This cover is a portrait of where this new level of mainstream recognition has taken…

WHETHER WE like it or not, comedian Ayo Edebiri and I are both about to learn a lesson. For Edebiri, a California resident who’s in New York for a few whirlwind days of press, she’s about to find out that our interview is taking place at a Brooklyn pottery studio — not, as she assumed, a restaurant. My lesson is that the breakthrough actress of at least three movies this summer, one highly anticipated second season of prestige TV, and the subject of this interview very much does not want to be here. To be clear, Edebiri is approachable and disarming and kind in a way that even copious amounts of media training couldn’t instill in a budding star. She ambles into the room with a cautious but gentle…

FOR THIS YEAR’S EDITION of the Future of Music issue, Rolling Stone dove deeper than ever into the artists, trends, and tech shaping the music of tomorrow — from artificial intelligence redefining how songs get made to a multi billiondollar orb in Las Vegas that could change the way we see concerts. We also introduce you to the next generation of superstars with our Future 25 list (see p. 66), curated with this issue’s cover star, Bad Bunny. The survey stretches from an Afrobeats sensation to a hiphop collective from Seoul to a rising música Mexicana star — a vision of what’s to come that’s pretty exciting, if you ask us.…

WHEN SHE wakes up in the recovery room, Maurice hears nothing. It’s not like hiking in the redwoods, where the lack of city sounds creates an illusion of silence. This is a complete audio void. Still groggy from the drugs, she closes her eyes and dreams of the tiny control room at work, its walls padded with sound-absorbing panels of nippled foam. Maurice made plans to get this surgery while she was fucking around at work. It was a few weeks before Aquatic Revenge played their legendary 2070 New Year’s gig, and everybody was freaking out because a new song had just dropped. Big parts of it were sampled from blue whale songs, which hover around a frequency of 35 Hz — much lower than human hearing. Maurice hopped…

The big news in Hollywood is the writers strike. How do you feel about it? Writers deserve to be paid — and deserve to be paid fairly. Let’s see if they can get some equity. The SAG strike is looming as well. Tom Hanks recently discussed his fears about AI, and how the studios may produce work featuring someone after they’ve passed. People just started worrying about that? I asked about that a long time ago. Ever since I did Captain Marvel and they de-aged me, it’s like, “Well, I guess they can do this anytime they want to do it if they really want to!” When I get a contract and it has the words “in perpetuity” and “known and unknown” on it, I cross that shit out.…

WHEN LIL WAYNE hops on Zoom one recent afternoon, he’s on a tour bus in California between stops on his Welcome to Tha Carter Tour, where he’s been performing at more-intimate venues to better engage his fans this spring. Even with his Grammy Awards, platinum plaques, and a claim to rap GOAT status, he says that he has “so far” to go until he’s satisfied. “The true artists and pioneers, they never retire,” Wayne, 40, tells me, noting that he has no plans to stop rhyming. He’s been locked in the studio nearly every day for almost three decades now, building a catalog of songs so expansive that he can’t even try to estimate the size of it. He recently finalized ColleGrove 2, a sequel to his 2016 collaboration…

FOR BENOIT CARRÉ, the future revealed itself in six notes. In 2015, Carré, a cerebral, bespectacled songwriter then in his mid-forties, became the artist-in-residence at Sony’s Paris-based Computer Science Laboratory, headed by his friend Francois Paçhet, a composer and leading artificial-intelligence researcher. Paçhet was developing some of the world’s most advanced AI-music composition tools, and wanted to put them to use. The duo’s first released project was the mostly AI-composed Beatles pastiche “Daddy’s Car,” which ended up making worldwide headlines in 2016 as a technological milestone. But Carré was looking for something deeper, something new. “I’ve always been interested in music with unexpected chord changes, unexpected melodies,” Carré says. “I’ve always searched for that kind of surprise in my work, too. And that means that I need to lose…

The fiercely independent Memphis MC is the hottest star in Southern rap — and after her breakthrough year, she’s just warming up WHEN GLORILLA ARRIVES at a Hollywood bowling alley, she’s clearly off the clock, cozy and happy to be among familiar faces. No cameras, no fans — just her team, the two friends she came with, and a handful of security to ensure it stays that way. She’s relieved, at least in this moment, that no one is coming over to speak to her. In two days, it will be exactly one year since the release of her breakout single, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go),” a spirited anthem for being newly s-i-n-g-l-e that divided her life into before “F.N.F.” and after. It’s the song that kick-started her career, the one…

WHEN GRETA GERWIG was in preproduction on her Barbie movie (out July 21), executives from the brand’s owner, Mattel, paid her an inevitable visit. She gave them a preview of the movie’s look (very, very pink) and feel (Elf-y magical-realism ramped up a thousandfold). Then she hit them with a monologue: stuff like the influence of spiritualist painters, how Barbie is like an ancient religious myth, references to The Red Shoes and “Stairway to Heaven” and Heaven Can Wait. “I think at that point, when I was in hour three of talking,” Gerwig recalls with a small laugh, “they all realized no one has thought more about this. They saw I wake up every morning and panic about proportions and color saturation. And they were like, ‘We don’t have…

ONE DAY in London’s Kensington district in 1983, Tina Turner’s resurrection finally appeared within reach. The prior decade had been one of stage-shaking triumphs, personal nightmares, various degrees of mortification, and now, a chance at possible redemption. But as musician and producer Martyn Ware soon learned, Turner’s past was never in the rearview mirror — and on that day, it was terrifyingly in her face. The previous year, Turner had sung on an edgy, pulsating remake of the Temptations hit “Ball of Confusion,” and now Ware — who had co-helmed that track, had co-founded the Human League, and was a member of Heaven 17 — was meeting with her to map out another collaboration. Arriving at what he recalls as “a beautiful kind of mansion” where Turner was staying,…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS RENEÉ RAPP hasn’t been sleeping well. The past six months have been a bit of a sleep-deprived haze for the singer and actress, full of weird or straight-up horrific dreams. Most of the time, she’s being booed off a stage. Once, she dreamed about murdering a person she had just started dating. The night before we talk, she had one so bad she doesn’t want to repeat it. “It was a really not-great thing to dream about,” she says. Her subconscious isn’t the only thing that’s been keeping her up in recent months. Last year, with her career already gaining speed thanks to her starring role in Mindy Kaling’s hit Max comedy, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Rapp released her first EP…

Grady Kurpasi and Andy Hill dove to the ground as the forest around them exploded. There was a rapid pop, pop, pop as rifle fire pounded the dirt and trees and Russian infantry edged closer and closer. Kurpasi, a 49-year-old American former Marine sniper who volunteered to fight with the Ukrainian International Legion, and Hill, a 35-year-old British volunteer, desperately returned fire. Kurpasi called for help on a hand-held radio. But Kurpasi and Hill were on their own. The two men crawled on their stomachs trying to make it back to their team roughly 600 meters away. Suddenly, another burst of fire. Hill saw Kurpasi get hit. A split second later, a bullet shattered Hill’s left arm. Before Hill could react, a Russian soldier jammed a gun barrel to…

“WHO’S SWAGG MAN??” the 36-year-old rapper currently wanted by the law poses the question to himself in a text to me. “I was born an artist … Swagg Man is a fictif [fictional] guy. Same like all artist[s].” I’ve been trying to talk to Swagg Man for weeks. He says we will meet in Paris; then he says Miami, where he can show me his car collection. Finally, unable to get him to fix a time and place, we speak for two hours via Zoom. He claims that this is his first time speaking to the press in six years, though even that is questionable. Facing me in sunglasses and a backward black baseball cap, he’s a charismatic figure. In his music videos, he comes across as handsome and…

IT HAS TAKEN Kim Petras 15 years to get a debut album out. In the interim, the German singer-songwriter’s steady rise has made her one to watch among pop artists: Her “Era 1” singles, released from 2017 to 2019, were a cool homage to fizzy 2000s bubblegum, and her pair of Halloween-themed mixtapes were edgy, spooky fun. Earlier this year, Petras became the first trans artist to have a Number One hit, with her Sam Smith collaboration “Unholy.” But the journey to Feed the Beast hasn’t been all Champagne and glitter. Her continued work with Dr. Luke has been troublesome to many music fans, due to accusations of sexual assault and abuse that have kept the producer locked in an ongoing legal battle with Kesha. Then, after signing to…