Rolling Stone December 2021

WHEN TRAVIS SCOTT was a kid in Houston, his favorite place on Earth was the local Six Flags amusement park, known as Astroworld. It shut down when he was 13, but he named his 2018 album after it, and created the Astroworld Festival at Houston’s NRG Park, its former site, aiming to re-create some version of his childhood dream. At the third edition of the festival, on Nov. 5, 2021, during Scott’s headlining set, in front of a giant sculpture of the artist’s own face, Astroworld turned into a waking nightmare. At press time, nine people were dead after a crowd crush; at least 25 more concertgoers were seriously injured, including a gravely hurt nine-year-old boy, Ezra Blount, who had been watching the show from on top of his father’s shoulders.…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS ‘OH, MY GOD, I’m so sorry,” says Lindsey Jordan, 22, as she emerges from the leafy steps of Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, half an hour late, and approaches the Cloisters. “I was coming back from therapy, and I was like, ‘Either I’m going to pee at my apartment or, potentially, my pants.’ ” Jordan, who performs as Snail Mail, takes good care of the deep-indigo jeans she’s wearing — later, she’ll stop to trickle water on her knee after spilling some coffee. Clutching a black backpack and wearing a lavender sweater with white-and-brown Celine loafers, she looks like an impossibly fashionable middle schooler on a field trip. Even her lace face mask, which she got from her mother’s bra store in Maryland, wins compliments from the…

EARLY IN 1999, Radiohead began to size up the task of what to do next after 1997’s acclaimed OK Computer. “We were deeply suspicious of any level of success that we’d earned,” Thom Yorke says now. “Trying to get away from wherever the fuck we had found ourselves to somewhere new.” Over the next two years, with 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac, the band leapt forward into a new universe beyond rock’s horizon — accompanied by a rich world of eerie, dreamlike imagery created by Yorke and visual artist Stanley Donwood. Now, they are looking back with a pair of art books, Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land!, and a deluxe reissue of the two albums. “At the end of it, the music and the artwork ended…

ALBUM 1. ‘Drones,’ by Terrace Martin This frequent Kendrick Lamar collaborator’s new album fuses R&B, funk, and hip-hop into a sound that’s as warm and welcoming as a 70-degree afternoon. DOCUMENTARY 2. ‘Ricky Powell: The Individualist’ Filmed before the photographer’s death earlier this year, this doc uses his extensive catalog, clips from his public-access show, and interviews with everyone from the Beastie Boys and Laurence Fishburne to Powell himself to tell the story of his life — and the epic 1980s Manhattan scene he captured. TOUR 3. Buffalo Nichols On the road in the South and Midwest this month, this bluesman updates the genre for the Black Lives Matter era, making it feel as soulful and urgent as it was 100 years ago. POETRY COLLECTION 4. ‘Call Us What We Carry’ Amanda Gorman’s first book was rushed to press after she…

THE IMAGE of outdoorsiness may be overwhelmingly white, but Alexis Nelson — a.k.a. @blackforager on Instagram and Twitter, and @AlexisNikole on TikTok — wants people to know that exploring the wild is very much Black. “Foraging almost feels like tapping back into a practice we forgot about for a couple of generations,” says Nelson, 29. Although she grew up watching her father cook and her mother garden, Nelson found foraging in 2015, when she was scraping by in Columbus, Ohio. “I was sick of ramen and Boca burgers,” she says. “Some neighbors had started doing urban foraging, and it lit up a lightbulb for me.” Nelson hit the outdoors, grabbing dock leaves to sprinkle into her noodles for a lemony taste, and field garlic greens to spice up her vegan burgers.…

YOU’D HARDLY ever guess that Latto — a rapper as glamorous as she is braggadocious — was born with a name as understated as Alyssa Stephens. She has spent this year recording a new album, riding the high of her Mariah Carey-sampling single “Big Energy,” and enjoying popularity on TikTok. One key to her success: her choice to shorten her stage name from “Mulatto” in early 2021. “At first I wasn’t open to changing it. I was like, ‘If y’all don’t understand it, then that’s on y’all,’ ” she says on a recent Zoom call, adorned in micro cornrows and ultralong French tips. “But I’m maturing as a person.” 10-SECOND BIO HOME BASE Atlanta TIKTOK QUOTABLE “When I be doing these interviews, they always ask me, what’s my hobbies outside of rap? Shittin’…