Rolling Stone December 15, 2016

MUSIC THE BEST OF 2016 Our year-end coverage doesn’t stop! Check out expanded lists of 2016’s top albums and singles, plus deep dives into the year’s most memorable releases in rap, country, pop and metal – including Metallica, Miranda Lambert, Beyoncé and more. POLITICS STORMING THE WHITE HOUSE We speak with alt-right compatriots, including mouthpiece Richard Spencer, about Trump strategist Steve Bannon and being represented in the new White House. CULTURE TACKLING RACE ONSCREEN Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ ambitious movie about a young African-American male’s coming-of-age, is just one of the cultural highlights that addressed race this year. MOVIES NOT JUST ANOTHER BIOPIC With his lens trained on 20th-century icons like Pablo Neruda and Jackie Kennedy, director Pablo Larraín is reinventing the biopic for a new generation. THE STONES GOT THE BLUES Mick Jagger and Keith Richards talk with Rolling Stone Music Now host…

Bruno Is Back story [“Life on Planet Mars,” RS 1274]. It’s so refreshing to read that a superstar who appears so confident onstage is also an anxious perfectionist. It shows Mars’ commitment to making records and not just hit singles. Ray McDonald, via the Internet very talented guy. I particularly liked the lesson from Lionel Richie: Enjoy the perks of being on top. Never get lazy. Brian Olson, via the Internet take aways was discovering that Mars, winner of four Grammys, still plays weddings and birthdays. I never understood why so many stars think they’re too good for that – why turn down free money? Scott Boyle, via the Internet performer, singer and dance man since James Brown. Bryan Burchfield, Fultondale, AL What’s Hot 2016 to the Hot Issue [“The 2016 Hot List,” RS 1274]. I’d never heard of LVL…

1. Childish Gambino “Redbone” Has anyone ever done the actor-to-rapper thing as well as Community/Atlanta star Donald Glover? This single from his third LP exudes geeky warmth, as he splays helium-soul love all over a rubbery P-Funk groove. But when he sings, “You better believe in something,” it’s clear there’s more going on here than just looped-out fun. 2. The Magnetic Fields “’93 Me and Fred and Dave and Ted” Stephin Merritt is releasing an album of 50 songs, one for every year of his life – including this sweet ode to New York in ’93, complete with squalor, sex and gunplay. 3. Saba “Westside Bound 3” An elegiac image of Chicago from rapper Saba. Poignant details (like leaving for college as your friends go to jail) drive the song home. 4. Sylvan Esso “Kick Jump Twist” Amelia Meath, the singer…

1. Beyoncé Lemonade Beyoncé shut everyone else down this year with a soul-on-fire masterpiece, testifying about love, rage and betrayal that felt all too true in the America of 2016. The queen delivered a confessional, genre-devouring suite that’s larger than life yet still heartbreakingly intimate, because it doubles as her portrait of a nation in flames. She dropped Lemonade as a Saturday-night surprise after her HBO special, moving in on every strain of American music from country (“Daddy Lessons”) to blues metal (“Don’t Hurt Yourself”) to post-punk-gone-Vegas dancehall (“Hold Up”) to feminist hip-hop windshield-smashing (“Sorry”). Even with “All Night” as an ambiguous resolution, it’s a whole album of hurt, which is why it especially hit home after the election. Beyoncé explores what it’s like to get sold out by a lover –…

1. Beyoncé Formation Beyoncé dropped this battle cry at the Super Bowl, shocking the nation with her Black Panther-inspired imagery. “Formation” was the omnipresent hit that just seemed to get more massive and demanding with time. Even before the rest of Lemonade existed, it stood as Bey’s most lyrically defiant and musically militant statement about who she is, where she’s from and where she’s going, declaring, “My daddy Alabama/My ma Louisiana/You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” That Mike Will Made It synth hook is the hot sauce in her bag, an ominous warning siren. From an artist who’s already spent so long at the center of American culture, it was a statement of blackness and feminism, and a party invitation nobody could resist. “Formation” is a song…

1. Pink Floyd The Early Years 1965-1972 Here is the ultimate saucerful of secrets: the definitive alternate history of this band’s odyssey from madcap psychedelia to megastardom in more than two dozen hours of rare audio and video, including film scores and unique collaborations. Early TV clips chart Syd Barrett’s shocking psychic descent; the next five years with David Gilmour show the Floyd pressing through inner space, soon to land on The Dark Side of the Moon. A two-CD set collects 27 highlights. 2. Bob Dylan The 1966 Live Recordings The set lists were the same every night. But it was always a different shootout as Dylan took his transformations in singing, writing and electricity on the road – driving audiences to fury and ecstasy, reveling in the amplified power of the future Band. There…