Table of contents for June 2023 in Rolling Stone

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS KESHA WAS on the verge of a panic attack in the spring of 2020, when her aging cat Mr. Peeps brought over her headphones. She’d been spiraling a lot back then, her anxiety mounting as the pandemic shut down the music industry, but she took her cat’s gesture as a sign that it was time to meditate. And in the midst of a guided meditation she’d done many times before, something shook loose. “I had this really beautiful, scary, and intense spiritual awakening where it felt like I was talking to my highest self, or God, whatever word you want to say,” she recalls. Three years later, she’s reclining on pristine white sheets with Mr. Peeps beside her at her L.A. home, dressed…

THE EVENING OF THE FIGHT, NATHAN VALENCIA WAS NERVOUS. It was the first time that Valencia, a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas had participated in Fight Night, the annual event hosted by rival fraternity Kappa Sigma. Like other frat functions, Fight Night was for charity. But this particular event had a dangerous reputation, known for landing participants in the ER with broken noses and concussions. This hadn’t deterred Valencia, a charming and popular junior, from signing up. He’d been assigned to the card’s main event, fighting Emmanuel Aleman, a fellow student and member of Kappa Sigma. When Valencia and his girlfriend, Lacey Foster, pulled up to the Sahara Events Center — a dank-smelling roller-hockey rink just a mile off the Strip, wedged…

What does Pride Month mean to you in 2023? Pride is that step beyond acceptance where there’s some power in understanding who you are and why, and being in opposition to certain things. Culture and society afford you this clarity and this strength, and this year, especially, I feel it’s very important. What inspired you to be a comedian? I think it came out of necessity from moving around a lot growing up. The thing I leaned on was to ingratiate myself in finding the quickest way to a laugh. With that instinct baked in, it led to me watching comedies, watching SNL every week. And after a certain amount of time, you convince yourself there’s no other option for you. You grew up in a strict Asian household.…

THERE’S SOMETHING so beautifully weird about the triumphant return of the Cure. It’s a crazy moment for fans — of all the fandoms in pop history, this is one of the most bizarrely long-lived, open-ended, multigenerational, cheerfully unkillable. Robert Smith and his crew of English gloom gods are hitting the road all summer, introducing music from their long-awaited album, Songs From a Lost World, which is so long-awaited it still doesn’t exist. The summer’s biggest rock tour is the goth-moppet lover boy who sang “Boys Don’t Cry” more than 40 years ago? That’s a future nobody would have predicted for this band — not even Smith. But nobody even hates the Cure anymore, which once seemed like a crucial part of the fandom’s identity. Smith has never lost his…

THE SUN IS SHINING in the small riverside town of New Ross, Ireland. It’s Good Friday, and I’m standing outside St. Mary’s, a defunct Catholic school. Crew members scamper toward their lights and cranes. Two rows of schoolgirls are led by a nun through the yard. Incongruously, through the sunshine, a snow machine periodically emits suds that melt on your face as you pass: This is Christmas 1985 via Easter weekend 2023. There, amid a clutch of equipment and crew members in the usual on-set menagerie, stands Cillian Murphy, co-producer and star of Small Things Like These, in a cinematic return to his native Ireland. Murphy isn’t easy to spot. Your eyes don’t immediately land on him as if following an unholy halo of superstar light. That may seem…

Every weekday at 5:30 a.m., while most of his San Antonio, Texas, neighborhood is still asleep, Albert Martinez gets into his silver Nissan Sentra and starts the drive to Uvalde, 70 miles to the west. That early, U.S. 90, which starts near the Mexican border and ends in Florida, is infinitely dark and leaden, the tiny farms along the way covered in shadows. Martinez is a 50-year-old music teacher in Uvalde. Usually, he drives in silence. The radio would be a distraction — it’s almost impossible for him to listen to anything without counting in time or wondering why an instrument wasn’t tuned more tightly. Instead, he makes plans, deciding which song his kids might learn next or planning upcoming performances. By the time he arrives in Uvalde, the…

Are Queer Stories Boxed in on TV? After strides in the 2010s, LGBTQ representation has stalled. Here’s why television needs to break out of the rut IN A PIVOTAL SCENE in the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, two lovers reconnect in a bar. Cinta has taken a job in said bar to monitor the home of the woman who raised Cassian Andor, the resistance fighter of the series’ title. He’s currently in jail, but Cinta doesn’t know that. She’s dedicated to the Rebellion and willing to wait as long as it takes. Then, her girlfriend, Vel, arrives. The portrayal of Vel and Cinta’s relationship in earlier episodes has given the audience a sense of how comfortable the two are with each other. The love between them is deep and…

THIS SUMMER, realness is in at the queerest of places. The music is booming, the dance floor inviting, and everybody is welcome. For as long as DJs have been spinning — from the birth of Studio 54 in 1977 through the vogueing ballrooms, big-room clubs, and underground lounges of the decades that followed — New York’s nightlife has offered solace and escape for queer creativity. It’s within these historic venues that American designer Halston often found his inspiration, ultimately transforming him into one of the most celebrated fashion figures in history. These are the kinds of rooms that led Madonna to thrust Jean Paul Gaultier’s cone bra into the spotlight and gave George Michael the space to strut his freedom with help from a few supermodels. Today, the beats…

JENNY LEWIS knows she’s not a real Southerner. “Let’s be honest,” the 47-year-old indie-rock icon says on a Zoom call. “I’m a Jewish girl from the Valley, transplanted in East Nashville. I’m not an outlaw at all.” It’s true: In Tennessee, where Lewis has been splitting her time with L.A. since 2017, the only law she breaks is smoking weed. She’s also allergic to horses. And bonfires. “I’m the nerdiest, wimpiest Nashvillian,” she confirms. Even so, Lewis’ new album, Joy’All, is her Nashville Skyline moment, full of cozy melodies and lush pedal steel guitar. There’s even a song titled “Giddy Up.” And during our interview, she drops wisdom like a local in a porch rocking chair. “You can look outward,” she says. “But really, you got to get on…

Kerri Colby FOR KERRI COLBY, drag was like the wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: Once she stepped inside that world, she could embrace who she truly was. “I was able to find a light in me that always existed but I was never able to see before I transitioned,” she says. Colby was raised in Dallas by a Pentecostal Christian family who rejected her identity from the get-go. She believes faithful Christians like her family “mean well” in following the Bible’s teachings, but they miss the point of the Scripture: “It’s about compassion and being a living example of the golden rule,” she explains. Despite recent legislative efforts in states like Texas to “ostracize and limit the visibility of trans people,” Colby intends to live proudly as a…

ARLO PARKS’ VULNERABLE ECSTASY A soulful pop prodigy lets us into her worldon her excellent second album ON FIRST LISTEN, the second album from London singer-songwriter Arlo Parks sounds like something to luxuriate in; Parks sings and lays down poetry over plush textures and simmering beats. But a closer listen reveals that these pillowy structures are, in fact, cushions against the blows of modern life — bulwarks that keep Parks’ self, the “soft machine” referenced in the album title, moving without cutting herself off or suffering too much long-term damage. Parks is a pop prodigy; she got noticed by a management company as a teen, and won the 2021 Mercury Prize with her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, which came out when she was months away from turning 21.…