Table of contents for December 2024 in Rolling Stone

The murder trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez gripped the country in the Nineties. The first resulted in a hung jury in 1994. Though the brothers admitted that they’d shot their parents to death in the family’s Beverly Hills home in 1989, the question was motive: Were they, as the prosecution argued, spoiled rich kids who acted in cold blood, seeking a shortcut to their inheritance? Or, as the young men tearfully claimed on the stand — in one of the first extensively televised trials broadcast to a rapt nationwide audience — had they acted in self-defense after years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, with their mother standing idly by? A subsequent trial ended in two life sentences for the brothers, who have so far…

He’s traveling through the north country today. Eighty miles from Canada, where the winds, it’s been said, hit heavy on the borderline. As his rented Toyota pickup truck reaches a tree-shaded suburban intersection, he kills the engine and bounds out into late-January air. He’s layered a down jacket over a gray sweatshirt, the hood yanked over his mussed brown hair. His destination is a boxy, cream-colored little house on the corner, down a walkway framed by twin shrubs. To its left is a newish street sign: Bob Dylan Drive. ● He spent the past hour and 20 minutes navigating an iced-up Highway 53, fishtailing enough between Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, to send the insurers of at least two major Hollywood franchises scrambling for Xanax. But Timothée Chalamet is on…

You can hear the influence of Quincy Jones, who died Nov. 3 at age 91, in practically every genre of music. In the music of Stevie Wonder — who grew up listening to Jones’ work with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and others, as well as Jones’ own records — the producer’s influence lives on most strongly in the way Wonder arranges his music and in the verve of his singing. The two artists worked together several times, and Wonder still marvels at what it was like to hear Jones record his songs, especially noting a 1973 version of Wonder’s “You’ve Got It Bad, Girl.” “Hearing him sing ‘You’ve Got It Bad’ is mind-blowing because I never imagined Quincy Jones doing my song,” Wonder says. “The more I…

Shohei Ohtani walks up to home plate at New York’s Citi Field, and the L.A. Dodgers fans, who are well in attendance on this Wednesday afternoon, are up on their feet. ● “So, ideally you get a pop-up, right? You got like five seconds in the air. God forbid the guy drops the ball.” ● I’m sitting in the outfield with Scott Brody, who is not paying the fans around us any mind. He is intently studying the players in the outfield, as well as the cellphones he has in either hand, with sportsbook apps loaded up on each one and ready to fire. “So when that ball’s in the air, you can submit the under on the bet because the guy’s on second base. He’s not gonna score.”…

TAYLOR MCNEILL Stylist Taylor McNeill tapped into her love for Bob Dylan and his music when she styled cover star Timothée Chalamet for this issue. First, she tracked down the hatmaker who worked with Dylan on the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Then, with the goal of “capturing a feeling without needing to copy the exact same thing,” she borrowed a bouquet from an original Dylan hat and affixed it to a Yankees cap. The L.A.-based stylist also closely collaborated with photographer Aidan Zamiri and Chalamet himself as she created a look that resonates with the actor’s own personal style. She adds that she, Zamiri, and Chalamet are “very in sync in the way we think about fashion and communicating an idea through clothing.” McNeill’s styling work has appeared…

The Spanish singer and rapper Quevedo spent some sleepless nights back home in the Canary Islands this fall. He’d been busy visiting family before the November release of his new album, Buenas Noches, and the wait for the project was keeping him wide awake. Insomnia inspired the whole LP, in fact. Buenas Noches is a look at all the things that kept Quevedo up as he skyrocketed into stardom. He made a splash when he first appeared on the Spanish-music scene in 2020, scored a mega viral hit single in 2022 with Argentine producer Bizarrap (the video for “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 52” currently has more than 675 million views on YouTube), and then released his acclaimed debut album, Donde Quiero Estar, in 2023. The quick rise was a…

His openhearted warmth always kept people rooting for him. By Rob Sheffield The first night Liam Payne ever did a headlining solo show, the first One Direction song he sang was a deep cut: “History.” It’s not the most famous 1D song, but it’s one of their most direct statements about the bond they shared with their audience. Liam surprised the crowd with it on that first night, at New York’s Beacon Theatre in June 2018, complete with a video montage of One Direction over the years, as he sang, “You and me got a whole lot of history/We could be the greatest team that the world has ever seen.” There are so many clips of Liam singing “History” in his solo shows, openly inviting the audience to celebrate…

Guitarist Warren Haynes sometimes had his doubts about where things were headed when he was jamming with Phil Lesh. After Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, Haynes, himself no stranger to taking music to its outer limits by way of extended jams, frequently joined Lesh onstage in either a re-formed version of the Grateful Dead or with Lesh’s own band, Phil Lesh and Friends. “Sometimes the jams would get so out there, and I would maybe think something was not clicking, not working,” says Haynes. “I would look over at Phil, and he would just have a huge grin on his face — it was just about chasing it. When it was on the risk of falling apart, or even when it did fall apart, it was just as fun…

Earlier this year, footage of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and his four children dancing together at his ¥$ Vultures Listening Experience in China went viral. The clip, along with another of him dancing to his 2013 cut “On Sight,” were rare moments of positive attention for Ye. His no-filter ethos has drastically dampened his star power stateside, as fans in the U.S. have a fielder’s choice of reasons to be done with the once-revered artist. Whether it’s his MAGA support, his 2018 “Slavery was a choice” statement, his 2022 barrage of antisemitic comments, or his more recent sexual-misconduct allegations, he now seems more infamous than beloved here. Yet that doesn’t appear to be the case in Asia. Ye performed in September for a packed crowd at Wuyuanhe…

Halfway through their set, Muna address the elephant in the stadium. “We just wanted to acknowledge that someone very special is missing tonight,” says the indie-pop trio’s lead singer, Katie Gavin. It’s day one of All Things Go, an independent-music festival that fans nicknamed Lezbopalooza due to its largely queer, female, or nonbinary lineup, including Chappell Roan. Except the day before Roan was scheduled to appear onstage at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York, she pulled out. “We love Chappell so much,” Gavin continues, as the young, eager audience, a quarter of whom have donned pink cowboy hats, quiet down to hear what this wise stateswoman of sapphic pop has to say. “You know, we started as a queer band in 2014, so we’ve really been given the…

SOUTHERN ROCK IS RISING FROM THE ASHES A new generation of musicians is reimagining the region and reshaping music. By Will Hermes The American South is a mess of cultural contradictions, and if those contradictions have sometimes stoked the dumpster fire of U.S. politics in recent years, they’ve also fueled some of the best music being made right now. In 2024, the story of rock is a story of Southern rock. On two of the year’s best albums, Tigers Blood and Manning Fireworks, Katie “Waxahatchee” Crutchfield (Alabama) and Jake “MJ” Lenderman (North Carolina) have made 21st-century classic rock with indie-rock smarts and unmistakably Southern sensibilities. Zach Bryan (Oklahoma), the left-field hitmaker with a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “State Trooper” tattooed on his left bicep, made a Southern-rock album in…

Finally Got Some Satisfaction As a CEO who tumbles into an affair with her intern, Nicole Kidman gives mature female desire the attention it deserves in Babygirl. By David Fear Maybe you’ve noticed a serious uptick lately in May-December screen romances that favor the older-woman side of the equation. That still won’t prepare you for the raw, unfiltered sub-dom showcase Nicole Kidman gets with boyish twentysomething Harris Dickinson in Babygirl. Since the Nineties, Kidman has not exactly been timid in portraying characters whose desires stray into the realm of kink (think Eyes Wide Shut, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Paperboy). In this drama from Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn, she explores the power dynamics inherent in an affair between a CEO and her intern. The question quickly becomes:…