Содержание выпуска: January 2019 — Rolling Stone

“I was a nobody from nowhere who knew nothing and set out to do something.”—MICHAEL CAINE WHEN ALL THE VOTES from the 2018 midterm elections were finally counted, and despite Donald Trump’s blustering claims to the contrary, the results marked a huge victory for progressive Democrats and, more broadly, a rejection of Trump’s divisive and dangerous tactics. Nearly half of all eligible voters turned out in November, the most for a non-presidential election since 1914. Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives received more than 60.5 million votes. (By contrast, Donald Trump received 63 million votes in 2016 even though turnout for presidential elections usually far eclipse midterm voting.) If Democrats can sustain this support, Trump will be loudly rejected in 2020. There are a lot of reasons to…

BAD BUNNY knows how to make an entrance. When he shows up at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas for Rolling Stone’s Latin Grammys preparty in November, he’s wearing rainbow-flecked board shorts, flip-flops and lime-green shades. The Puerto Rican star, 24, proceeds to steal the dance floor with his raver moves. The next night, he steals the whole awards show with the nu-metal fury of “Soy Peor” and the electro-psych bliss of “Estamos Bien.” It’s just another week for one of the hottest acts in Latin pop, whose music scored 7 billion YouTube views last year, and who flew from Vegas to Miami two days before the awards to perform his hit Drake duet “Mia” at an arena. (He says he’s been helping the Canadian rapper practice his Spanish:…

1. Chance the Rapper “The Man Who Has Everything” We’re hoping hip-hop’s most magnanimous superstar will deliver a new album soon; for now we can be content with gems like this sweet, somber holiday-themed wish list — which includes new swings in the local playground, an end to racism and (why not?) an elevator for the crib. 2. Perfume Genius “Not for Me” Glammy indie hero Mike Hadreas takes a satin, sad-sack 1963 ballad from Bobby Darin and flips it into a queer anthem full of sweeping synths and harplike arpeggios. It’s a dramatic moment of exile empowerment. 3. Offset “Red Room” The first single from the Migos member’s new solo album is an R&B-tinged jam that shows off his talent as a restrained and introspective crooner, brooding…

JEFF TWEEDY thought Wilco’s 2004 album, A Ghost Is Born, would be his last. At the time, his addiction to Vicodin and his lifelong anxiety issues had spiraled so far out of control that on tour he routinely fell asleep in his bathtub without being sure he’d wake up. He wrote songs like the gorgeous elegy “Hummingbird” for his young sons, “who could turn to it when they were older … to have some deeper connection to the dad they’d lost.” When the band recorded “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” he was so far gone he could make it through just one take. Tweedy’s new memoir, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), is full of moments like these, revealing the intense turmoil behind his best songs. The songwriter, who got sober…

NICK KROLL is wiping whitefish salad from the corner of his mouth when a boy approaches our booth. “You are Big Mouth,” he says in accented English, a Mexican kid about 10 years old on holiday in New York’s Lower East Side. “I’m not allowed to watch it,” the boy says, leaning in and out of earshot of his mother, “but I love it.” A grotesquely animated show about a group of horny suburban spazzes wanking and wet-dreaming their way through puberty, Big Mouth is an unlikely object of affection. But the series, created by Kroll and in its second season on Netflix, is widely beloved — and not just by horny spazzes themselves but also their parents, their health teachers and pretty much anyone who’s suffered the humiliation…

WILBUR ROSS, THE commerce secretary, is a liar. And according to lawsuits brought by former business partners, a thief. Now he’s attempting his biggest swindle yet: rigging the 2020 census to favor the Republican Party. A vulture capitalist with no experience in government, whose private-equity firm was fined by the Securities and Exchange Commission for bilking investors out of millions, Ross was a tidy fit for Donald Trump’s Cabinet, which the president stocked with tycoons despite campaigning as a champion of the forgotten man. “I just don’t want a poor person,” Trump said of his top economic posts. He saw Ross — supposedly the richest of the lot — as a fellow traveler, a self-made billionaire with few scruples. Touting Ross at a rally in Cincinnati, Trump boasted, “I…

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 1 Cardi B Invasion of Privacy “I’M A RICH BITCH and I smell like it,” Cardi B announces on her instant-classic debut. In a year when hip-hop seemed mopey and insular, her neon-bomb charisma and willingness to stomp on our pop pleasure buttons were incredibly refreshing. Cardi could’ve followed up the bloody-shoed success of “Bodak Yellow” with an LP of funny Twitter snaps. Instead, Invasion of Privacy established her as an innovator with her own indelibly influential voice — whether she’s claiming the Dirty South in “Bickenhead” or celebrating her Dominican flash in “I Like It,” with Bad Bunny and J Balvin. Cardi starts out in the strip clubs, makes her man stutter in “Be Careful,” shows surprising vulnerability on “Ring,” and teams up with…

Every actor has a role he or she regrets turning down. What is yours? I never made that kind of mistake. I only made the ones in the opposite direction — what I didn’t say no to. If you could tell your younger self not to do a certain movie, which would it be? The Swarm. It’s about [killer] bees. I did it without reading the script because I said, “Who’s in it?” And they gave me this great big star list: Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland, José Ferrer. One day we were all having a conversation with live bees above us, and suddenly we noticed all these little black dots on our shirts. The bees were shitting on us. And so the first review was in, but we…

“It’s about time a celebrity like Shawn spoke out and said how damaging it can be when fans fervently project their theories onto you.”—Flamingan, via the Internet Shawn Mendes Gets Real For our December cover, the 20-year-old hitmaking machine Shawn Mendes got candid with senior music editor Patrick Doyle when they met up in Europe. Mendes opened up about everything from his struggle with anxiety to his sexuality and his taste for weed [“Confessions of a Neurotic Pop Idol,” RS 1322]. There was an outpouring of commentary, and not just from die-hard Mendes fans, when the story went live. The profile even made it onto the Washington’s Post’s list of “Most Revealing Celebrity Interviews of 2018.” Expressing her sympathy for the pop star, Lisa McLoughlin tweeted, “It’s hard enough…

The Pink Floyd drummer is about to launch his first U.S. tour with a show that is entirely pre-1973 Floyd songs, including many by Barrett. “ASTRONOMY DOMINE” This is such a great drum track in an interesting time signature. It’s a fantastic bit of Sixties philosophy mixed with a sort of psychedelic lyric. “BIKE” The lyrics to this are so very Syd, astonishingly clever. It’s fun, but there’s a depth of sadness to them. When I listen to it now, I realize how young and immature we were and how hopeless we were at coming to grips with Syd’s breakdown. “INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE” This is a track that is open to improvisation and reinterpretation. When you play the opening riffs, you can freestyle it so many different ways. “VEGETABLE MAN”…

A FEW DAYS before Thanksgiving, Jered “Threatin” Eames, a waifish, black-clad 29-year-old with a whip of Ariana-length hair, sinks into his hotel-suite chair in West Hollywood. He looks pale and sickly, recovering from a 13-hour Frankfurt red-eye and the craziest week of his life — when he tried living out his rock-star fantasy but was exposed as an enigmatic trickster. “There was no way that I was going to get enough attention being a rock artist in 2018,” he says, “unless I did something to get people to pay attention.” In November, managers of rock clubs across the United Kingdom began sharing the same weird tale. A pop-metal performer, Threatin, had rented their clubs for his 10-city European tour. Club owners had never heard of the act when a…

Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 Ryan H. Walsh VAN MORRISON’S 1968 LP Astral Weeks was a landmark fusion of jazz, folk, rock and meditative soul. But its creation is as mysterious as the cantankerous genius who made it. Journalist Walsh dives into the Boston rock scene of the time, where Morrison made the LP after fleeing New York, due to problems with a mobbed-up record business; there are cameos from Timothy Leary, Lou Reed, a commune leader and a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. What emerges is a fascinating image of the late Sixties and an indelible portrait of Morrison himself. “A hateful little guy,” says one associate in the book, “but … he’s the best rock & roll voice out there.” Let’s Go (So We Can Get…

“I DON’T TALK ABOUT POLITICS,” Taylor Swift said in 2012. “I don’t think that I know enough yet in life to be telling people who to vote for.” That changed in a big way in 2018, when Swift endorsed two Democratic candidates in Tennessee, while blasting Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn for discriminatory and anti-gay policies. Swift proved that in the Trump era, the sidelines are no longer a safe space — especially after events that hit close to home, like the bombing of Ariana Grande’s 2017 concert in Manchester, England, and Vegas’ Route 91 Harvest festival, site of the deadliest mass shooting in American history. “Artists are less afraid to piss off the other side,” says a major music publicist. “The lines have been drawn. The divide is really…

Bruce Springsteen Springsteen on Broadway COLUMBIA As recording artists grapple with the low-yield streaming era, there’s been a surge of creativity off record — in pumped-up concert staging, film scoring, memoir writing, Twitter feeds. Flexing the storytelling skills he’s flaunted in songs and concert banter for decades, Bruce Springsteen rose to the moment with his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, and the subsequent Springsteen on Broadway, his (mostly) one-man meta-jukebox-musical, which just ended its year-plus New York run. Now both a Netflix film and a two-and-a-half-hour soundtrack LP, it’s a model of modern multiplatform art-making. The LP was recorded, like the film, in front of an audience at the Walter Kerr Theatre, as a precise replica of the stage show, in turn based closely on the book: Its foreword,…

“I think of any genre as a snow globe: You don’t admire it for its stillness. You have to shake it up and see how it explodes.” Not long ago, acclaimed director Pedro Almodóvar turned up in the audience at one of Rosalía Vila Tobella’s shows in Spain. “I was singing this song, ‘La Hija de Juan Simón’ — a very traditional song,” says the singer, 25. “And I remember him crying.” He’s not alone: Rosalía’s savvy blend of flamenco vocals and cutting-edge pop sounds is hitting home, with her excellent second album, El Mal Querer (which translates loosely to Toxic Desire), taking home two of the five Latin Grammys she was nominated for in November — a remarkable feat for a first-time nominee. With songs like “Malamente,” “Di…

MARCUS MUMFORD doesn’t get nervous a lot. But he admits he’s a little apprehensive the day before Mumford & Sons release their fourth album, Delta, and launch a 63-date arena tour. The band spent months working on the LP, looking for a balance between the folk singalongs of its first two albums and 2015’s plugged-in Wilder Mind. A new single, “Guiding Light,” combines acoustic strumming with a dance beat; elsewhere, the group pulled from its love of electronic music and hip-hop. “Our hope is that people enjoy it with us, but we know not always everyone will,” Mumford says, calling from Dublin after a rehearsal. “If you try to pander to some audience, you can lead yourself awry. I hope it pushes the boundaries of what people choose to…

Khalid’s Victory Lap Khalid rolled out the hits at Jingle Ball in San Francisco after a huge year in which he capitalized on the success of his 2017 breakthrough, American Teen, with a big tour and singles with Halsey and Billie Eilish. Next up: finishing his second studio LP. “I’ve been feeding the world with so many collabs that now it’s time to go, ‘OK, this is just me.’ ” RANDOM QUOTE “Starbucks is blocking porn, and it’s about time. I was trying to enjoy my gingerbread latte while all this rawdogging was going on. What a racket!”—Bette Midler on Twitter…

THE YEAR IN HIP-HOP made one thing blindingly clear: The old guard is, well, old. Kanye West executive-produced five albums over the summer, but it took a Lil Pump feature to get him any traction on streaming services. Nicki Minaj needed a duet with embattled rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine to make any real noise. The generation rushing to fill the vacuum at rap’s top isn’t always getting there on artistic merit — see the empty gestures masquerading as scintillation on Minaj and 6ix9ine’s hit “Fefe,” or Post Malone’s featherweight blockbuster Beerbongs & Bentleys — but, more often than not, the new class made the case that the genre was due for a change. Travis Scott’s Astroworld was a grand, sweeping album that finally got him out of the long shadow…

CALL IT A SURPRISE TWIST, if you must: Early in this Monday morning in November, M. Night Shyamalan turned on his shower, and no water came out. The writer-director has come to believe that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, and as it happens, the universe — not to mention the vast success of his initial run of movies, beginning with The Sixth Sense — provided him with a 125-acre country estate west of Philadelphia, where he’s lived with his family since 2007. So he simply popped into another building on his sprawling property, terrifying a cleaning woman in the process. He grabbed a shower there, mussed his thick black hair up as usual, and managed to get his youngest daughter to school, prepping her for a French quiz on…