Table of contents for August 2018 in Rolling Stone

“I believe this is a universal truth, one of the great secrets: The more you give, the more you get.”—Bitcoin billionaire BROCK PIERCE WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT, after years of shrinking page counts, slashed budgets and all the harsh realities of modern publishing – not just at ROLLING STONE, but everywhere – that we’d be growing again? Look inside. In our new monthly format, ROLLING STONE is bigger, thicker – more pages than we’ve had in a decade – and redesigned with a modern, energized look and feel. It’s a magazine we hope you’ll want to spend time with, and keep for your collection. What hasn’t changed is the mission: to tell great stories in original, powerful and surprising ways. We have space and resources to do more of…

‘CAN I RIDE THIS wearing high heels?” Troye Sivan asks, eyeing a scooter suspiciously. The high heels in question are raising his pointy black Helmut Lang boots about two inches off the ground – “I’m not sure if they’re men’s or women’s” – and the scooter is the popular new motorized kind that you unlock with a smartphone app. Sivan steps aboard, kicks off and lurches forward. Another question occurs to him: “How do you stop it?” It’s mid-June and Sivan, a 23-year-old pop phenomenon, is in search of a good coffee on the west side of Los Angeles, the city he currently calls home. He’s got an excellent new album on the way, Bloom; a new single, “Dance to This,” featuring Ariana Grande, which premiered this morning; and a…

EVEN BLAZE Foley’s closest friends didn’t know much about him. The eccentric, burly Texas songwriter – who wrote country classics such as “If I Could Only Fly” before he was shot dead at 39 years old in 1989 – was known to embellish the story of his background, and his death was clouded in mystery. “I heard he got shot at the unemployment office taking a bullet for another homeless guy,” says Ethan Hawke. “I remember waxing poetic about that one night.…Then we found out that’s actually not true.” Those mysteries set the actor-director off on a major research project – and the result, Blaze, recounts the heartbreaking story of Foley’s descent from promising songwriter into homelessness, drugs and despair. The film, which Hawke directed, has received festival praise for…

THERE’S NO STORY in music like the love story of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Every year, the Carters revise our whole pop-celebrity mythos. They surprised the world in June by dropping their blissed-out new album, Everything Is Love, in the middle of their On the Run II tour. There’s a long tradition of musical marriages that rise and fall from song to song: Sonny and Cher, Fleetwood Mac, George and Tammy, John and Yoko. But nobody has ever staged a public meltdown and reunion like these two, on anywhere near this scale. Fifteen years after “ ’03 Bonnie & Clyde,” they’ve been together three times longer than the actual Bonnie and Clyde. They can’t leave couple drama alone – the game needs them. Beyoncé specializes in the impossible. Every time people are…

Last summer, U.K. pop singer Dua Lipa was a new artist playing daytime festival slots. This time around, she has a major hit under her belt (“New Rules” has more than a billion YouTube views) and is a main-stage attraction. At a gig in Fort Lauderdale, she rocked a Nineties look. What’s next? “I would love to make an album with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala,” she recently said. Bonnaroo: Love, Jams and Hot Chicken Bonnaroo isn’t quite the jam-band mudslide it once was – these days, headliners are Top 40 hitmakers, and the camping area offers yoga and free laundry. But it’s still full of great moments you won’t find at any other fest – like a Tom Petty tribute put together by members of My Morning Jacket,…

JUST AS the first national campaign since Donald Trump took office has inspired a wave of women and minorities running for office, it’s also seen an alarming influx of candidates motivated by white nationalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and racism. Seemingly emboldened by Trump’s divisive rhetoric – and the GOP’s relative indifference – this new class of Republicans is testing the appetite for bigotry in public life among constituencies across the nation. From an admitted pedophile to a former American Nazi Party member, here are the nine most appalling candidates campaigning this year. THE WHITE NATIONALIST Paul Nehlen U.S. House (WI) The self-described “pro-White” candidate who pals around with David Duke was banned from Twitter this year for making a racist joke about Meghan Markle. THE CONFEDERATE Corey Stewart U.S. Senate…

TWENTY-SIX MEN AND WOMEN are seated along four folding tables laid end to end in the ballroom of a former Masonic lodge in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. An eclectic mix, ranging from local charity workers to Silicon Valley investors to cryptocurrency early adopters, they all believe that they’re about to make history. Specifically, they are here to help Brock Pierce – a child actor turned video-game entrepreneur turned crypto titan – give away a billion dollars to charity. Not in a will after his death, but now, in the prime of his life and the peak of his career, at age 37. ¶ Just three days earlier, Pierce was listed number nine on Forbes’ first-ever List of Cryptocurrency’s Wealthiest People, with his net worth estimated as high as $1…

“I love your raunchy boss-status personality. You inspire me. Gained a whole new respect for you and Offset after this article.”—jfizzle, via the Internet Hip-Hop’s Power Couple At more than seven months pregnant, Cardi B bared it all for our July cover with her husband, Offset – from her actual baby bump and how she plans to be a mother to her candid thoughts on Donald “Dickhead” Trump [“Cardi B and Offset: A Hip-Hop Love Story,” RS 1317]. The chart-topping, record-breaking mother-to-be also posted the cover image online, saying, “This is so special to me and means so much! My daughter made it to the ROLLING STONE cover!!!!” Offset captioned the same image: “Can’t wait till my daughter get here.” Their followers showed their love for the expecting couple…

“A lot of these tattoos aren’t happening in the world’s best tattoo parlors, I’ll tell you that. They are happening in people’s living rooms and kitchens.”—KEITH “BANG BANG” MCCURDY, CELEBRITY TATTOO ARTIST Face tattoos can ruin careers, says Lil Wayne’s tattoo artist Dow Hokoana, so she refuses to give them to people unless they’re in the music industry. “I’ve even said no to Wayne before,” she says. “Some days you have to roll the dice and go, ‘Boss, I’m not doing that today.’ He was mad, but he trusts me.” POST MALONE RECENTLY went viral after getting the phrase “Always Tired” tattooed across his face, but it wasn’t much fun. “He said it felt like I was tattooing his eyeballs,” says his tattoo artist Chad Rowe. Malone isn’t the…

“I listen to a lot of melancholy music, so this was easy,” says the Sonic Youth singer. Her duo Body/Head just released their new LP, The Switch. ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER “Roosevelt Island” This song is kind of like, “See you on the other side of a breakup.” It’s about how the city can energize you. AIMEE MANN “Save Me” Not only does Aimee have a beautiful voice, her lyrics are amazing: “If you could save me from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they could never love anyone.” LUCINDA WILLIAMS “Steal Your Love” I love the lyrics “I don’t want your drugs.…/I just want to steal your love.” She’s really great at showing vulnerability. PJ HARVEY “Shame” I love this song because she’s so defiant: “I don’t need no ball…

IN 1970, Ralph Steadman was an obscure British cartoonist when the underground magazine Scanlan’s Monthly gave him an assignment: Accompany Hunter S. Thompson at the Kentucky Derby. Thompson’s chronicle of that “decadent and depraved” day became an early classic of gonzo journalism, and Steadman’s illustrations – gnomish, cigar-chomping spectators watching misshapen horses – perfectly mirrored Thompson’s visceral language. Their partnership continued at ROLLING STONE, most famously with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Steadman drew lizards dressed as humans and depicted Thompson and his lawyer-friend Oscar Acosta as behind-the-wheel maniacs. “I saw things through a glass darkly – that’s what Hunter used to say,” says Steadman, 82. “That’s what he liked.” Steadman’s work with Thompson was only a small part of his six-decade career, in which he defined the times…

IN MAY 2017, Ryan Zinke, the 52nd United States secretary of the Interior, traveled to Utah on a four-day fact-finding mission. A Montana native and former Navy SEAL, Zinke carries himself with the sort of distinctly American brand of swagger that Donald Trump, who favors Cabinet picks “out of central casting,” must have swooned over: a macho trifecta of cowboy, soldier and lifelong jock. He’s tall, and his voice, an adenoidal purr, has just a hint of John Wayne. He could wear a Stetson without looking ridiculous. Zinke had come to Utah to tour a pair of national monuments, Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, as part of a broader review ordered by the Trump administration. Prior to the visit, conservatives had derided the monuments as an example of federal overreach,…

A FEW MILES OUTSIDE NASHVILLE, as the Walmarts and Waffle Houses give way to country roads and hickory trees, there’s a wild expanse of land, about 2,000 acres, nestled near the banks of the Cumberland River and guarded by security cameras. That’s where Eric Church is building his lakes. » The first lake is still just a pit – an excavation site full of bulldozers and sump pumps and limestone boulders that Church and his wife, Katherine, have spent the past few years digging up. (“One of my buddies came by and said, ‘Dude! Did you buy a quarry?’ ” says Church.) The second is closer to finished: It’s at the back of the property, on a little creek that drains from a holler. The dam has been built and the…

You’ve been married to your wife, Heather, since 1971. Very few rock-star marriages have lasted that long. What’s your secret? It’s not easy. I think ours survived because I was always honest with her. At the end of every tour, however long we were away, and whatever had gone on during the tour, I’d be on the first bloody plane back to her. But underneath it all, I worshipped the ground she walked on. You were the only member of the Who to not have to deal with a major substance-abuse problem. How did you avoid that? I had to, so I could keep the others in line. You try getting three people on acid from the Monterey Pop Festival all the way to London! I was the one that…

RISING STAR AWKWAFINA STRIKES IT ‘RICH’ She may be starring in two of the summer’s biggest movies – Ocean’s 8 and Crazy Rich Asians – but don’t assume Awkwafina, née Nora Lum, is living large. “Not at all,” says the Queens-born rapper-turned-actress. “Sometimes I look at my bathroom like, ‘I can’t believe this is my house, dude. I need to upgrade.’ ” That goal should be well within reach after Crazy Rich Asians (out August 15th), a blockbuster-in-waiting based on Kevin Kwan’s bestselling novel about the lifestyles of the rich and snobbish in high-society Singapore. As the movie’s resident bottle-blond best friend, Goh Peik Lin, Lum puts the “com” in this rom-com with her signature hip-hop swagger (see “My Vag,” the viral music video that launched her career in 2012)…

EVERY VISITOR to 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Spike Lee’s production headquarters in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, is greeted by Radio Raheem. A massive papier-mâché rendering of Do the Right Thing’s tragic hero – complete with trademark boombox – towers over the entryway, a potent reminder of themes that run through so much of Lee’s oeuvre: the beauty, absurdity and horror of black life in America. Nearly 30 years after that masterpiece, Lee has crafted a fitting companion in BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of an African-American cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the Seventies. In May, the film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where Lee publicly called President Trump a “motherfucker” for his refusal to condemn white supremacists who had incited violence…

Amara La Negra Latin pop’s boisterous new star wants to free your mind To anyone who watched the first season of VH1’s Love & Hip Hop: Miami this year, Amara La Negra – bold, mahogany-skinned and Afro’d – is a newly minted icon. To Spanish-language TV viewers, she’s been a star for years, since she was a kid making regular appearances on Univision’s Sábado Gigante. And now, with hits like the reggae-tinged “What a Bam Bam” soaring into the millions of views on YouTube, La Negra is relishing her biggest spotlight yet. “I knew at an early age that I wasn’t afraid of a crowd,” says the 27-year-old singer, who was raised in Miami by her Dominican parents and has a knack for blunt pronouncements. As one of very few…

Mitski Be the Cowboy DEAD OCEANS MITSKI’S ALLAMERICAN HEARTBREAK On her third LP, one of rock’s best young singer-songwriters turns pain into power By WILL HERMES WHEN LORDE took Mitski Miyawaki out as an opening act on her Melodrama tour this year, it was an ideal match: two wise, intense young women parsing heartache, class conflict and other shit storms in miniaturist detail and at maximalist scale. Will Mitski blow up similarly? Who knows? But as her third LP proves, she’s already becoming one of the best songwriters of her generation. Fans might’ve been surprised by how easily her emotionally nuanced indie rock translated to arenas. But flipping narratives of powerlessness is Mitski’s superpower. Take “Pink in the Night,” a standout on Be the Cowboy. It opens with a sexy…