Table of contents for October 2020 in Rolling Stone

“Our existing education system should include moral teachings. Your own health, your own happiness, your own successes in life very much depend on this warmheartedness.”—DALAI LAMA, page 38 WHEN WE FIRST PUBLISHED “The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” in December 2003, Amy Winehouse was still three years from releasing Back to Black, and Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city, was almost a decade away; many of today’s top musicians (and fans) weren’t in middle school yet. While the original list has taken on a massive life of its own, with almost 63 million people reading it on our site last year (not to mention Facebook groups dedicated to debating it and fan-built pages lobbying for missing artists, such as the one called, “We want GENESIS listed on ROLLING…

CHADWICK BOSEMAN broke into movies in 2013, at the age of 35. He was gone only seven years later, at 43. When he died, we all began to tout the majestic array of names among his achievements: Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall. Most important, though, is the fictional but — thanks to Boseman — very much living and lived-in T’Challa, king of Wakanda. In the midst of a moment as ideologically fractured as ours, the Black Panther hero is an unlikely unifier in a world beset with chaos. Boseman’s was a strange, wondrous, meteoric career snuffed out; a career that reads, in retrospect, like a political project, an attitude toward history and how we tell it. Boseman’s approach to performance upended the usual rituals of actorly impersonation. His…

IN TIMES OF TROUBLE, the Dalai Lama’s story is one that bears repeating. The hardships include being plucked from his peasant parents as a toddler and ensconced in a spooky old palace, where he was tasked with relearning nearly every ounce of the knowledge he had managed to sponge up in his previous life as the 13th Dalai Lama. Then being required, at 15, to confront Chinese authorities who were invading his homeland and would soon take it over entirely. And they certainly include the time he, age 23, was forced to disguise himself and flee Tibet under cover of night, spending the next couple of weeks crossing deadly stretches of the Himalayas before arriving as a refugee in India, where he has lived in exile for the past…

American Utopia STARRING David Byrne Chris Giarmo Tendayi Kuumba DIRECTED BY Spike Lee PARADISE FOUND Spike Lee turns David Byrne’s hit Broadway show into a spectacle of music and joy ‘AMERICAN UTOPIA” begins where David Byrne’s 2018 album of the same name ended: with the song “Here.” “Here is an area of great confusion,” Byrne sings from a steel-gray stage, a model brain in his hand. He points to another region on the brain and sings, “Here is a connection with the opposite side.” Connection — not only between opposites and neural networks, but also in a world community — was the guiding element of Byrne’s hit Broadway show. It concluded its run in February 2020, a timely end for a work that finds unity in distance and bonds…

“The Beatles will always matter. They represent the longing for the ideal where injustice, war, and oppression are all outdated, and our social values include ‘radical’ concepts of peace and love.”—Cody Zimmer, via letter The Beatles Shine On Fifty years later and the world is still talking about the breakup of the Beatles. For our September cover story, Rob Sheffield (who authored Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World) revisits that heartbreaking moment in music history [“And in the End,” RS 1343]. Readers who hold the breakup in their own memories and those who were not even alive when the Beatles were an active band had much to say about their lasting power today. “The Beatles changed my life with their music in…

DURING the last week of his life, Tom Petty grew unusually wistful. Home after a tour with the Heartbreakers, he had his wife, Dana, call up his rarely seen 2002 “Fun in the Desert” video, then asked her to track down a high school girlfriend on social media. “He hated Facebook,” Dana Petty recalls. “But he got super-nostalgic. Looking back, it’s very strange.” Little from his musical past tugged at him more than Wildflowers, the 1994 solo album that contained some of his most intimate, relaxed, and revealing songs, from “You Don’t Know How It Feels” to the wispy title folk song. With the help of producer Rick Rubin, the album became one of Petty’s most beloved and sonically expansive works. “He would always say, ‘That’s the best record…

LAST OCTOBER, standing on the front porch of a small two-story house that had seen better days, I witnessed one of the more unsettling conversations of my adult life. I had embedded with a team of community organizers in Alamance County, North Carolina, an hour’s drive west of Raleigh. This was Trump country. The president had won here in 2016 by 13 points. The sheriff was on the record as having accused “criminal illegal immigrants” of “raping our citizens in many, many ways,” and the county had inked a $2.3 million contract with ICE to detain migrants who’d crossed the border and were living in the state. The local neo-Confederate group had seen a remarkable resurgence in the wake of Trump’s election, motivated by the fight over Confederate statues.…

You grew up as the daughter of a traveling salesman and spent the majority of your adult life on the road, engaged in activism. Has Covid-19 grounded you? Writers are always quite used to sitting in our chair, typing, so it doesn’t feel that unusual. It’s probably more unusual for people who are accustomed to going to the office every day. I haven’t missed being on the road yet. But seeing my friends, and walking the New York streets? I do miss that. I do at least three or four long Zooms a week. ‘The Glorias,’ a new biopic on Steinem’s early life, is out now on Prime video. One of Ms. magazine’s most famous issues featured the names of women who had abortions. How would your life be…

WHEN MICHAEL TROTTER sat down on the staircase inside his home in Albion, Michigan, one day in 2017, he was ready to end his life. Grappling with post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq, Trotter thought that maybe his life-insurance policy could solve his wife and young son’s financial woes if he died. “I felt like I was the weight holding them back,” Trotter says. “I had failed, I guess, one time too many.” Distressed, Trotter’s wife and musical partner, Tanya Blount Trotter, called the police and tried to persuade her husband to hold on. “Michael, I know you have a plan to leave this world,” she told him, “but if you give me just five more minutes to love you, I promise I can make you staying in…

KATY PERRY has spent most of the pandemic sheltering in place and preparing for two major August releases: Her fifth album, Smile, and her first child, a daughter named Daisy Dove Bloom. “I keep saying it’s a bit of a win when the fans get an album and I get a baby,” Perry says, laughing over Zoom in what she calls her “fortuneteller” outfit: a silky pink-and-white floral button-down paired with a matching turban. On Smile, Perry pulls from the darkness she experienced in 2017 after a short separation from her now-fiancé, Orlando Bloom, and an unenthusiastic response to that year’s Witness, which was led by a subversive single about her post-election depression, “Chained to the Rhythm.” Smile balances heartache and hope, with emphasis on the latter. “It’s a…

LAND OF THE FREE, HOME OF THE LAWLESS In Season Four of ‘Fargo,’ warring mobs, corrupt cops, and others fight to control 1950 Kansas City Fargo NETWORK FX AIR DATE Sundays at 10 p.m. STARRING Chris Rock Jason Schwartzman Jessie Buckley Ben Whishaw E’myri Crutchfield ‘YOU KNOW WHY America loves a crime story? Because America is a crime story,” mob boss Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) argues. We are a nation built on stolen land, with the labor of stolen people. And perhaps because of this, as Josto notes, we tend to root for the takers in these stories, rather than the innocent victims being taken. The long-awaited fourth season of the great FX crime anthology series Fargo has no shortage of colorful takers to root for, or against, in…