Table of contents for May 2021 in Rolling Stone

“Cheer up, John. I seriously didn’t even know you were Denzel’s kid until I read the first couple paragraphs of this article, and I totally adore your acting!”@prioritize12 Washington’s Crossing Whether they focused on his acting, his athleticism, or his character, most readers loved spending time with April cover star John David Washington and learning about the choices he’s made in forging his own path to the silver screen [“John David Washington Does the Right Thing,” RS 1350]. “Excellent story and cover! Amazing actor, such a talent,” gushed Regina Jansen. “Fantastic article on Mr. Washington, I’ve really enjoyed everything I’ve seen John David Washington in to date. Your article made me feel like I was there interviewing him with you!” exclaimed Jared Gadson. “Wow, now I need to see…

POP-MUSIC DOCUMENTARIES have been around almost as long as pop itself. But thanks to the avalanche of streaming services, the music doc is experiencing a golden age at the moment. Here are six notable documentaries — from Biggie to Billie to the Beatles — with the potential to rock your world, regardless of what device you’re watching them on.…

‘OH MAN, this … I’m so sorry, but this is fucking crazy. It’s just … It’s so compelling.” Justin Theroux is halfway through answering a question about the price of fame before he raises his eyebrows, and, as surreptitiously as humanly possible, turns his head to glance at the person behind us. We’re sitting outside a Sullivan Street cafe within spitting distance of the 49-year-old writer-actor’s apartment, on what feels like the first real spring day New York has had in eons. He’s wearing his “uniform,” a signature Theroux-chic mix of stylishly scuffed leather boots, a necklace made out of an old subway token, an olive-green bomber jacket, and jeans that are Nineties-supermodel skinny. The usual vintage, so-overly-ironic-it’s-now-sincere concert tee, familiar from a million Justin-around-town photos on the internet,…

PHIFE DAWG’S MOTHER believes it is important to open with a story that illuminates the cleverness and wit that her son carried through most of his life. “Malik started playing piano at age eight,” the poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor says. “He stuck with it for about three years, and then finally one day he came home very agitated. He and his teacher had had a huge fight. Malik told me that he was not returning to piano lessons and that he didn’t want to work with his teacher anymore because her breath stunk.” Then comes the punchline: “I knew that her breath did stink, but I could not believe this brazen little boy was bold enough to say it out loud.” While she was fine with her son walking away…

BLACK KEYS GET BACK TO THE BLUES The garage-rock heroes pay homage to the Mississippi artists who inspired them The Black Keys Delta Kream NONESUCH THE BLACK KEYS HAVE never been afraid to look backward — especially concerning the blues. The first two tracks of their 2002 debut, The Big Come Up, were lively, low-fi covers of tunes by Mississippi juke-joint bluesmen R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, and their 2006 EP, Chulahoma, was a full-on, we’re-not-worthy Kimbrough tribute that ended with a voicemail from the late blues belter’s widow telling them how much she loved their renditions. Kimbrough and Burnside’s rough ’n’ rowdy guitar wailing and foot stomping has fueled the Keys’ own variety of the baby-I’m-howlin’-for-you garage rock. After the band became platinum rock stars, the blues still…

WHEN LUCY DACUS was 13, she spent a summer at a Bible camp in her home state of Virginia. When she looks back now, she remembers the sermons preaching abstinence, the “slightly erotic God-loving songs” at worship times, and the talent show where she performed Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” backed by five male friends with acoustic guitars. Most of all, though, she remembers meeting her first boyfriend. “He was into Slayer, and he was a stoner, and I told him that if we dated, he would have to stop smoking weed,” Dacus, 26, recalls over Zoom from the house she shares with six friends in Philadelphia. “I was a straight-laced, hardass, morally superior 13-year-old.” She turned her recollections of that early-teenage romance into a song called “VBS” (short for…

YAYA BEY has lived some lives. At 32, she’s been a wife, a divorcée, a weed peddler, an art educator for the unhoused, a curator, and a street medic. She’s also been a songwriter since age nine, first crafting hooks for her father — an MC who’d seen moderate success in the Nineties — in their Queens, New York, home. “He was like, ‘You can’t sing,’” Bey recalls, laughing. “But he always thought I was a good writer.” Now based in Brooklyn, Bey began this spring with an engrossing EP, The Things I Can’t Take With Me. “I’m just trying to heal,” she says. “I lived a lot of my life having men kind of run the show: my dad, my ex-husband, men I’ve dated.” The music is sensitive…

UNTIL THE PANDEMIC, Lil Yachty never stopped to think about how quickly he became famous. “It was a full year from walking across the stage in high school to then I’m in this penthouse in midtown Atlanta, I got this G-wagon, put my mother in a house,” Yachty explains. “It’s a fast life. You not ever getting the chance to think about a lot of shit.” Yachty’s 2016 hit “Minnesota,” which had the treacly energy of a nursery rhyme, earned the then-17-year-old the title “King of the Teens.” But since then, he’s become an elder statesman of a certain brand of young superstar — and something like the Gen Z answer to Diddy. He collaborated with brands like Nautica and Target; he appeared in the movie How High 2;…

THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIR OLD HOME NBC, 1990-96 NEW HOME Peacock ORIGINAL Will Smith is a street-wise Philly kid whose life gets flipped, turned upside down when he moves in with relatives in Bel-Air. NEW VERSION Now it’s a drama about being a young black man in a racist society. Showrunner Chris Collins is a vet of The Wire. WHAT’S DIFFERENT Smith is only a producer. And the Fresh Prince may have a fresh backstory about cops catching him with a gun. WHAT’S THE SAME Uncle Phil gets stuffy. Actual quote from the four-minute film that inspired the series: “In this house I’m not ‘Uncle Phil.’ I’m the law!” WHY WE’RE WORRIED Hammering a comedy into a solemn drama sounds … hard. This is like trying to turn…

COLSON WHITEHEAD’S 2016 novel The Underground Railroad depicts both the savage reality of American slavery and the danger of escaping it. The story takes its fugitive protagonist, Cora, on a fantastical tour through different states via a literal locomotive, each stop featuring horrors reminiscent of real-life atrocities. It is a world that requires a deft hand to commit to film, and perhaps no one is better suited than Barry Jenkins. In films like the Oscar-winning Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, the director has married the terror of being black in America with its beauty. Still, Jenkins’ limited-series adaptation of The Underground Railroad, which debuts May 14th on Amazon Prime, is his most ambitious project to date. “This show scared the shit out of me,” Jenkins says. “It…

THREE WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS 2020, in the piney woods outside of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a deer hunter came across the fallout from a firefight that, to date, no one has been able to explain. A tricked-out Chevy Colorado with matte-black wheels and racing tires was stuck in a rut on a dirt road near Lake MacArthur. In the bed of the truck and on the ground beside it were two dead men. Both had been killed by gunshots, and according to news reports, shell casings were scattered on the ground. Yet there were no firearms to be found at the scene, and no trace of the third man, the surviving shooter. There had to have been at least one. The man on the ground, who had been dropped…

You survived a lengthy bout with Covid last year. How are you feeling now? It’s terrible. I got long-term Covid, where you get better from the virus, but you have leftover [symptoms]. Apparently, they now think that you do get better from long-term Covid; it’s not forever. That is good. ‘She Walks in Beauty,’ Faithfull’s album with Warren Ellis, is out now. On your new album, you recite poetry by Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and many others. What makes a good poem? There are certain technical aspects that I really enjoy, like alliteration and really good rhyming. I think a really good poem has a rhythm to it. Like music, choice of words is very important. It’s quite a big thing, a great poem. You became famous when you were…

EVER SINCE he got booted off a Rascal Flatts tour in 2006 for playing too long, Eric Church has been country music’s middle finger, upending the way things are done in Nashville. Take his new record, Heart & Soul. It’s an urgent, wildly ambitious triple album he wrote and recorded in the mountains of North Carolina. Instead of a studio, Church commandeered a restaurant with producer Jay Joyce and an army of trusted songwriters, and challenged himself to write and record a song a day. Church is determined to be one of the first artists back on the road in a post-Covid world. How soon? This fall. “That’s aggressive, but I’ve got to make it happen,” he says. “I think it’s that crucial to the overall sentiment of what…

FOR MORE than eight decades, the sitcom has both marked the times and provided a balm against them. From Rob Petrie tripping over his ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show to Ilana face-planting on a Broad City subway car; from The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden barely containing his frustration with Ed Norton to Atlanta’s Paper Boi doing the same with his cousin Earn; from Lucy Ricardo getting drunk on Vitameatavegamin to Fleabag enjoying Gin in a Tin with the hot priest, the genre’s most beloved characters have been by our sides. In choosing the top 50 sitcoms ever — a fuller list of 100 lives online — we considered not just how much they made us laugh, but also how much they influenced the shows that followed, how well…

CYNTHIA CARTER YOUNG thought of Leonard Carter as her “big little brother.” He was younger than her, but so protective that he was more like the older sibling. “He always wanted to look out for other people,” she says. Last spring, she was looking forward to seeing him again. After almost 25 years in prison, Leonard, 60, had been paroled and had only weeks left to go until his release. But on April 14th, Cynthia got a dreaded call from a No Caller ID number. “I said ‘Oh, no,’ and picked up.” Leonard had died from Covid-19. “If he’d lived, he would have had a chance to see his grandchild for the first time,” she says. “What he wanted to do most was hug his grandchild.” Almost 200,000 people…