Table of contents for January 2022 in Rolling Stone

MOVIE 1. ‘Scream’ For the fifth installment of the genre-bending franchise, Ghostface terrorizes a new generation of hot Woodsboro teens. Luckily, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox are also back to meta-explain horror-movie survival. DOCUMENTARY 2. ’Carole King & James Taylor: Just Call Out My Name’ The pair reflect on their decades-spanning friendship, while weaving in footage from their 1970 Troubadour show and their 2010 reunion tour. TOUR 3. The War on Drugs The transporting indie rockers added Eighties-arena heft on their new album, I Don’t Live Here Anymore — and if their recent livestream is any indication, their return to the road should be a lighter-waving good time. BOOK 4. ‘Rise: A Pop History of Asian America From the Nineties to Now’ With essays, cartoons, and contributions…

IN 2001 DMX went to Arizona to record his fourth album. By then, he had already become an unlikely superstar, a barking battle rapper turned crossover sensation. He had channeled all the pain of his first three decades on Earth, all the rhymes that had been filling up the pages of his notebooks for years, into three multiplatinum albums. His single “Party Up (Up in Here)” was breaking down the door to a new demographic of fans. Just a few years before, Puff Daddy had said DMX was unmarketable. He used to be feared in his own neighborhood in Yonkers, New York — someone people would avoid when they saw him coming around the corner with his dog. Now the whole world wanted a piece of X. After three…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS WHEN BIG THIEF’S Adrianne Lenker hears her band’s music in the background at a cafe, she winces. “I just feel like, ‘Man, I remember recording that song and how radical it felt, how raw it felt, like we were ripping something open,’” she says. “And now, here in this coffee shop, it’s just completely blinded into the blur of everything. There’s no drama in it.” In the past few years, Big Thief have started to get played in quite a few coffee shops. With their pair of 2019 albums, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands, the folk-rock quartet became the type of indie favorite that sells out theaters and gets nominated for Grammys. “It’s really lovely to witness a purely motivated art collective kicking ass,”…

I AM SITTING WITH Doja Cat in an Airbnb in Universal City, California, listening to a punk cover of “I Saw Her Standing There” and polishing off the toothsome lobster-caviar rolls she made. She’s talking about an ex-boyfriend and puffing on her omnipresent highlighter-colored tobacco vape (“I don’t crave many things other than this stupid thing. That’s pretty much it. Chocolate, sex, and vape”). All of a sudden, after about an hour of chatting about her last album and past relationships, she looks down at her Minnie Mouse-encased iPhone and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. For a few minutes, I’m standing in the kitchen, scribbling notes, cleaning up lobster meat, and trying to figure out the automatic trash can, when she comes back and calls out, “My…

In the middle of California’s Central Valley, in a modest milky-blue home on one acre of farmland, lives a small group of nuns. They wear habits and abide by a set of vows, but as the door opens, it’s clear that the Sisters of the Valley, as they’re known, aren’t living in a traditional convent. Because as the scent wafts out, it’s unambiguous: It’s the earthy, pungent smell of weed. When we visit, five women live in the home: Sister Kate, 62; Sister Sophia, 49; Sister Quinn, 25; and at the moment, Sister Luna and Sister Camilla, both 34, who are visiting from Mexico. Sister Kass, 29, lives off the property with her two children and her partner, Brother Rudy, the collective’s crop manager. On this sunny day, the…

A WAR ON SELF-SERIOUS SUPERHEROES Writer-director James Gunn’s ‘Peacemaker’ is a gloriously goofy sendup and sincere character study in one Peacemaker NETWORK HBO Max AIR DATE Jan. 13 STARRING John Cena Danielle Brooks Freddie Stroma Jennifer Holland Robert Patrick ANY DOUBT that Peacemaker would have the same energy, style, and sense of humor that writer-director James Gunn brought to last year’s feature film The Suicide Squad is dispelled within seconds of the superhero show’s opening-credits sequence. It is essentially an Eighties-style music video, with the homicidal title character, played once again by John Cena, and his supporting cast performing a choreographed dance number on a neon-lit stage while the Norwegian glam-metal band Wig Wam’s “Do Ya Wanna Taste It” shreds in the background. It’s the kind of inspired gag…

BTS PLAYED their first in-person concert since the start of the pandemic at L.A.’s SoFi Stadium on Nov. 27, and members of their fan base, known as ARMY, flocked from all across the globe to spend a euphoric evening singing along to hits like “Dynamite,” “Butter,” “Silver Spoon,” and “Permission to Dance.” It was an emotional moment, after the band was forced to cancel a world tour in 2020. “Yesterday, I really shouldn’t say this, but it’s the first time that I saw you in two years, and, honestly, it was a little awkward,” Jimin told the crowd. “To be honest, I don’t think I did all I could do for you guys for the past two years, so it’s an honor, and I’m really moved that all of…

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON was helping Haim prepare for their headlining set at Coachella in 2018 when the Academy Award-winning director of Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, and Phantom Thread turned to guitarist-singer Alana Haim with a thought. “He said, ‘I’m going to put you in a movie,’” says Alana, the youngest of the three Haim sisters. “I was like, ‘OK. All right. I’ll be fine walking in the background of a movie.’” Anderson had something much more than a quick cameo in store. The movie that became Licorice Pizza (out now) was still germinating in his brain at that point, but he knew it would be about a precocious 15-year-old boy in early-Seventies Los Angeles who falls for a brash, sharp-tongued woman 10 years his senior. And even…

ELVIS PRESLEY had been dead for six months when the plastic-surgeon’s knife plunged into Dennis Wise. There Wise lay, on a table in an Orlando hospital, surrounded by photos of the King. He knew what was coming, but the reality of it didn’t really hit him until the doctor, who seemed like a nice enough guy, started carving into his face. “All of a sudden, it started hurting real bad,” Wise recalls. “He said, ‘Give me something!’ and a nurse came over and plunged this needle into me.” Wise soon went under. When he woke up, his swollen face wrapped in bandages, Wise had implants in his cheeks and a curled-up lip, and he was on his way to resembling the King more than his 23-year-old self. For the…

25 MUST-SEE MOVIES FOR 2022 From ‘The Batman’ to ‘Avatar 2,’ the blockbusters and big titles we can’t wait to catch this year By DAVID FEAR Aline Jan. 21 Once upon a time, a girl growing up in Quebec discovered she has a world-class singing voice. She met a manager who steered her to fame, fortune, and global superstardom; he also married her. After embracing her destiny as a pop diva, she settled into a lucrative residency in Las Vegas. If this story sounds somewhat familiar, it’s because that’s exactly what happened to Celine Dion — only writer-director-star Valérie Lemercier is portraying a fictional version of Ms. Dion, named Aline Dieu, in what is a biopic by any other name. The French actor is also playing the singer from…