Inhaltsverzeichnis für December 2019 in Rolling Stone

THE COUNTRY MUSIC that Luke Combs loved as a kid growing up in North Carolina in the Nineties may not be considered the coolest by today’s standards: Instead of outlaw music or alt-country, he was a big fan of mainstream Nashville hitmakers Brooks and Dunn, Garth Brooks, and Clint Black. “I’d love to lie to you so people would think I was cool and say I was listening to Merle Haggard when I was 10, but I wasn’t,” Combs says. Combs’ ability to channel that unabashed populism has helped make him one of the biggest stars in country music right now. The burly singer-songwriter — who performs in an oversize fishing shirt and a baseball hat — has scored six Number One singles in the past three years, including…

The Rush frontman’s recent tome, Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass, is a history of the guitar that includes photos from his own collection. THE WHO “My Generation” A pop song with bass solos? John Entwistle was arguably the greatest rock bassist of them all. His playing was bold and incredibly dexterous. CREAM “Crossroads” Seeing Jack Bruce roam wildly up and down the neck of his Gibson EB3 in concert made me not want to play bass, but to play bass in a rock trio. LED ZEPPELIN “What Is and What Should Never Be” John Paul Jones changes gear, holds down the heavy bottom, and adds terrific melody throughout this song. YES “Roundabout” A hit song driven by an outrageously complex, rockin’ bass line by Chris Squire. He…

DECEMBER 1969: THE Rolling Stones are capping off their decade of triumph with a new album. It’s called Let It Bleed. The songs are full of doom, death, and destruction. Right from the start, it’s bad news, from the opening guitar shivers of “Gimme Shelter.” “That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really,” Mick Jagger told Jann S. Wenner in his 1995 “Jagger Remembers” ROLLING STONE interview. “It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that. It’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens. Pillage and burning.” Fifty years after it came out, Let It Bleed sounds timelier than ever. Amid all the chaos, the Stones made a masterpiece that holds up as the ultimate rock & roll album for bleak times, which is why it…

In 2019, Artists Go Feat. First Why songs with featured artists are more popular than ever right now STREAMING HAS PAVED the way for the dominance of hip-hop, the rise of Latin pop in the U.S., the reigns of Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish, and the existence of Bhad Bhabie. But one of the biggest come-ups has been that of four letters often nestled inside parentheses: “feat.” The feature — which gained popularity in the Eighties on songs like Queen’s “Under Pressure” (feat. David Bowie) and Stevie Nicks’ “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” (feat. Tom Petty) — is increasingly prevalent on the charts. Why? The growth of hip-hop, a historically collaborative genre, has certainly played a role, with hip-hop accounting for a larger majority of the charts each…

Carey On! Mariah Carey attended Heidi Klum’s Halloween party in New York dressed as an Eighties rocker. Just after midnight — right as a new 25th-anniversary edition of her Merry Christmas album dropped — the singer Instagrammed a video of herself in reindeer pajamas. “It’s tiiiiime,” she said, officially ringing in the holiday season. Rolling in the Deep The NYPD threw Queens’ Rolling Loud into chaos when it requested that five rappers — including Pop Smoke and Don Q — be pulled from the lineup because they had “been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide.” The hip-hop festival happened anyway, making its first stop in the city that birthed the genre, with Megan Thee Stallion, A$AP Rocky, and Travis Scott all performing. During “Butterfly Effect,” Scott took a…

Beck Hyperspace CAPITOL SOMEWHERE inside every album Beck has made since Mellow Gold — his 1994 surprise attack of slippery irony and hip-hop bravado — is the solo folk-blues singer caught on that year’s One Foot in the Grave, writing about despair with a surrealist edge while turned toward hope. That is the Beck who jumps out here in “Saw Lightning,” in looping spasms of acoustic, skidding Delta slide guitar. Most of the song’s apocalypse comes in contemporary kicks. Beck sings of great fire and flooding, praying for rescue in a strident android’s tone — like Skip James in Auto-Tune — and overdubbed layers of galactic doo-wop. Pharrell Williams, Beck’s chief accomplice on Hyperspace, drums in martial-funk time and speed raps like a digital assistant in a rush. But…

UPDATE DANCE-FLOOR HEAD TRIPS Electronic music producers use subtle beauty to take us higher FOR SOME people, electronic dance music means weapons-grade thump and drug-zonked fun. But dance-floor refinement can be just as awesome, without risking you a visit from EMTs. Sam Shepherd, the London producer who records as Floating Points, creates a kind of down-to-earth elation on his stunning LP Crush, balancing serenely smiling synth textures and gently propulsive house grooves on tracks that seem to shyly wink toward transcendence; “LesAlpx” evokes the alloy glide of classic Detroit techno as it builds and recedes, and “Bias” goes from foreboding drone to glistening banger. Tunes 2011-2019 collects 17 loose tracks by downtempo dubstep icon Burial to create the reclusive artist’s first album since 2007. Spare, anxiously throbbing tracks like…

“This is the best duo I could imagine. My first concert was Elton John, and Lana Del Rey has helped me feel not alone on issues in my life.”—Cosmin B., via Facebook FOR OUR NOVEMBER ISSUE [“Musicians on Musicians,” RS 1333], we invited some of our favorite artists to sit down with a musical hero. Lana Del Rey prepared 13 pages of questions for her visit with Elton John, resulting in a conversation that ranged from Seventies L.A. rock to the value of having mystique. Ringo Starr and Dave Grohl (below) bonded over how they still cope with the losses of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain; Brandi Carlile got her hero Bonnie Raitt to open up about how she faced the challenge of being a woman in a studio…

1. I Got Mine 2008 The Black Keys started a recent show in Denver with this stomper from Attack and Release, which they like for its combination of slow tempo and heavy riffs. “It’s kind of like when Kool-Aid Man breaks through the wall,” Dan Auerbach says. Discussing how they made the set list for their first tour in five years, he jokes, “We just went to the top 25 songs on Spotify.” 2. Eagle Birds 2019 Auerbach likes this hypnotic Delta-blues-style rocker because he gets to play a Peavey Razer — the guitar of choice for the late Mississippi guitarist T-Model Ford. “I probably saw T-Model [live] more than anybody,” he says. “He’s probably our biggest influence. Junior Kimbrough was like jazz, but T-Model was like a garage…

A 15-SECOND FEATURE can launch a young rapper to stardom — just ask Snoop Dogg (who came of age on Dr. Dre’s “Nuthin But a ‘G’ Thang”) or Nicki Minaj (whose eviscerating verse on Kanye West’s “Monster” made her the hottest name in hip-hop in 2010). It’s not always a younger artist who’s making the cameo, but younger MCs dominated features in 2019. The top three featured artists were all young Atlanta rappers, suggesting hip-hop in 2019 moved further in the direction ATL superstars like Young Thug and Future pushed it in the early 2010s. “I always knew the ground that those guys could shake up,” Thug tells RS of Lil Baby and Gunna. “I done gave all them the game from my standpoint.” THE KILLER CROSSOVERS AS HIP-HOP…

THE FIGHT TO DISLODGE Donald Trump from the presidency has sparked unprecedented interest in the 2020 Democratic primary, drawing dozens of candidates, including no fewer than seven sitting senators. But the fight to wrest the Senate from Republican control — and oust Mitch McConnell as majority leader — is arguably just as important. Take it from Amy McGrath, the former Marine fighter pilot aiming to win McConnell’s Kentucky Senate seat, who sees curbing McConnell’s power as essential to healing our republic. “He’s the epitome of Washington dysfunction, everything we hate about politics,” she says. “You cannot drain the swamp until you get rid of Mitch McConnell.” The stakes could hardly be higher. Unless Democrats flip the Senate, the grand plans of the presidential candidates are dead on arrival. Capturing…

DIRECTOR J.J. Abrams is trying to talk about his new Star Wars movie, but the process of making it keeps intruding. He’s in his office on the second floor of his Bad Robot production company’s Willy Wonka-worthy headquarters in Santa Monica, and his assistant keeps opening the door to pass him notes, as Abrams’ iPhone buzzes with increasingly urgent-seeming texts from the film’s visual-effects supervisor. He’s fresh from a stage over at Sony Studios, where John Williams was conducting an orchestra through the score for December 20th’s Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. Just last week, Abrams was doing reshoots right here at Bad Robot, in a green-screen room that allows him maximum movie-tweaking flexibility. It’s mid-October, and the film is 71 days away from release. Episode…

ON THE MORNING OF September 29th, six weeks before the 2016 election, Donald Trump was in a conference room at Trump Tower in New York talking to leaders of the religious right about sex-reassignment surgery. In a way, he was bringing about his own transformation. Having quashed the idea that his run for president was a lark or a publicity stunt, having come from behind to take the Republican nomination, and having fought his way up the polls to the extent that he was within striking distance of Hillary Clinton, Trump was now trying to seal the deal. And that involved something he would soon become much more known for: a discussion of other people’s genitalia. “With the operation or without the operation?” Trump asked the conservative Christian leaders…

Coldplay Everyday Life Parlophone AFTER THEIR platinum 2015 pop move, A Head Full of Dreams, and a two-year tour that shifted $523 million in tickets, easy-listening rock champs Coldplay have made an album that aspires to more than stadium-packing. This is positive: When Ed Sheeran becomes your gold standard, it would seem time for a rethink. Evoking an Eighties-inscribed notion of ambition, Everyday Life is a double LP, Coldplay’s rangiest and deepest release by a mile. Divided into halves titled (wait for it) “Sunrise” and “Sunset,” the band taps into storefront gospel, Nigerian Afrobeat, and Sufi qawwali music. There are choirs, orchestral strings, and interpolations of the Janis Joplin signature “Cry Baby,” and late Scottish indie rocker Scott Hutchison’s “Los Angeles, Be Kind.” Strikingly, the lyrics and sound bites…

For the cover of her debut album, Cheap Queen, Mikaela Straus embraced a “drag persona,” with hyperstylized makeup. “[It’s] this feminized version of myself,” says the 20-year-old, who performs under the name King Princess. “And I love that, because that’s something I was terrified of until, maybe, last year.” Inventing that persona was a way for Straus to get through a breakup; she sings about that relationship on Cheap Queen, which combines sparse, R&B-inflected production with sharp, openhearted lyrics. The LP is the culmination of nearly two years of anticipation that began with 2018’s “1950,” a song that was at once a parody of pop nostalgia and a genuine plea for romantic salvation (“I hate it when dudes try to chase me/But I love it when you try to…

CAMILA CABELLO was thinking about performing her new album even before she recorded it. After playing stadiums in 2018 as an opening act on her friend Taylor Swift’s Reputation world tour, the 22-year-old entered the studio to record her upcoming second album, Romance, with a goal: to record bombastic songs that would sound great live. “I was really inspired by the big sounds of the Eighties,” she says, jet-lagged and calling from London. “I just liked the drama — like Queen, where everything is so intense. I want these songs to feel amazing to perform.” While tracks on her self-titled debut tackled her roots, relationships, and establishing herself as a solo artist separate from her group Fifth Harmony, Cabello wanted Romance to be more thematically focused. Helpfully, she fell…

BEST CONCERT MERCH BEST BOX SETS BOB DYLAN, TRAVELIN’ THROUGH The latest volume in Dylan’s Bootleg Series chronicles his late-Sixties sessions in Nashville, including a disc of iconic duets with Johnny Cash. PRINCE, 1999 Prince’s landmark 1982 double LP, which featured classic hits like “Little Red Corvette” and “1999,” gets supersized with four discs of previously unheard outtakes and live tracks. ELVIS, LIVE 1969 This 11-CD set documents the King’s return to live performance after an eight-year hiatus. It’s an image of Presley summoning the rock & roll fire that originally made him a legend. THE BEATLES, ABBEY ROAD This 50th-anniversary edition of the Fab Four’s beloved masterpiece comes with a bold new mix and 23 fascinating outtakes and demos. BEST BOOKS ’Til Wrong Feels Right BY IGGY POP…

‘BILLY DEE WILLIAMS,” says Billy Dee Williams, ticking off the syllables with a well-manicured index finger. “BILLY … DEE … WILLIAMS.” He repeats himself three more times in his musical baritone before unleashing one of the 20th century’s most seductive smiles, satisfied he’s made his point. “There are certain individuals whose legacy you will never forget,” he says, taking a sip of his Tuesday-afternoon beverage, a vodka-lemonade concoction. “I’ve always tried to create this — Billy Dee Williams.” Williams, who turned 82 in April, came out of semiretirement to reclaim the role of star-faring smoothie Lando Calrissian in December’s Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, which means his Hollywood career now spans 60 years, beginning with 1959’s The Last Angry Man. “It goes back to when I…

‘PURPLE RAIN” may be Prince’s biggest and arguably greatest album, but his 1982 opus, 1999, was his most pivotal triumph. After releasing four scandalously excellent records of erotic R&B, he put on some pants, toned down the Lothario act, rebranded himself as a pop savant, and attained superstardom via smashes like “Delirious” and “1999,” and the steamily vulnerable “Little Red Corvette.” This feat was especially impressive because 1999 was a 70-minute double album, albeit a uniquely unbloated one — exactly the right amount of overflowing, genre-blurring genius. This has never been more apparent than on this six-disc, “Super Deluxe” edition 1999 box set, which pairs the album with two discs of mostly unreleased outtakes from his fabled vault and electrifying live recordings from the era. It creates an alternate-universe…

What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given? Know that when you walk away from something, you gave it your best. And then: Fuck it. Just keep moving on and say, “Fuck it.” What’s the most important rule you live by? No dickheads. You see them a lot in our business, actually. You know, when you’re number one on a call sheet, you set a tone on the set. If you’re late to the set, other people will be late. If you’re an asshole, other people will be assholes. You work with talented people who are nice to work with. And then there are talented people who are dickheads. So as I’ve gotten older, my rule now is: No dickheads. Don’t need ’em. Don’t have time for ’em. What’s…