Rolling Stone -julkaisun June 2019 -irtonumeron sisällysluettelo

“If you get an opportunity, even if you don’t think you’re fully ready for it, you’ve got to go with it. Say yes. Suck it up. Or is it ‘soak it up’? Somewhere in between.”—KEVIN PARKER OF TAME IMPALA IN THE WEEKS leading up to his fourth appearance on our cover, Howard Stern told listeners he was nervous. Not about the interview but about the photo shoot, which he despaired about openly on the air during his SiriusXM morning show. “Man, oh, man,” he said with a sigh on April 15th. “I hate how I look.” Though still boyish at 65, with his gawky posture, angular features and mass of curly locks, Stern is camera-shy. “I’ll talk to you for 10 hours,” he told senior writer Andy Greene. “But…

MAC DEMARCO is hanging out at home in Los Angeles, playing video games on the couch. “I don’t really know what’s going on, but let’s rock and roll!” he says. This might be the most Mac DeMarco way possible to begin a conversation. His chill folk-rock tunes, laced with a surreal sense of humor, have made the Canadian singer-songwriter an unlikely star. Since breaking through in 2014, he’s become a bankable live draw with hundreds of millions of Spotify streams, despite making little attempt to keep up with contemporary music. On his fourth LP, Here Comes the Cowboy, DeMarco gets even weirder. Take the title track, which began as a twangy guitar part and a mantra-like phrase that tumbled out when DeMarco was messing around in his garage last…

The folk icon recently played the final American show of her farewell tour. She’ll wrap it up in Madrid on July 28th at the Teatro Real. TRADITIONAL ”We Shall Overcome” This is probably the greatest protest song ever written, an anthem of real depth. It’s a meeting of politics and social change and music. BOB DYLAN ”Blowin’ in the Wind” The message in this is universal. I’ve heard German boys singing it by a fire. It’s an anthem. That’s why so many people have latched on to it. JOHN LENNON ”Imagine” I sing this on my current tour. It has a beautiful lilt, and it’s easy to sing. People feel at home and together when they sing along to it. SIMON AND GARFUNKEL ”The Boxer” This is a protest…

AS ONE half of Outkast, Big Boi has played to more than a few awestruck crowds. But in February, at age 44, he played the biggest gig of his life. Clad in a fur large enough to swallow a lesser man, Big Boi two-stepped his way through his 2003 hit “The Way You Move” during the Super Bowl halftime show at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Some weeks later, Big Boi joined with the NFL to donate $100,000 to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. “It’s the birthplace right here,” he says about Atlanta. “Ebenezer Baptist Church was a hotbed for the civil-rights movement. We had [Ralph] Abernathy and Dr. King and John Lewis. They paved the way for us.” The NFL donation was part of Big…

J Balvin Leads a Reggaeton Revolution If you’re lucky enough to catch J Balvin at a festival this summer, buckle up. In June, the reggaeton star will play Primavera Sound in Barcelona and Porto, Portugal; he’ll storm the Belgian fest Tomorrowland in July, then Chicago’s Lollapalooza in August. He first teased his summertime set at Coachella’s main stage in April and reached the apex of the crusade he started so many years ago as a shy singer-songwriter in his hometown of Medellín, Colombia: turning American pop fans on to his arty, Spanish-language take on urban music. Balvin came stocked with an arsenal of original hits — including his first Number One single, “I Like It” — and performed alongside two cartoonishly huge Cardi B and Bad Bunny bobbleheads. Populated…

HOWARD STERN HASN’T RELEASED A BOOK IN 24 YEARS. Back in those days, he was a guy who didn’t think twice about calling Rosie O’Donnell a “fat pig”; using a giant, rotting fish as a mallet to spank a naked woman on the air; or viciously mocking a member of his “Wack Pack” with Down syndrome he’d dubbed “Gary the Retard.” On the cover of the book Miss America, he dressed as a drag queen, and inside he offered detailed accounts of his private cybersex sessions with fans. “I needed her to make me come,” he wrote about a woman he called a “hot little slut.” “My balls were bluer than the tip of Walt Disney’s frozen nose.” The Howard Stern of 2019 — who spends his free time…

TOBY LINGLE WAS CREMATED in a 49ers cap, a Star Wars T-shirt and sunglasses shortly after his funeral at Highland Park Community Church in Casper, Wyoming. He was 43. The outfit was the daily wear for an aggressively coarse and casual man. Lingle was that guy, the one who told the crude joke to your kids and insisted on swearing in front of the elderly at restaurants. He would simply amp up the blue material and drop some more f-bombs if you called him on it. ¶ His sister, Tawny Perales, showed me a picture of Lingle in his coffin. “He wore the cap all the time because he was losing his hair,” she told me at a Starbucks not far from the church. “People think it’s weird I…

DOMINICAN POP ARTIST Vicente Garcia cites Paul Simon as a key influence, and you can hear a Graceland-like sense of boundary-crossing possibility all over his music. Garcia got his start fronting the R&B-leaning group Calor Urbano in the early Aughts, and now he’s sneaking into the mainstream as a Latin Grammy-nominated solo act. On his new LP, Candela, funky, full-tilt songs like the title track and “La Tambora” enhance traditional merengue music with handsome synthesizers and keen drum programming. It’s an intricate pop hybrid, but he makes it seem easy.…

Fleishman Is in Trouble Taffy Brodesser-Akner RANDOM HOUSE LIBBY EPSTEIN, the narrator of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s enthralling debut novel, Fleishman Is in Trouble, is a magazine-writer-turned-suburban-mom obsessed with the work of Archer Sylvan, a legendary Tom Wolfe-esque journalist who picked one side of a story and argued passionately for it, ignoring all contrary evidence. Late in the book, about the turbulent post-marital-separation life of Libby’s old college friend, physician Toby Fleishman, Libby vows, “I would never be Archer Sylvan, but I would write my book, and it would have something in it that Archer was incapable of, which is all sides of the story, even the ones that hurt to look at directly — even the ones that made us too angry to want to hear them.” Libby is an…

“Knowing he’s been indulging for decades and is doing well gives a different perspective. Cheers to all the open-minded individuals who don’t judge a plant by its stigma!”—Jenny Staaf, via email Willie Stays High America’s favorite stoner, Willie Nelson, starred in our first annual Weed Issue in May [“The High Life,” RS 1327]. A few weeks before his 86th birthday, the legendary Texas songwriter sat down with ROLLING STONE senior writer Patrick Doyle, at his longtime home outside Austin. He reminisced about smoking his first joint in the 1950s, talked about starting his own cannabis company and previewed his next album. In response to the cover story, one reader, Ruben Baeza, tweeted, “The world would be a better place if everyone was more like Willie Nelson.” Paul Kramarchyk said,…

The first time Stella Donnelly sang about her vibrator, her parents were in the crowd. “It was a really funny moment of ‘Well, here I am!’” she says, laughing. The Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter, 27, spent years playing corporate parties in a cover band before finding her own voice as a brazen indie-pop truth-teller. On her excellent full-length debut, Beware of the Dogs, she takes on sexism, racial injustice and lame dudes who like Ernest Hemingway, pulling no punches against any of them. One highlight is “Old Man,” where she triumphantly stands her ground against a creep: “Oh, are you scared of me, old man?/Or are you scared of what I’ll do?/You grabbed me with an open hand/The world is grabbin’ back at you.” “I’d gone for so long singing other…

ALI WONG had been a working comedian for years before the 2016 release of her first special, Baby Cobra, which she performed while seven months pregnant with her first child, catapulted her to stardom. Her 2018 follow-up, Hard-Knock Wife (filmed while she was pregnant with her second), was an equally raunchy exploration of married life and motherhood. Now, she’s starring in two Netflix projects — an animated series called Tuca & Bertie and a romantic comedy, Always Be My Maybe, which she wrote with her co-star Randall Park — and has a book coming out this fall. But stand-up is still her lifeblood. Wong called just after arriving home in L.A. from a four-day, seven-gig stint in San Diego with her children in tow. “It was hectic,” she says.…

ONE FATEFUL NIGHT LAST FALL in Malibu, Kevin Parker was stoned and tipsy in an ocean-view rental house, writing music and marveling at the ferocious Santa Ana winds. “It was apocalyptically windy,” he says. “I couldn’t even stand outside to smoke my spliff.” The 33-year-old mastermind behind the blockbuster psych-rock act Tame Impala, Parker had a drumbeat going on an endless loop as he gazed at the Pacific, hit his joint, sipped some gin (or maybe it was wine; he alternates between the two as his hangovers dictate) and waited for inspiration. “I can sit there with a beat playing for hours,” he says. “Sometimes nothing comes to me, but sometimes I get a melody I’m obsessed with.” He was about halfway through work on the new Tame Impala…

Bruce Springsteen Western Stars COLUMBIA THERE HAVE been times throughout Bruce Springsteen’s career when California has called. He named a song for the state after his parents moved there in 1971, and he’d return to it, in life and writing, repeatedly, chasing his dreams like Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. Western Stars is the latest visit: a lushly orchestrated set of throwback, country-tinged folk pop that, despite some resemblance to previous works like Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, sounds like little else in his catalog. Frankly, its sheen is off-putting at first. But once you settle in, the set reveals some of Springsteen’s most beguiling work ever. The sonic approach is in full bloom on “Hello Sunshine,” the first single. Draped in strings and pedal steel moan, it evokes…

What’s the best and worst thing about success? I look at success and failure as two sides of the same thing. It goes back to ancient times: “Hey, let’s go kill that rhinoceros. Well, we didn’t get it this time, but we learned how to do it so in the future, we can not go hungry.” Failures can be constructive. Apocalypse Now was initially viewed as a failure; now it’s a classic. The avant-garde of yesterday is the wallpaper design of today. Some of the greatest artists of their day, we may have never heard of them. But the “failures” like Van Gogh or Rousseau, who had to take his paintings around in a wheelbarrow — you’d give your eyeteeth now to have those paintings. Who are your heroes?…

1. Stef Chura “They’ll Never” We were huge fans of this indie rocker’s 2017 debut LP, Messes. But she’s really upping her game here. The guitars sound like fighter planes, and her voice is cut with country grit as she delivers the kind of Big Rock Anthem today’s young folks sometimes seem a little too shy to shoot for. 2. Bruce Springsteen “Hello Sunshine” A new side of Springsteen, showing off his love of California AM gold like Glen Campbell and Harry Nilsson. It conjures a sense of post-Sixties/Vietnam comedown that Bruce himself would show up to vanquish later in the decade. 3. Lil Zay Osama “Changed Up” This Chicago rapper’s breakout moment is a true stunner. Lil Zay drops a haunting depiction of betrayal and rage that’s both…

THERE’S A GREAT MOMENT in the Billie Eilish video for “Bad Guy” where you can behold everything that makes her the new pop queen for our moment. She steps into the club and gets carded — bad news, since as anyone on Earth knows by now, she’s just 17. The bouncer holds out his hand for her ID. Eilish takes out her Invisalign and drops it into his palm, all drippy with saliva. Eeewww. It’s one thing to hear her do this on her album — but another to see the blasé sadism all over her face. So awesomely disgusting. And you worried pop stars were running out of ways to shock people. Eilish is more than just the teenager of the year — she’s the first invader from…

MADISON, WISCONSIN. A blustery Friday evening. A few thousand supporters of Vermont senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders are gathered in James Madison Park, along the shores of Lake Mendota. Though it’s April, it’s cold as hell. A group of Bern fans look ready to blow away in the breeze as their giant American and Wisconsin state flags fill up like spinnaker sails. When Sanders finally ascends to the lectern, all you can see from a distance is a shock of white hair whipping in the wind atop a shiny black overcoat. He looks like a gull in a Glad bag. “When I was leaving Washington this morning, I was wondering — should I take my coat or not?” he says. “Right decision. Good!” It’s the beginning of Sanders’…