Table of contents for December 1, 2016 in Rolling Stone

Durant’s New Life great cover story [“the Liberation of Kevin Durant,” RS 1273]. Much respect to Durant, whose honesty will only make people like him more. Glad that you’re at peace, KD. Play like you’re eight years old again! Armando Jamies, via the Internet paul solotaroff’s piece shed light on the socioeconomic structure black Americans – and especially black athletes – are forced to deal with. I wish Durant had given it another shot, but leaving Oklahoma was the best decision. A. Dixon, via the Internet the idea that oklahoma City Thunder management failed to provide Durant with a good supporting cast is ridiculous. The team was loaded last season; you don’t go up 3-1 on the winningest team in NBA history without a solid lineup. If Durant had an ounce…

The Eurythmics co-founder just teamed up with Louisiana blues singer Thomas Lindsey for the collaborative album Spitballin’. Oliver! “Consider Yourself” My dad used to play the Oliver! soundtrack on his gramophone record player, and the whole house came alive. This song always cheered me up. Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue” The bit about abandoning the car out West feels like it comes from a Raymond Chandler novel. And the melody is fantastic. R.L. Burnside “Jumper on the Line” This just stays on the same blues riff over and over. It shows you don’t need complicated lyrics and epic chord changes. Tyrannosaurus Rex “Debora” I saw Marc Bolan in my hometown of Sunderland when he first started out. About 800 girls were spellbound, and you couldn’t get this song out…

‘I’M A PRETTY BIG NERD,” SAYS JOE JONAS, sitting in the L.A. house he’s dubbed “the Shaqteau.” If you’re wondering how it got that name, check the life-size cutout of NBA great Shaquille O’Neal that greets you upon entrance. Jonas – who just released his debut LP with his disco-pop crew, DNCE – has come a long way since his teen days as a sitcom star on the Disney Channel. But he’s kept a boyish sensibility, even as he’s become a little more rugged and sophisticated with age. “I’ve always been attracted to fashion that lets you be yourself,” he says. For Jonas, thatmeans a house stocked with childhood memorabilia as well as fine art and a wardrobe that mixes leather and letterman jackets. “I’m a big-time New York Giants…

 July 20, 2012  James Holmes, 24 Aurora, CO Purchased an assault rifle at a gun store in Colorado and more than 5,000 rounds online. 12 killed, 58 wounded  Dec. 14, 2012  Adam Lanza, 20 Newtown, CT Used a traditional rifle and an AR-15, both of which were purchased legally by his mother. 27 killed, 2 wounded  June 7, 2013  John Zawahri, 23 Santa Monica Bypassed state regulations by uilding his own R-15 out of comonent parts he bought online. 5 killed, 2 wounded  July 16, 2015  Mohammod Youssef Abdulazeez, 24 Chattanooga, TN Opened fire on two military centers with a weapon he bought online. 5 killed, 2 wounded  Oct. 1, 2015  Chris Harper-Mercer, 26 Roseburg, OR Obtained weapons from family members and a licensed firearms dealer. 9 killed, 9 wounded…

Bruno Mars 24K Magic Atlantic HHH Bruno Mars wears a lot of hats on his third LP: giddy uptown-funk savant, bumping-and-grinding R&B time-traveler, Ashford and Simpson-esque quiet-storm balladeer. But the heart of 24K Magic recalls the New Jack Swing of Boyz II Men, Bell Biv DeVoe and Bobby Brown. Mars wanted Magic to re-create the nostalgic wonder of the school dances he attended in the Nineties – and his crowded productions, infectious attitude and soaring voice go well beyond “tribute” into the realm of “blockbuster reboot.” The chorus in “Calling All My Lovelies” – “I got Alesha waiting/Iesha waiting/All the –eeshas waiting on me” – is an adult epilogue to Another Bad Creation’s playground romanticism, and “Perm” is a future-shocked James Brown hip-hop hybrid. Yet while his funk…

Arrival Amy Adams Directed by Denis Villeneuve HHH ½ amy adams, a miracle-working actor, can make you a believer. She’s the heart and soul of Arrival, a mesmerizing mind-bender in which she plays a linguistics prof called in by the military, along with a physicist (Jeremy Renner), to discover the intentions of 12 alien spacecraft hovering over our planet. Director Denis Villeneuve takes a cerebral approach to the material. But it’s Adams, her face a reflection of conflicting emotions, who gets inside your head and makes you feel what’s at stake. Oscar voters, take note. Nocturnal Animals Amy Adams Directed by Tom Ford HHH ½ the versatility of amy Adams shines through in Nocturnal Animals as she takes the role of Susan, a sleek Los Angeles gallery owner who’s falling…

 THIS WAS ONE OF THE best political articles I have read in this election cycle. Excellent understanding and analysis. Too bad that my state, sad Wisconsin, had to be the starting point. We will need decades to recover from the Republican regime currently in power here. Elizabeth Butler Madison, WI  “ROLLING STONE” HAS long been a staple in my home, but Matt Taibbi’s biased reporting bugs me. We the people out here see what’s happening on both sides of the political debate, and we will make up our own minds when we vote. John Daniels Via the Internet  TAIBBI’S PIECE – ALONG with Neil Strauss’ “The Age of Fear” [RS 1272] – should be distributed to every American of voting age. Hell, let’s make them required reading in our high…

For the past two years, the who have been on what they called their “last big tour,” performing some of their most wide-ranging sets in decades with a renewed energy. The tour has been especially reinvigorating for Pete Townshend, who for years had found playing live increasingly dull: “People would say, ‘Were you having fun onstage?’ I’d say, ‘Not really. It’s just what I do,’ ” he says. Townshend’s attitude started changing during the final five weeks of the tour’s most recent leg, which included a set at Desert Trip in Indio, California, that for many fans was the highlight of the festival. Townshend has been encouraged by younger faces in the audience, and a new sense of effortlessness in his playing. “Maybe it’s because I can see the end…

 Danny Brown feat. Kendrick Lamar  “Really Doe”  “This is a banger for sure,” says Diamond of the latest single off Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. “The production reminds me of Nineties hip-hop. Kendrick is fire on the chorus.”  Rihanna “Kiss It Better  Diamond has been spinning Canadian DJ Kaytranada’s dreamy remix of this Anti track, which D calls a perfect weekend party-starter: “It’s the best kind of pop music – supercatchy.”  The Growlers “I’ll Be Around” “Julian Casablancas produced a great album for these guys,” Diamond says of the California “beach goth” group. “This sounds like an update on late-Seventies Rolling Stones.”  The Slits “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” Diamond often plays this 1979 cover by London postpunkers the Slits, which he says “works so well in different modes: party…

For years, miami producer DJ Khaled was best known for shouting a triumphal three word phrase – “We the best!” – over amped-up hip-hop tracks featuring friends like Jay Z, T.I. and Future. Over the past year, though, Khaled has transformed into a star in his own right. His latest album, Major Key, hit Number One, but his surging fame is thanks largely to his Snapchat account, where he combines glimpses of the hip-hop high life (there are many jet-ski rides) with weirdly compelling quotidian scenes like Khaled watering a garden full of flowers he refers to as “angels.” Khaled has in turn become an unlikely digital-age motivational speaker, encouraging followers to absorb his “keys” to success. This month, he’ll release The Keys, a memoir that bundles life lessons into…

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 IT’S RAINING SOMETHING BIBLICAL IN NASHVILLE, COMing down like vengeance between the roadway signs for chicken wings and Jesus and Donald Trump. And here, inside a farm-fresh joint called Butcher and Bee, at a table spread with pickled okra and fried chicken and kale, Evan Rachel Wood is questioning the nature of our reality, the cogs and wheels that have created this very scene, up to and possibly including the guy posted up at the bar who looks like an older Elvis, if Elvis were crazy tall and wearing vintage tweed. “What if this is all bullshit?” Wood asks. “What if this is just conditioning? What if all this is learned and not true? Who am I really, without my programming?”  Decent questions, all, and not necessarily rhetorical. In fact,…

BY WILL HERMES Miranda Lambert The Weight of These Wings RCA HHHH Miranda Lambert’s latest opens on a classic country image: a weekend hangover echoing the one in Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down.” But “Runnin’ Just in Case” is no brooding existential ramble. It’s a gravel-spitting exit from sorrow’s driveway, bad memories shriveling in the rearview. And it sets the tone for the Nashville star’s most ambitious LP, a rangy two-disc set ditching country’s mainstream playbook for the sort of Great Album that rock acts used to crank out regularly back in the day. Rubberneckers have anticipated The Weight of These Wings since Lambert split from Blake Shelton, ending their four-year term as country’s First Couple (another thankless job). Sure, it’s a “breakup record.” But it’s more…

<div class="thick-border"></div> MUST-HAVES <div class="thick-border"></div> Simon and Garfunkel: Bookends 1968 These high school pals from Queens were three years into their stardom – the biggest, most creatively ambitious act to come out of the folk revival since Bob Dylan – when they made this classic, gorgeous and unprecedented album: a look back at the Sixties even before they ended, as hard lessons and now-distant dreams. Bookends was only half a concept album. Side Two was ultimately an unrelated melange of recent singles. But Side One was an exquisite suite of urgency and remembering – the distance and despair within families in “Save the Life of My Child,” the passing of this nation’s ideals in “America” – ending with the eerie, prophetic intimacy of “Old Friends” and the early…

 “My Generation” (Version 3) Townshend’s sputtered delivery on this early acoustic demo was an attempt to sound like a man on amphetamines. “It gave Roger a chance to spit and shout from deep in his belly,” Townshend says.  “The Girls I Could’ve Had” A previously unheard blues rocker about being shy around women. Townshend says it stayed in the can because Daltrey was such a successful ladies’ man.  “A Legal Matter” The in-progress version of the first song Townshend recorded lead vocals on features surprisingly countryish lead guitar: “Roger and I had occasionally done it that way for fun,” he says. “It fits very well.”  “Sunrise” (Version 1) This appeared on 1967’s The Who Sell Out as a fragile ballad. The ’65 demo shows jazzier, more confident origins. “I wrote…

Tuesday, november 8th, early afternoon. Outside the Trump Tower in Manhattan, a man in the telltale red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat taps me on the shoulder. “You press?” he says, looking at a set of lanyards around my neck. I nod. “Fuck yourself,” he says, thrusting a middle finger in my face. He then turns around and walks a boy of about five away from me down 5th Avenue, a hand gently tousling his son’s hair. This was before Donald Trump’s historic victory. The message afterward no doubt would have been the same. There’s no way to overstate the horror of what just went down. Sure, we’ve had some unstable characters enter the White House. JFK had health problems that led him to take amphetamine shots during the Cuban…

Metallica Hardwired. . . to Self-Destruct Blackened HHHH It’s been eight years since Metallica’s last studio album. But that’s small change next to their long haul to this two-disc resurrection: via the jagged apocalypse of 1988’s ...And Justice for All and the focused brawn of 1991’s Metallica. The mostly epic-length tracks – almost entirely written by drummer Lars Ulrich and singer-guitarist James Hetfield – are melodically assured furies of serial riffing and tempo shocks. “Hardwired,” “Atlas, Rise!” and “Now That We’re Dead” are relentless whirls of tribal chug and hyperthrash, braking hard at the title chorus lines. Guitarist Kirk Hammett’s torrid wah-wah solos affirm his standing as heavy metal’s most tuneful arsonist. And after working out his interior rage earlier in this century, Hetfield is on vintage-lyric ground…

“Hey Schoolgirl” Non-album single 1957 Simon and Garfunkel were Queens teens when they cut this slice of Fifties-rock candy as Tom and Jerry. It landed them on American Bandstand. “Bleecker Street” Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. 1964 This gently buoyant postcard from the ground zero of the folk revival comes with naive but ambitious imagery, already showing Simon’s poetic streak. “Anji” Sounds of Silence 1965 This intricate solo instrumental was a rite of passage for young folkies in Britain. Simon learned it there, nails it here. “Blues Run the Game” Old Friends 1997 Simon produced a ’65 recording of this folk-blues diamond by Jackson C. Frank. Simon and Garfunkel’s take sat in the can for 30 years. Both are beauties. “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and…

Who are your heroes? I’m fascinated with the Alamo, so I go back to Davy Crockett. There was a lot of bravery on both sides of the walls. Crockett was an example of someone who could have left the fort, but he did the right thing and stayed, and he was killed for it. Also, and I know this sounds random, but I admire Jack Nicholson. He’s so honest as an actor, down to his hair. It’s always out of place. What book has left the most lasting impression on you? Romeo and Juliet touched me very much. It’s a bit like the Alamo in its two factions. When the Franco Zeffirelli movie came out, I saw it many times. I was drawn to the romance – total romance. I…