Table of contents for August 2020 in Rolling Stone

NOT TOO LONG AGO, Margo Price was offered the chance to collaborate with a more famous artist. Some people around her thought it was a good idea, but Price wasn’t sure. “I love collaborating with people, but I’m not going to do it just because somebody’s famous,” she says. “I really have to admire their art.” For Price, it was one of many decisions she faced after the success of her first two albums. On those LPs, she combined the sounds of classic country with harrowing stories from her life, which included growing up in poverty and the loss of her infant son, as well as songs about pressing issues like the pay gap. That led her to what she calls “a fork in the road” that coincided with…

I’m a 22-year-old woman, and in the past four years, ever since I lost my virginity, I’ve had sex with 13 men. Potential partners are judging me for it. What is your take on “body counts” in general? Is that really a red flag for men? —Lynn, Washington, DC I don’t see it as a red flag. The minute a woman does this, she gets called a “slut.” If we do it, we take out an ad in the paper. We brag! It’s such a lousy system and so loaded against women. I think having a healthy sex life is exactly what a person your age should be doing. What I don’t think is healthy is jumping into a marriage 15 days out of high school. In my heart,…

IT’S A FRIDAY EVENING in mid-May, and Chrissie Hynde is supposed to be kicking off a tour tonight in support of the Pretenders’ latest album, Hate for Sale. Instead, she’s stuck in her London flat, singing Bob Dylan’s “Standing in the Doorway” over the phone to the band’s lead guitarist for a covers project the two are working on. Her life, like everyone’s, has been upended, but you wouldn’t know it talking to her. “I live alone and I don’t have any pets, so I have all this time to mess around,” she says later. “I feel like I’m 15: no responsibilities, no pressure. I can paint and play songs.” In recent months, Hynde, 68, has reconnected with her saxophone-playing brother, Terry, who lives in Ohio, and she frequently…

THE LAST OF AYANNA Pressley’s hair fell out in the middle of December, on the day before the Massachusetts representative and the rest of the House voted on President Trump’s articles of impeachment. Losing her crown of Senegalese twists — the signature hairstyle that Pressley, 46, had been wearing since winning the 7th Congressional District seat two years ago — was traumatic for several reasons. It was also the anniversary of her mother’s death. “I was missing her. I was mourning my hair. I was mourning the state of our democracy,” Pressley said when she revealed her alopecia diagnosis in January. The world has only become more tragic and tumultuous since then, but Pressley, who is currently running unopposed for re-election in November, has not slowed down. She has…

THE CHICKS JUMP INTO THE FIRE The country trio’s first record in 14 years is their poppiest and most personal LP ever Gaslighter The Chicks COLUMBIA IN THE NINETIES, the Dixie Chicks paved the way for the truth-telling women who dominate country music today. But they’ve never had much luck living in the world they made. In 2003, some light bashing of President Bush got them exiled from Nashville, and their rock-influenced comeback LP, Taking the Long Way, failed to create a viable path forward. Even their recent decision to drop “Dixie” from their name echoes the burden of bad history. The trio’s first studio release in nearly 15 years is their most pop-sounding, but they still have some bones to pick. This time the conflict is coming from…

“When people say, ‘You’re not going to be the Dixie Chicks’ — I hate the analogy. I never was trying to be the Dixie Chicks. I’m trying to be Neil Young, motherfuckers.”—MARGO PRICE WHEN CHARLES HOLMES traveled to Atlanta on June 27th to interview Lil Baby for this month’s cover story, the city was still raging over the police killing of Rayshard Brooks outside a local Wendy’s and reeling from a new escalation in coronavirus cases, with a record 10,284 reported across Georgia that week. “It was an intense time to be there,” says Holmes. “But it also felt like the right time to visit Lil Baby.” The Atlanta rapper’s latest song, “The Bigger Picture,” describes in urgent, personal rhymes the fear, pain, and “wicked” system of police brutality…

AS A TEENAGER, photographer Mark Weiss used to sneak his camera into concerts and later sell the pictures he took to fans. He stopped in the late Seventies after spending a night in jail for hawking shots of Kiss; once out, he brought his portfolio to Circus magazine, which bought one of his photos of Aerosmith. Before long, he was on the front lines of the Eighties’ hard-rock revolution. Now he’s looking back on the big-hair era in The Decade That Rocked, which includes a foreword by Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. “The people who listened to this music are still listening to it as religiously as they were back then,” Weiss says. “That’s why bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Bon Jovi can still play stadiums. No other decade…

It was Memorial Day weekend 2011, and Awad Bilal was twerking in front of a thousand people. Bilal was a touring dancer for New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia at the time, and they’d rolled into a festival in Connecticut — only to find what Bilal recalls as an audience of “weird young white boys” who reacted harshly to Freedia’s fabulous spectacle. “They threw bottles at us,” he says. So Freedia and her band cut their set short and headed to a local diner, where the twerking didn’t stop. “Here we are at this diner, living our best lives,” Bilal recalls. “There’s such a strength in being with your crew.” Today, Bilal, 34, has a crew of his own: Too Free, the dance-music trio he sings in with bandmates…

JOHN LEGEND’S new album, Bigger Love, is a lush, seductive, often-danceable collection of grown-up love songs, with sweet retro-R&B production touches on nearly every track. There are striking departures, too, like the Coldplay-meets–Kings of Leon power ballad “Wild” (with guitar from Gary Clark Jr.) and the trap/doo-wop hybrid of “Ooh Laa.” In all, it would’ve been a perfect balm for a nation in social isolation; as it happens, Legend ended up releasing it in the midst of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. “Albums take a while to make,” he says, “and there’s still quite a distance between writing it and putting it out. So you can’t ever be sure exactly what environment you’re going to be releasing it into. But here we are. We’re at this moment.” This album…

SUVs tend to be bulky and utilitarian, focused on either surviving off-road adventures or shuttling the kids from school to practice (pre-pandemic, anyway). But the Jaguar I-Pace (from $69,850) is straight-up gorgeous. It’s also a blast to drive. Along the iconic Angeles Crest Highway in the San Gabriel Mountains, the I-Pace kept up with smaller cars through the twists and turns. A brief detour up Mount Wilson saw the Jag eat up the narrow road’s tight corners. Meanwhile, roomy seats and a comprehensive (if sometimes hard-to-use) infotainment system helped keep everyone happy inside. On the way down the mountain, the regenerative braking system — it’s how EVs recharge their batteries on the fly — slowed the vehicle whenever my foot came off the pedal. At times it was too…

THE BELLS OF Hamtramck’s Saint Florian Church ring out for Sunday Mass. The building was enlarged in 1928, and the June sun glances off a spire built 200 feet high so that its Polish-immigrant parishioners would have a symbol of Christ that towered above the smokestacks that blotted the Detroit skyline. ▶ There’s little evidence of Christ’s mercy a block away on Poland Street. Biba Adams cooks up bacon and beignets in her bungalow. She is treating herself because it is her birthday, the first without her mother, grandmother, and aunt. They have all been taken away by the COVID-19 plague that swept through Detroit’s black neighborhoods like a 21st-century angel of death skipping few homes. ▶ Her eyes are red. “I like living here, the church and the…

What was the most indulgent purchase you ever made? When I went to Nashville to seek my fortune and fame in 1969, I bought a Martin D-28 [guitar] and a D-18 12-string. And I hocked everything I had for that, because “this was it!” I was going to Nashville, and I had to take the chance. And when I got there, my first wife and I spent our first honeymoon night at the Holiday Inn in Nashville on West End — and both guitars were stolen out of my car that night. Talk about indulgent — it took me years to pay it off because I had no insurance or anything, and I had to go get another guitar. There’s an actual group of fans known as Church of…

“Historically, black women aren’t given due credit for their work or leadership. I’m grateful that both Jamil Smith and Kadir Nelson didn’t shy away from a full portrayal.”—Lisa Ruffin Schauf, via Twitter Black Lives Matter For our July issue, ROLLING STONE approached artist Kadir Nelson to commission a painting to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. The result, “American Uprising,” accompanied senior writer Jamil Smith’s cover story [“The Power of Black Lives Matter,” RS 1341], which featured Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors: the women who founded — and continue to grow — the movement. The package moved readers to respond and call for change. “Thank you for this article,” wrote Kathleen Hill. “The actions and words of these three amazing women, along with the millions of…

AT 4 A.M. ON JUNE 24TH, Jonathan Majors woke with a stomach flu. So, naturally, he did what any of us would do: Dragged himself out of bed, headed outside in the predawn light, got situated on the basketball court of a nearby park, threw up, and worked out for an hour and a half. Then he threw up again and walked home. “It’s the ritual,” he says matter-of-factly, while alternating sips of a blue energy drink and hot tea a few hours later. “It was rough. But we did it.” Majors, 30, is Zooming from the sun-dappled courtyard of a pink adobe house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s been quarantined since February. He had flown there to begin production on The Harder They Fall, a Western…

If you’re in the market for a handy urban errand runner, look no further than the Mini Cooper SE. On the surface, it’s the same Mini people know and love — a frisky-handling, high-design British coupe by way of BMW (which owns Mini). The SE squirts from zero to 60 mph in a peppy 6.9 seconds, darts around lumbering SUVs in city traffic, and grips the pavement like mad with its sticky Goodyear tires. The interior reads posh, from the light-ringed orb of its center display screen to sport seats clad in diamond-pattern, eco-friendly faux leather. The downside: The Mini is so tiny, its makers could only stuff so much battery inside, a lithium-ion pack just one-third the size of the largest Tesla units. Still, my test drives in…

LIL BABY has four pockets stuffed with cash, and he’d like to keep it that way. The 25-year-old rapper has spent the past 15 minutes teaching me to play cee-lo, a dice game that helped make him famous in certain some Atlanta circles long before he reached legal drinking age. Outside, torrential rain falls on a collection of cars worth many, many mortgages. Inside the headquarters of Quality Control, the most successful hip-hop label currently operating in Atlanta and home to Migos, City Girls, and Lil Yachty, three green dice bounce against the wooden floor. Baby, born Dominique Jones, is a patient and methodical teacher, calmly answering my inane questions about throwing technique. Every time he throws the dice he snaps his fingers, trying to will the numbers to…

THE YEAR Donald Trump was carried into office on a frothing anti-immigrant platform, there were an estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Roughly two-thirds had been here for more than a decade. Prior administrations had abysmal records, but generally acknowledged that the U.S. was enriched by the immigrants who chose to build their lives here. It’s why Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to some 3 million undocumented immigrants, why George W. Bush supported a path to legal citizenship, why Barack Obama — labeled “deporter-in-chief” after removing nearly 3 million people — also created DACA to protect immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But from the start, Trump embraced a rabid xenophobia once restricted to the furthest fringe in modern American politics, slashing refugee admissions, rescinding…