Table of contents for July/August 2021 in Rolling Stone

Blowing Up the World’s Biggest Band Our June cover on the biggest band in the world [“The Triumph of BTS,” RS 1352] was widely praised, with our additional digital covers of each member (Jung Kook, V, Suga, RM, Jin, J-Hope, and Jimin) sharing the love. It’s no surprise that ARMY, the band’s die-hard legion of fans, were enthusiastic and supportive from the start. “The ROLLING STONE interview is a must-read for new ARMYs — and for some old ARMYs who haven’t dug deeply into BTS’ history,” wrote @Happylatae. “This article deserves all the clicks from ARMYs because it’s so insightful,” said @LTB_613. “As an ARMY who writes about [them] as well, I can definitely say that this is one of the best-written articles about BTS and their career,” penned…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS IT’S NOON IN THE CATSKILLS, and Claire Cottrill is thinking about buying a barn. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter, who performs as Clairo, recently purchased five acres in nearby Massachusetts, and she has big plans to build a well and churn butter. “There’s privacy that I’ve been craving for a long time,” she says. “I genuinely feel like I’m on a different planet.” Cottrill got a taste of the country life back in the fall, when she spent a month here, at a studio in the mountains near Woodstock, recording her second album, Sling, with producer Jack Antonoff. It’s a cozy, introspective record — a snapshot of an artist entering adulthood, embracing domesticity, and retreating to the woods. A few months after recording wrapped, Cottrill…

Real-life advice from a guy who’s seen, done, and survived just about everything Croz, my wife and I have reached the point where we need to put down our beloved dog. She wants to get a puppy afterward, but I don’t know if I can do this again. The pain of their deaths is too hard. What do you think? — Peter, Toronto Dogs live much faster than we do, and the pain of losing them every 15 years or so is agonizing. But I just don’t think I can’t not have a dog in my life. And if you have kids, you have to have dogs, because dogs will teach kids about love. Dogs are experts on love. They have a Ph.D. in love. My advice is to…

THE HERETICS LEFT the champagne and orange juice untouched, but the conversation flowed freely all the same. It was a cool May morning in Washington, D.C., and George Conway, Jennifer Horn, Mike Madrid, and Ron Steslow sat behind bulky microphones in a darkened studio lit like the Charlie Rose show. Co-founders of the Trump-tormenting Lincoln Project, enemies of the recently departed 45th president, and exiles from their former home in the Republican Party, the four had gotten together to tape an episode of Steslow’s podcast. A hush fell over the studio. The filmmaker Fisher Stevens, who is making a documentary about the Lincoln Project, hovered at the room’s edges and whispered orders for his cameramen. And then there was me, perched on a tiny stool, scribbling down notes on…

FROM THE OUTSIDE, the house isn’t terribly different from others on the block: a cozy bungalow in L.A.’s Highland Park neighborhood with an old lilac tree blooming near the entrance. In fact, it’s legendary: the place where a prodigal teenager and her older brother recorded the album that made Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell the queen of Gen-Z pop. It’s a location familiar to any Eilish fan, and at first glance on an absurdly beautiful day in April, not much appears to have changed about the house in the couple of years since it became famous, along with its teenage occupant. The O’Connell family’s rescue dog, Pepper, trudges through the backyard, now joined by Eilish’s year-old rescue, Shark, a gray pit bull. Signs of home-schooling linger in common areas,…

WHEN TWITTER BANNED @realdonaldtrump on January 8th, it short-circuited the 45th president’s hard-wired connection to the nation’s consciousness, silencing his anytime platform to threaten, cajole, insult, troll, and terrify the nation. Two weeks later, the inauguration of the subdued, levelheaded Joe Biden brought an end to four years of national trauma. For the liberal opposition, Trump’s departure meant mental liberation! We were free to obsessively share Bernie Sanders mitten memes; to consume news stories of low-impact ephemera like the shrimp tail a comedian (allegedly) discovered in a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch; or to propose overconfident solutions to the saga of the stuck Suez Canal container ship. So starved were Americans for non-Trumpian drama that Oprah’s interview with Harry and Meghan about their split from the royals damn near…

IN THE PAST year, an offshoot of cryptocurrency called NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — has become one of the world’s hottest topics, and in a year without in-person events, they’ve created a huge revenue stream for musicians and artists who’ve gotten in on the ground floor of this expanding market. While the dollar amounts may be mind-boggling, the appeal is obvious: Whether these “digital safes” store images, videos, pieces of music, or luxury experiences, they can be tracked on a transparent network and can’t be replicated. Here’s a look at some of pop culture’s zaniest and most successful NFTs, and the total amount of money artists have earned from them.…

ON THE COVER Capturing the Joy of Billie Eilish Billie Eilish first appeared on the cover of ROLLING STONE in August 2019, sporting a spiked collar, claw-like nails, and an apathetic teen glare. Nearly two years later, the 19-year-old star graces the cover once more — this time shot in soft focus, wearing a minimalist button-down blouse and her new blond locks. “I feel like there’s an intimacy to [the photos],” photographer Yana Yatsuk says. “It’s a little more real to me, a little less perfect. It feels like a boyfriend would have shot it.” “She’s brilliant, and she knows what she wants, but she also has trust, and those two things together are really important.” Los Angeles-based Yatsuk has photographed several notable women for ROLLING STONE, including songwriter…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2010, Prince was feeling proud of the music he had just been recording at his Paisley Park studio. So happy, in fact, that at least once, he asked his backup singers to join him as he drove around Minneapolis, blasting songs like the lean, funky “Same Page, Different Book.” “We had the windows rolled down, and some people would point as we drove past, like, ‘Was that Prince?’” recalls singer Elisa Fiorillo. The album was called Welcome 2 America, and Fiorillo and others who worked on it were looking forward to its release. Instead, Prince shelved the project and rarely brought it up again. “We don’t know what happened,” says bassist Tal Wilkenfeld. “He was working on four different projects, so maybe he thought, ‘I’ll…

I REALLY LIKED President Biden’s address to the joint session of Congress in April. It’s as if he was saying, “Let’s do all the stuff we know we should do but haven’t done.” It was a long list. That’s because there’s a lot of stuff we know we should do and haven’t done. Like infrastructure, child care, making sure every kid’s K-12 education has adequate resources, and addressing the climate crisis. It’ll cost a lot. But then again, it’s all stuff we really can’t afford not to do. And there is a way to afford it all. Tax the rich. Perhaps you’ve noticed that the rich have been getting a lot richer for quite a few decades now. According to the Federal Reserve, which has no reason to lie…

WHEN TORREY PETERS, 39, was writing her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, she imagined how “trans girls talk to each other” — about sex with bad men, jobs, babies — and used the Trojan horse of domestic novels to examine assumptions about what it means to live in America. “So the project was to ask, what happens when you put a trans woman into one of these domestic American social novels?” Her sardonic answer: “You may keep your KitchenAid stand mixer, but you may lose your nuclear family.” The story is centered on Reese, a 35-year-old trans woman living in Brooklyn who longs for motherhood — but is in a rut of risky sex with married men. Then her ex, Ames, adds a snag by asking her to help him…

THERE ARE STILL A LOT of question marks around Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie in four years, tentatively titled Soggy Bottom, but we do know this: The latest from the bard of the San Fernando Valley is set in his hometown in the decade he was born, the 1970s. It involves a child star working his way through his teenage years, a hot-to-trot movie producer, and a politician. Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, is in the cast. (So is Uncut Gems co-director Benny Safdie.) And judging from the photos of last year’s shoot that have been making their way around the internet, both the city of Encino and a bearded, bejeweled Bradley Cooper appear to have gone through a time warp back to…

NOSTALGIA THESE DAYS moves at the speed of lightning, so naturally the late aughts are already back in fashion. Circa 2008, millennial emo teens — a.k.a. scene kids — loved either neon-bright or pitch-black swoopy hair, raiding Hot Topic’s Invader Zim collection, and blasting angsty bands like My Chemical Romance, All Time Low, and Pierce the Veil. Now, these fashions have sparked a scene-kid revival on TikTok and Instagram among Gen Z’ers who may or may not remember that “RAWR means ‘I love you’ in dinosaur.” When teens these days aren’t calling pre-2012 footage of high schools and screamo shows “vintage,” they’re dancing to Metro Station and Gym Class Heroes, or doing highly contoured alt-girl makeup and fashion tutorials that have brought the black, white, and red color palette…

HOUSTON IS THE fourth-largest city in the United States but can feel like it contains the entire planet. Its freeways intertwine like blood vessels, as cars course through its more than 600 square miles each day. Unlike many cities its size, Houston’s population hubs are dispersed and multifaceted. The city’s diverse immigrants, transplants, and native Texans enjoy their own enclaves of self-determination. There’s a cluster of nearly a dozen Nigerian churches in the Alief suburb; Little Saigon, home to a bustling Vietnamese community, sits adjacent to Chinatown. And yet the city feels cohesive. Houston is a place where people chase the American dream, for better and for worse. Its cheap, accessible land makes it a hot spot for the entrepreneurial, nevermind that it takes half an hour to get…

“Let’s take the fucking Capitol.” A burly, bearded man in a ballistic vest and a baseball cap that says “God, Guns, and Trump” is trying to rally members of the crowd. The man’s name is Daniel Lyons Scott, but he goes by Milkshake. It’s around noon on January 6th, a frigid day in Washington, D.C., and even though most of the men there are wearing orange ski hats and winter jackets, they’re still shifting from one foot to another to keep warm. ¶ “Let’s not fucking yell that, all right,” someone else in the video says. Ethan Nordean, who goes by Rufio Panman, after the Lost Boys’ leader from the 1991 Steven Spielberg film Hook, shouts into the megaphone, with the air of an impatient older brother. “It was…

What are the most important rules that you live by? If it’s not fun, then I’m uninterested, entirely. If somebody’s treating me poorly, I have to walk away. Life is so fricking short, and I’m three-quarters of the way through mine already. I just want to have a good life, full of joy. ‘No Gods No Masters,’ the first Garbage LP in five years, is out now. Who are your heroes and why? Patti Smith is a huge hero for me, most importantly because she’s a woman who has navigated her creative life so beautifully and so artfully, with such integrity and authenticity, and has proven to me that a woman, an artist, does not have to subscribe to the rules of the contemporary music industry. It’s very rare…

THE BIGGEST ARTISTS, ALBUMS, AND SONGS OF TODAY OVER THE PAST 10 years, as streaming has molded the music industry into new shapes, the biggest song of the year has changed shape, too — from kitschy pop rap (Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop”) to sax-y funk (Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”) to swaggering country rap (Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”). But one thing has remained stubbornly the same: It’s been, well, super bro-y. So much so, in fact, that the last time a woman had the top song of the year was back in 2011, when Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” hurtled to the top of the year-end charts. In 2012, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” featured New Zealand singer Kimbra; apart from…

WHEN LIZ PHAIR released Soberish this June, it ended an 11-year hiatus between studio albums. “It’s weird to come back and participate in the promotional cycle, and have the business changed so much,” says the songwriter, 54. “And then adding Covid to that has been … the word ‘zany’ just came to mind.” She’d hardly been vacationing in the decade since 2010’s Funstyle, though. In just the past few years, she’s put out a massive box-set reissue of her classic 1993 debut, Exile in Guyville; published her memoir, Horror Stories; and continued her work as a television composer. Those experiences and more informed her writing on Soberish, which sees her contemplating how to take the edge off of life while staying ahead of the curve. Phair called to talk…

AT AFROPUNK’S 2019 New Year’s Eve festival in South Africa, DJ Moma was scheduled to play a 45-minute set following headliner Solange Knowles. He knew exactly what to do. The DJ, born Mohamed Hamad in Sudan and raised between Paris and Queens, had frequently traveled to South Africa, immersing himself in the country’s music scene. Roughly 20,000 fans were gathered at Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, formerly the site of a detention center that held Nelson and Winnie Mandela. “I started playing trap. They loved it. I went into some Afrobeats, they loved it,” says Moma. “And then I just said, ‘Are my yanos in the building?’” Moma dropped “Labantwana Ama Uber,” by Semi Tee of Soweto, a hit in the surging amapiano subgenre of South African house music. “Yanos” is…

DRINKS Cannabis beverage sales rose 40 percent in 2020, to $95.2 million. CANN — whose “social tonic” is one of the bestselling cannabis drink brands in California — uses a process called nano-emulsification, which allows cannabis-infused oil to dissolve in water, and leaves no discernible taste. While the company offers options with either two or five milligrams of THC, there are plenty of variations out there: KEEF’S cans of classic soda come with a 10 mg kick, while Pabst Blue Ribbon has licensed its name to a group of former employees who just launched a lemon seltzer with 5 mg. GUMMIES Gummies have long been a favorite, but in recent years, developers have come up with innovative ways to make them even more effective. Traditionally, edibles pass through the…

ROCK DRUMMERS used to become legends by pounding out epic arena solos. These days, players are just as likely to become famous by uploading covers of beloved songs to YouTube, which can rack up huge numbers. But when it comes to going viral, flair, originality, and a grabby conceptual hook can matter more than chops. Here are four online drummers who rose to the top.…

HE’S ALL OVER TIKTOK, muscles bulging out of a snug polo shirt, pouring a cocktail into a coupe in slow motion as George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” plays. Some of the clips, hashtagged #mancrushmonday or #celebritycrush, show him strolling through the streets of Italy, effortlessly elegant in pressed cream pants and black horn-rimmed glasses, or sensuously lifting a forkful of carbonara into his mouth. Welcome to TucciTok, a not-small segment of the social media app that is unabashedly hot for veteran character actor Stanley Tucci. “I don’t know,” Tucci says, laughing, from his home in London, when asked to explain his Gen-Z appeal. “I’m old enough to be everybody’s father or grandfather.” Tucci has played a cobalt-haired propagandist in The Hunger Games and an effete right-hand man in The Devil…

CATHERINE TOWNSEND’S career — dating columnist, private investigator, true-crime podcaster — is straight out of a hard-boiled detective novel. But the jobs intersect. “There’s no better training than being out on tons of first dates,” she says. “It teaches you a lot about reading people.” An Arkansas native, Townsend grew up obsessed by true crime. In 2004, she began to follow the local unsolved murder of 22-year-old Rebekah Gould, a few years her junior. But it wasn’t until 2017 — a dozen years after founding the U.K. Independent’s “Sleeping Around” column, and four years after getting her California P.I. license — that she took on Gould’s case. “Rebekah reminded me of myself,” she says. “Someone actually told me she was a high-risk victim because she was dating different guys.…

THE STOLEN AIRPLANE began rolling forward under its own power, with no one in the cockpit. The twin engines of the Horizon Air Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 aircraft had been set to idle. But without anyone riding the brakes, the 13-foot propellers began pushing the plane slowly toward the runways of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. ¶ The thief, Richard “Beebo” Russell, had just disconnected the tow bar of a tug vehicle he’d used to pivot the plane out of its parking spot. In a frantic, seven-second dash, the husky 28-year-old abandoned the truck and sprinted to the lowered passenger-entry door. He scrambled into the fuselage and hoisted up the hatch before flinging himself into the captain’s seat. ¶ It was August 10th, 2018, a warm, clear evening nearly two decades…

ACK ANTONOFF HAS ALWAYS been a serious, handshake-avoiding, airplane-seat-wiping germophobe, but the past year didn’t phase him much. “I was fine,” he says, “because I was preparing for this.” Instead of freaking out, the songwriter-producer-frontman spent the year hanging with his parents in New Jersey and making music with his usual crew of insanely famous and talented women — Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde, among others — not to mention finishing the third album by his own band, Bleachers, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night. “If you actually look at the work I do,” he protests, “it’s not as much as you think. I’m just sort of doubling down hard on a few things.” But his work is, pretty inarguably, ubiquitous; with the rise…

LUCY DACUS BRINGS THE DRAMA One of the best young songwriters around delivers an LP that feels like a great memoir By ANGIE MARTOCCIO Lucy Dacus Home Video MATADOR IN 2018, Lucy Dacus kicked off her album Historian with a startling admission: “The first time I tasted somebody else’s spit, I had a coughing fit.” That line was followed by six minutes of eviscerating lyrics and guitar riffs, making for a towering indie-rock moment right up there with the best of Paul Westerberg and Liz Phair — and it was just the first song on the album. Dacus continues to master the art of first lines on her excellent third album, Home Video, whether it’s “In the summer of ’07/I was sure I’d go to heaven” (“VBS”) or “When…