Table of contents for Sep-24-15 in Rolling Stone

A monster tour turns into the party of the year THIS SUMMER, TAYLOR SWIFT OWNED MUSIC’S main stage – and pretty much everyone else was happy to be her special guest. Her latest album, the unabashedly poppy, Max Martin-assisted 1989, is her biggest yet, with four Top 10 hits so far; in June, she took on Apple Music and won, convincing the company to pay artist royalties during its trial period; and she just won four VMAs, including Video of the Year. Meanwhile, in the nation’s arenas and stadiums, she’s cemented her dominance, selling out all 85 shows on her ongoing 1989 tour. As if to underscore her newfound place at the center of pop, Swift has played host to a dazzling array of onstage duet partners: current hitmakers like…

THE GENTLEMEN OF DURAN Duran gather in a posh suite high atop the Carlyle hotel in New York. The business at hand: inspecting a canvas of the artwork for their excellent new album, Paper Gods. It’s a collage of images from their videos over the years: the Eiffel Tower from “A View to a Kill,” the sumo wrestler from “Girls on Film,” the limo driver’s cap from “The Chauffeur.” Simon Le Bon, dashing as ever in a natty white suit, looks over the canvas approvingly, but then furrows Le Brow. “There’s just one thing I don’t recognize,” he says, pointing to the lower-left corner. “The yellow cocktail. Where’s that one from?” “ ‘Rio,’ ” he’s reminded. The scene from their most famous video, where a mysterious tray of brightly colored…

Miley’s Deranged Variety Show This year’s VMAs had it all: WWE-worthy beefs, a dozen costume changes by host Miley Cyrus, and a weeping Justin Bieber. But none of it was as wild as Miley’s afterparty at L.A.’s Beacher’s Madhouse, which included a cake with a vomiting Barbie on top, plus randomly placed sex toys and little people flying around in harnesses. Cyrus hung out with rumored girlfriend, model Stella Maxwell, as well as guests like Jared Leto and Wayne Coyne. “She climbed the sign on top of the Roosevelt Hotel naked at 7 a.m.,” says Coyne. “But that’s just a normal night for us.” Libertines: Bloody Great! London’s Libertines brought blotto charm to the Reading Festival, playing songs from their first album in 11 years, the shockingly great Anthems for…

WHEN POPE FRANCIS ARRIVES in Washington, D.C., on September 22nd, it will not only be his first papal visit to the United States; it will be his first visit ever. He’s 78 years old, but he spent most of his life in his native Argentina, as a Jesuit priest and later cardinal. Aside from required trips to Rome for official church business – he always insisted on flying economy – the former Jorge Bergoglio rarely left Buenos Aires. His one substantial vacation for pleasure, a trip to the Holy Land in 1973, was not well-timed: He arrived just as the Yom Kippur War was breaking out and so spent most of his visit confined to his Jerusalem hotel room. In Washington, Francis will meet with President Obama at the White…

Hip-Hop Masters THRILLED TO SEE DRE AND Cube on the cover [“American Gangstas,” RS 1242]. To a white suburban teenager in the early Nineties, the hip-hop giants of the time were what the Stones and Hendrix were to my parents: radical, fresh and topical. Which they couldn’t understand. Ken Scelfo, Belmar, NJ N.W.A’S BEAT-THE-ODDS ORIGIN story got a great telling by Brian Hiatt. Straight Outta Compton remains a revolutionary rap record, a masterpiece of music and social justice. Alicia Gomez, via the Internet “FEEL THE GROOVE, BUST A move, this is something to dance to.” Still so true! A great story on N.W.A, too. Hank Lee, via the Internet MAYBE NOW WE CAN GET A film about the truly most dangerous hip-hop group of the same era, Public Enemy. Ben…

The New Jersey rapper singer currently has two Top 10 smashes on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (the supercatchy “Trap Queen” and “679”) – plus another Top 20 hit with “My Way.” We asked him to check out five songs, old and new, and tell us what he thought. CLASSIC Abba “Dancing Queen” I remember that my mom would always sing this song around the house. It was one of her favorites. Fugees “Fu-Gee-La” The Fugees were instrumental in hip-hop! This is such a classic beat. Everyone I knew would always freestyle over it. Cam’ron feat. Juelz Santana “Hey Ma” When this song came out, I remember hearing all the older dudes where I grew up riding around town saying, “Hey, Ma!” It’s still a classic Dipset song. NEW Miranda…

RIGHT NOW, FEW, IF ANY, DIRECTORS are doing foulmouthed humor with as much heart or balls as Leslye Headland. Here’s a primer on the 34-year-old. WHAT TO WATCH FOR Headland’s new film, Sleeping With Other People, is a mix of screwball comedy and straight-up raunch that follows two friends (Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie) who bond over their inability to make relationships work. “It’s When Harry Met Sally for assholes,” Headland says. CHOICE WORDS Headland’s been an outspoken critic of the way Hollywood treats female directors. When she first pitched her 2012 film, Bachelorette, she says, “I was told, ‘You should probably ask your parents for $250,000 and shoot the thing yourself.’ . . . And look what happened to Ava DuVernay. She’s the Beyoncé of filmmaking, and she can’t…

DAWN TO DUSK A year ago, Canadian folk-rock prankster Mac DeMarco was feeling cramped in the windowless Brooklyn loft he shared with nine people, so he went on Craigslist and found a house on a dingy stretch of Jamaica Bay in Far Rockaway, Queens. There, he recorded his latest LP, Another One, on which he gives out his address and tells fans to stop by – a questionable decision for an A-list indie star (and huge festival draw) with a rabid fan base. “We started getting 60, 70 people a day coming by,” he says. “It’s nice kids are into it enough to travel to a weird New York neighborhood.” To see an exclusive video of DeMarco at home in Queens, visitRollingStone.com/dawntodusk.…

CBS’s Supergirl, debuting October 26th, is the first female superhero show of the 21st century – so showrunner Greg Berlanti (The Flash) has to make it fly. “I hear it more and more,” says Berlanti, “how desperate and excited people are to have a female hero.” Here are his five secrets for helping Supergirl take off : Stay gender-neutral. “It’s an action show that happens to have a female lead. We paid no attention to gender in terms of proportion of action to drama to romance.” Push limits with special effects.Supergirl has CGI effects that would’ve been unimaginable on TV a decade ago. “On the board in the writers’ room, it says, ‘Heart, humor, spectacle.’ We try and treat these shows like movies.” Cast the right person.Glee’s Melissa Benoist is…

The Weeknd Beauty Behind the Madness XO/Republic Abel Tesfaye – the mysterious pop innovator who records as the Weeknd – set a weird new standard for gloomy selfindulgence in R&B when he came out of Canada a few years back. He was like Drake with the soul of an art-school goth, singing vaguely creepy things like “It’s gonna end how you expected/Girl, you’re such a masochist” in a satin-smooth voice over weeded-out, blacklight-ready tracks built from stretched-out Siouxsie and the Banshees and Beach House samples. The three mixtapes he self-released in 2011 (collected one year later as his fulllength Trilogy) and his proper major-label debut, 2013’s Kiss Land, all seemed suspended in a predawn haze, where partying gets dark and drugs feel more like quicksand than rocket fuel. It’s…

Glen Hansard Didn’t He Ramble Anti- Irish troubadour stretches out toward soul and blues Glen Hansard has been a steadily prolific singer-songwriter for 25 years, first with the Dublin indie-rock act the Frames and later as half of Oscar-winning folk duo the Swell Season. On his second solo effort, Hansard explores fresh sounds, from plain-spoken blues (“Wedding Ring”) to traditional-minded Irish ballads (“McCormack’s Wall”). The highlight: “Her Mercy,” a soul showstopper that starts small and builds toward a parade of horns and cathartic pleading. Yet as the LP progresses, Hansard too often lapses into his trademark brooding melodrama – an easy fallback for a singer who’s at his best, nowadays, when he’s trying something new. JONATHAN BERNSTEIN Metric Pagans in Vegas MMI Canadian indie-pop band delivers synth-laced…

TAIBBI’S STORY WAS ENRAGING and enlightening. The GOP’s candidates are the political version of The Bachelor, and Trump is the Frankenstein monster of our own creation – a schoolyard bully we built ourselves when we bestowed credibility on reality-show personalities. It’s fun to watch your three-year-old pretend to drive a car, but would you really give him the keys? Lisa Oxman, via the Internet “IT’S LIKE WATCHING 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England” may be the funniest sentence ever written by man. With the void left by Jon Stewart, I’m grateful Taibbi’s back to help us sort out this “would be hysterical if it wasn’t so sad” epoch. Paul Treffert Via the Internet CLASSIC TAIBBI! TOO BAD he didn’t spend time with someone of true character: Ben…

AN HOUR BEFORE THEY TOOK THE stage at MTV’s Video Music Awards in Los Angeles on August 30th, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis were sure their set was going to be a total disaster. The Seattle rapper-producer duo had just finished the final run-through of the performance – an ambitious outdoor version of their new single, “Downtown,” involving tricky choreography and multiple guest vocalists – and nothing was going right. “We watched the playback, and Ryan was bummed,” says Mackle more. “He was like, ‘Dude, this isn’t good. It’s going to be a shitshow.’ ” In the end, their first televised performance in more than a year went off without a hitch – but it was a high stakes moment for more reasons than one. The last awards show Macklemore and…

Black Mass SEPTEMBER 18th Johnny Depp’s portrayal of Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger was so uncanny it unnerved crew members who grew up in the city. The actor plays him as a Southie psychopath who helps an old lady, then calmly shoots an associate. “We studied surveillance footage to capture his physicality,” director Scott Cooper says. “Bulger was so fascinating because he was so multifaceted and complex. Cunning. Humorous. Deadly.” Steve Jobs OCTOBER 9th Working from Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tackled the Apple CEO’s career through three product launches (the movie consists of three real-time scenes). Michael Fassbender doesn’t try to do a Jobs impersonation, but makes the unrelentingly intense Jobs seem self-aware and sympathetic. There have been a few Jobs biopics, but none dive…

‘N THIS CASE, I FEEL MORE IS more,” says singer Chris Cornell of Seattle hard-rock veterans Soundgarden, referring to the recent reissue of his 1999 solo debut, Euphoria Mourning, and his new, mostly acoustic album, Higher Truth. The latter was inspired by Cornell’s Songbook tour – a one-man show launched in 2011 with “25 years of songs I’ve written for different bands. I distilled what I do down to me and a guitar and arrived at a singer-songwriter identity.” Cornell takes Songbook back on the road this fall. He has also started work on Soundgarden’s next album. “I spent the last week and a half doing demos. We’re going to meet in four days and spend a week together. By the end, we’ll have a lot of stuff.” Your new…

TERRENCE HOWARD IS STANDING IN FRONT of a mirror inside his extra-deluxe, penthouselevel Chicago apartment, looking at himself looking back. You could say he sees himself as he is today, dressed in a silky long-sleeve loungewear top with a scarf circling his neck, like right out of the Hollywood handbook for dapper flamboyants. Or as what he has most recently become, a television-land megastar, for how convincingly he plays super-badass hip-hop-record mogul Lucious Lyon on Fox’s Empire, this year’s most unexpected hit show. Or even as certain others see him, including some ex-wives, as a man given to outbursts of stunning violence and domestic abuse, allegations of which are, in part, what led him to take the Empire role in the first place. “Since they see me as a bad…

After decades of weighty roles, Patrick Stewart, 75, is finally loosening up – by playing boozing, coke-snorting anchorman Walter Blunt on the Starz sitcom Blunt Talk. “I used to be a really, really pompous dick,” Stewart says. “But I’ve changed – now if it ain’t fun, I won’t show up.” I read that you once angrily lit into your fellow Star Trek actors for goofing off , telling all of them... “We’re not here to have fun”? That was my line. I yelled it at Denise Crosby. What an asshole I was. But now I’m here to have fun more than anything else. Did the Star Trek cast help you loosen up? They were solely responsible. If I’m funny in any way at all, they made me funny. We made…

Keith RichardsCrosseyed Heart Republic KEY TRACKS: “Robbed Blind,” “Trouble” Keith Richards’ first solo album since 1992 opens like a fever dream, with the 71-year-old rock god croaking acoustic blues like Robert Johnson after burning down a half-ounce spliff. But it’s a feint. “All right, that’s all I got,” he snaps just under two minutes in, before upshifting into his most eccentric and best-ever solo set. Crosseyed Heart is the sound of Richards following his pleasure wherever it leads, with a lean, simpatico team including longtime session pals Steve Jordan, Ivan Neville and Waddy Wachtel backing him up all the way. Naturally, there’s a dip into roots reggae: Gregory Isaacs’ 1974 lovers’ rock signature, “Love Overdue,” complete with brass and Neville’s sweet backing vocals. There’s also a straight read of…

Low Ones and Sixes Sub Pop Indie-pop minimalists explore new sounds on catchiest LP yet Low have been indie rock’s most economical songwriters for 20 years and running, but their 11th LP takes a bold step toward pop. “What Part of Me,” with its upbeat percussion, fuzzy guitar textures and sweet harmonized lyrics about relationship boundaries (“What part of me don’t you own?”), feels like a sideways response to the post-1989 maximalism of today’s Top 40; “Into You” is a gospel-inflected, subtly sexy slow jam; and “The Innocents” sets accusatory vocals over a crunching electroindustrial beat, all to excellent effect. Elsewhere, on the gentle, pained duet “Lies,” Low remind us they’re still masters of doing a lot with a little. KORY GROW Gary Clark Jr.The Story of Sonny…