Table of contents for August 11, 2016 in Rolling Stone

Future Rocks totally stoked to see my favorite MC on the cover [“The Dark Past and Glittering Present of Future,” RS 1265/1266]. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard “Turn on the Lights” and wondered who this shape-shifting magician was. A really nice profile of the hardestworking rapper in the business. Ray Garcia, via the Internet ciara must have given future a lot of material to write from, but their relationship was also really sad to read about. Jan Robbins, via the Internet i appreciate both future’s music and his candor in the story. At the same time, the first thing we read about are the bottles of soda and codeine cough syrup lying around the studio. Does he need to be that messed up to…

On july 7th, jay z did something out of character: He released a protest song. The rapper had reportedly wired tens of thousands of dollars to bail protesters out of jail in Baltimore in 2015, and Tidal donated $1.5 million to Black Lives Matter-related causes earlier this year. But it was only after the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota – as well as the shooting deaths of five Dallas police officers at a protest days later – that he finally spoke out. “Just a boy from the hood that/Got my hands in the air in despair/Don’t shoot,” he rhymed on “Spiritual.” He elaborated in a statement: “I’m saddened and disappointed in this America. We should be further along.” He was not…

IT’S A PERFECT SATURDAY MORNing, but Sting, unshaven and scruffy, is lying on a couch in a darkened New York studio, taking a nap before starting work for the day. He’s still recovering fromplayingNewYork’s Jones BeachTheater last night, the third date of his coheadlining summer tour with Peter Gabriel. “That was a workout,” he says. “I’ve been up since 5:30. I’m the son of a milkman.” Sting is working overtime to finish 57th & 9th (named after the intersection he crosses to get to the studio every day), which has him returning to the guitardriven rock music he hasn’t made in decades. “It’s not a lute album,” he says with a smile, a reference to 2006’s Songs From the Labyrinth. “It’s rockier than anything I’ve done in a while. This…

It’s soundcheck time at the Capitol Theatre, just north of New York, and Dweezil Zappa is leading his band through the songs of his father, Frank. Dweezil, 46, has been regularly performing his dad’s music for a decade, but his current tour is stranger – and more tense – than any before it. Unplugging his guitar, Dweezil looks out at the empty hall. “Sometimes people in the crowd yell things out, so I talk about it onstage,” he says. “I feel like people are choosing sides.” This should be a year for honoring the legacy of Frank Zappa, who died in 1993. A new, acclaimed Zappa documentary, Eat That Question, is in theaters, and a series of deluxe reissues and archival releases just hit shelves. Dweezil’s tour features songs from…

It’s one in the afternoon, and Halsey is getting buzzed on Veuve Clicquot rosé and telling me things that maybe she shouldn’t. Like the fact that the last time she was here in Central Park, she was with an ex-boyfriend who was coming down from heroin and just wanted to lie in the sun for six hours. Or that the original plan for today, dreamed up by her record label, was for us to go for a romantic boat ride. “And I was like, ‘Fuck, no,’ ” she says with a scowl. “ ‘I’m not going on a sailboat. I fucking hate boats. I’m not going to do that.’ It’s like a blind date, except that I’m not going to spend the entire time wondering if I’m going to be…

As 50,000 conservatives descended on Cleveland for the Republican National Convention, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was more crowded than usual. Bill O’Reilly, Caitlyn Jenner and Scott Baio all received private tours, taking in the massive new exhibit “Louder Than Words: Rock, Power and Politics.” Spread over two floors, it traces how rock has influenced attitudes about politics, patriotism and race, with items including Jimi Hendrix’s Woodstock guitar and the sax Bill Clinton played on Arsenio Hall in 1992. After performing outside the RNC with his band Prophets of Rage, Tom Morello woke up early to see the exhibit. He singles out a poster for a segregated Little Richard gig and a listening station for Rod Stewart’s 1976 song “TheKilling ofGeorgie” – about a gay friend murdered by…

ELVIS WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN Elvis without Scotty Moore. When I was a kid, after the BBC would shut off, another station would come on, called Radio Luxembourg. It had terrible reception – I’d be carrying my radio all around my room. That’s how I heard “Heartbreak Hotel.” I was an acoustic player, lurking in the folk area. But that’s when I knew I wanted to go electric. Scotty Moore was my hero. There’s a little jazz in his playing, some great country licks and a grounding in the blues as well. It’s never been duplicated. I can’t copy it. The closest I came was tracks like “Parachute Woman,” where I fooled around with echoes – those early Elvis recordings got me interested in the possibility of the studio. The…

NO EVENT SIGNIFIED THE END OF THE 1960S MORE THAN ALTAMONT, the free California festival where four people died on December 6th, 1969. The most notorious death was that of 18-year-old Meredith Hunter, who was knifed by the Hells Angels security force as the Rolling Stones played. Directors Albert and David Maysles told the story in Gimme Shelter, but longtime San Francisco Chronicle writer Joel Selvin felt the documentary, and most coverage since, have been superficial. “Nobody had done a comprehensive account of the debacle since the original report in Rolling Stone,” he says. He corrects that with Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day. Employing the help of a private investigator and dozens of interviews with crew members and performers…

HELL, YES, IT WAS CRAZY. YOU rubbed your eyes at the sight of it, as in, “Did that really just happen?” It wasn’t what we expected. We thought Donald Trump’s version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess. We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of “New York, New York” while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read WINNING, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald’s acceptance speech. . . . But nah. What…

Jason Bourne Matt Damon Directed by Paul Greengrass NOTE TO HOLLYWOOD: THE Fourth of July was weeks ago. Screw you for making us wait so long for a rush of an action movie that doesn’t suck. Jason Bourne is that rare summer thrill ride that doesn’t sell out to stupid. Matt Damon returns to the role he made his own in 2002’s The Bourne Identity, 2004’s The Bourne Supremacy and 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum. Damon, who knocks it out of the park, and Paul Greengrass, who directed two of the previous Bourne epics, didn’t want to commit until they had a script that spoke to the here and now. Damon has barely 25 lines of dialogue (Bourne defines perpetual motion), but the script says a mouthful about cyberterrorism and…

‘IT’S A PLACE OF GHOSTS,” SAYS DAVID GILMOUR, WHO IS AVOIDING THE 90-degree heat in Naples, Italy, in an air-conditioned trailer parked outside the amphitheater at the ancient ruins of Pompeii. He’s recalling his last visit, in 1971, when Pink Floyd played a set heavy on their experimental albumMeddle inside the empty venue, shooting it for a classic concert film. His memories of that trip are clear: performing shirtless due to the heat, and taking a trip with the band to Mount Vesuvius, which buried Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago, until it was discovered, remarkably preserved, in the 1700s. Now, Gilmour has returned to play again, this time for an audience. “Tonight will be the first time since 79 A.D. that there’s been an audience watching something here,” he says…

MR. ROBOT WEDNESDAYS, 10 P.M., USA IN THE EXCELLENT NEW SEASON OF Mr. Robot, our hero, Elliot, makes a desperate attempt to reboot his life. He’s still a brilliant but messed-up hacker, a lonesome punk with a drug problem and a head full of toxic social anxieties. But he decides to break his Internet addiction. He moves in with his disapproving mom in Queens. He keeps to himself and watches hoops. He stays offline. He’s turning his life into an “analog nightmare.” But he’s still haunted by old friend Mr. Robot – who recruited him into a gang of techno-anarchists who call themselves fsociety, bent on bringing down the corporate system. Thanks to Elliot, the global economy is a pile of smoldering wreckage. Mr. Robot came out of nowhere to…

Jared leto is wearing a preposterous straw hat this morning, a gigantic, not-quite-a-sombrero thing he bought for seven bucks at a corner store. And why not? He’s made it this far by committing fully, sometimes crazily, to everything in his life: Method acting, music-making, video directing, tech investing, not to mention the arts of being enigmatic, brainy and really, really good-looking. “I don’t dabble,” he says. “I dive in, 1,000 percent.” So if he needs sun protection for a hike, of course he goes big. In any case, Leto recently turned 44 – “old,” he calls it, with the subsequent qualifier “I don’t feel old” – and looks maybe 29, so his skin-care habits are probably not to be questioned. It’s 11:15 a.m. on a Thursday in June, and Leto…