Table of contents for September 2023 in Rolling Stone

BEHIND THE ISSUE Shooting Reggaeton’s New Queen Giel Domen and Kenneth Van de Velde Photographers Giel Domen and Kenneth Van de Velde aim to create a “beautiful, cohesive story” when they work together. The duo strike a balance with their respective strengths: Domen is the visionary behind the lens; Van de Velde is the technical expert who brings each vision to life through lighting and framing. For Rolling Stone’s September cover shoot with Karol G, the Belgian-born pair used sleek lighting and a crisp focus to capture a rising superstar who’s ready to take on the world. “When you portray an iconic figure like Karol G, you want to have sharp pictures,” Domen says. He adds that their work often includes enhanced-reality features like the avant-garde couture that Karol…

Phoebe Bridgers wasn’t yet born when Sinéad O’Connor ripped up a photo of the pope on “Saturday Night Live” in 1992, in protest of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church. Years later, Bridgers would immerse herself deeply into O’Connor’s music, life, and beliefs. After she became a highly acclaimed singer-songwriter (and a member of boygenius), Bridgers would cover “Black Boys on Mopeds,” a song O’Connor wrote partly about the death of a young Black man in England accused by police of stealing a scooter. It’s just one example of how, as Bridgers tells ROLLING STONE, O’Connor made a huge impact on artists long after she’d been ostracized by the music business. I PROBABLY FIRST heard Sinéad O’Connor thanks to my mom, who had — and still has — the…

IT’S THE MIDDLE of summer when RZA hops on Zoom one afternoon, but the Wu-Tang architect and Hollywood maven isn’t exactly taking it easy. The Wu-Tang Clan are on tour with Nas for the overseas leg of their New York State of Mind Tour, thrilling crowds while exemplifying the possibilities for hip-hop icons entering middle age. “We have to show the young generation that this can be a lifelong career if you follow the proper path,” he says. RZA, 54, parlayed his music into a decades-long career in Hollywood, acting, producing, and scoring films such as American Gangster and The Man With the Iron Fists. He also helmed Wu-Tang: An American Saga, a three-season-long TV series about the legendary group. These days, RZA says, he’s waiting out the Writers…

Lately, for Hayden Silas Anhedönia, time feels like a slippery concept. If she’s not playing shows halfway across the world, she’s usually tucked away in her bedroom, a quiet hideaway in Pittsburgh with a sloped roof that doubles as a portal to another world. Here, the hours glide by, one after the other. She might spend 12, 13, even 14 hours trapped inside, leaning over her computer, lost in the expansive sounds she’s creating. “You’ll get up at 9 a.m. to start working, and then you’re like, ‘Oh, what time is it?’ It’s 4 a.m. the next day,” she says. “But it’s fun — and insane and frustrating, and it makes me want to rip my hair out.” Getting into this private lair, where Anhedönia, 25, has lived since…

Since DuQuan Myers died six years ago, he’s come back in ways that are mysterious and magical and hard to explain. It started the day of his funeral, when the doves that were released over his coffin refused to fly home, perching instead in the oak tree just above his grave as if witnessing a visitation. Then there was that drive to El Paso, Texas, when — not once but twice — the windshield wipers started swiping just as the satellite radio cut out midsong, switching to the tune Myers’ sister Natasha had been listening to at the exact moment when her mom called with the news that her brother was gone. There was the way Myers’ nephew — the one who was just a baby when Myers died…

DANNY BROWN SITS quietly at a hotel restaurant table in Manhattan’s West Village, staring off into the distance with a stoic expression. The outdoor seating area is absent of any other guests besides the rapper and his manager, but he’d stand out even in a crowded room: Today he has on a vibrant look that includes a blue-gradient collared shirt, an extremely baggy pair of jeans, and the bright red, Astro Boy-esque MSCHF boots that had the internet in a chokehold earlier this year. When a waiter comes by to take any beverage orders, Brown immediately asks him to take away the alcohol menu. “I’m in a good space mentally,” he says afterward. “I’m happy and stuff. I just don’t want to be around that right now.” This interview…

WHEN DAVID BELISLE arrived in London in 2014 to take photos of Sinéad O’Connor, he found an artist who finally seemed at peace. She had just released an album, I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss, and was, Belisle recalls, “in a great place. She was in such incredible shape. She had quit smoking cigarettes and everything.” O’Connor invited Belisle to take photos as she shot a video for “Take Me to Church.” Trying to learn the location of the shoot, Belisle got a sense of her wit. “I wasn’t hearing from anyone,” he says. “Then, the night before, she texted: ‘We don’t know where yet. It’s like Kim Kardashian’s fucking wedding.’” In the years after the video shoot, O’Connor’s life would take a tragic turn: She was forced to…

ON THE LAST day of June, about 15,000 fans have braved dense New York City smog to worship at the altar of Karol G. At Rockefeller Center, a massive crowd assembles for the superstar’s debut on the Today show, dressed in Colombian levanta-cola (butt-lifting) jeans and the lemon-yellow jerseys of Los Cafeteros, the country’s national soccer team. There’s even a little girl sporting a black crop top emblazoned with Karol’s moniker, “Bichota.” Inside 30 Rock, the greenroom feels like an extended-family function: A dozen or so managers, assistants, and makeup artists are talking over one another, swarming around Karol and cracking jokes as they touch up her look for soundcheck. It is 5 a.m., and most of us have slept only three hours, but Karol, 32, is bright and…

IN 50 YEARS, hip-hop has transformed and taken on any number of different shapes and contexts while remaining undeniably distinct. You don’t quite know why something is hip-hop, but it strikes you as immediately as any physical quality. The rap world has invented new forms of expression capable of adapting to the changes brought on by the expansion of technology like the internet, all while remaining true to its essence, the indomitable spirit at the heart of this culture. More than just artists, today’s rap world is a constellation of figures all interlinked by the lineage they share with hip-hop’s forebears. Whether they’re rappers, producers, fashion designers, or online creators, hip-hop is as stuffed with talent as ever. Hip-hop changes too fast to predict far into the future, but…

MITSKI’S NEW AMERICAN GOTHIC One of indie rock’s most ambitious songwriters goes deeper than ever Mitski The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We DEAD OCEANS ‘I DON’T LIKE my mind/I don’t like being left alone in a room,” Mitski sings on her seventh album, her voice honeyed and rich despite her distress. “Please don’t take … this job from me.” We could read this as your average American workaholic, consumed by the grind. But it’s hard not to hear those words as autobiographical — after all, this is the same woman who decided to quit music, then came back, drawn to it like the tides to the moon. As she told ROLLING STONE in 2021: “This is who I am.… I’m going to keep getting hurt, and I’m…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS EVE HEWSON will not be doing karaoke today. “I have to be really, really hammered to do karaoke,” the actress explains, walking through New York’s Central Park. “I would really have to be a whole bottle of tequila deep.” Not that she is opposed to such things (“I mean, I am Irish”), but it’s 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, and up until very, very recently, sober public singing — or sober singing of any kind, really — was a complete nonstarter. “Absolutely not,” she says. “Hard no. It was absolutely my biggest fear.” So she’d played a non-singing nurse in The Knick, a non-singing prostitute in The Luminaries, and a non-singing murderer in Bad Sisters. Then she’d taken a sleeping pill on a…

XOLO MARIDUEÑA has been an action star since he was 16, when he debuted on Cobra Kai as Miguel, a budding karate champ who gets Mr. Miyagi-ed by both Danny LaRusso (Ralph Macchio) and Johnny Lawrence (William Zabka). But this summer, he’s set to become a full-blown superhero, playing the title role in DC’s Blue Beetle (out Aug. 18). “Even after booking the project, it didn’t feel real,” says Maridueña, who finally accepted it after watching the finished film. “Seeing the Warner Brothers and DC logos, that’s when I was like, ‘Holy crap.’” Unlike June’s The Flash, already a notorious flop, Blue Beetle is a fresh start — DC Films co-chief James Gunn has said it’s the first film to be set in his new DC universe, a full…

IN JULY 2014, the songwriter, producer, and mogul Lukasz Gottwald, a.k.a. Dr. Luke, paced the halls of one of his favorite workplaces, Conway Studios in Hollywood, and mused about thriving under pressure. The way he saw it, he faced more of it as a behind-the-scenes hitmaker than artists do. “I always hear artists talk about that,” Gottwald said, in a previously unpublished segment of a ROLLING STONE interview, at a moment when the 10-year hot streak that began for him with Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” was about to come to a cataclysmic end. “But as a producer-songwriter, you have to do it all of the time. Every day, it’s like, ‘OK, you had a hit. How do you beat that one?’ There’s that overwhelming feeling: fear of…

What is the best piece of advice anyone has given you? Early on, we were touring with the Band. It was the Arkansas Traveler tour with Michelle Shocked and Uncle Tupelo. I was rehearsing, and Rick Danko stepped up onstage behind me, out of the blue, and said, “You sound desperate. You should always sound desperate. Don’t lose that.” It’s a weird way of saying something that I totally agree with. I think what he really meant is people have to hear that you care — that you’re desperate to communicate, desperate to connect. That’s why we sing. In your new book, World Within a Song, you write about all kinds of new music that you love, from Billie Eilish to Rosalía. How have you kept your ears so…