Indice dei contenuti per December 2020 in Rolling Stone

WHEN TAYLOR SWIFT walked into Paul McCartney’s MPL Studios office in London, in early October, for this issue’s cover story, she arrived without assistants or stylists or even a makeup person. (Appropriately, Taylor chose to wear clothes designed by Paul’s daughter Stella McCartney for the occasion.) For most of the day it was just Taylor and Paul, along with Paul’s daughter Mary McCartney, a photographer, in what turned out to be a revelatory meeting of megastars from across the generations. Taylor came armed with questions; Paul was loose and relaxed, singing to Motown songs and sharing personal stories, like the time he made veggie burgers for Quincy Jones in his kitchen. They talked about songwriting, how to keep a semblance of normal life as a celebrity, and the risk-taking…

AS THE PANDEMIC was spreading in early March, Lenny Kravitz left his Paris home and decamped to his retreat on Eleuthera, a small island in the Bahamas. There, he’s been living the simple life, growing his own food and using trees as makeshift workout benches. Kravitz has been in a reflective mood, thanks to his new memoir, Let Love Rule. It’s the first of two volumes, covering his life up to the release of his 1989 debut album. It’s a fascinating look at Kravitz’s life-long duality: a biracial kid, the son of an NBC News-producer dad (Sy Kravitz) and TV-actress mom (Roxie Roker, of The Jeffersons), shuttling between Manhattan and Brooklyn before moving to Los Angeles, where he felt equally at home hanging out in Beverly Hills mansions, skate…

ELVIS COSTELLO was less than 24 hours into his first American tour when he met Iggy Pop. It was November 1977, and the former Stooges frontman was playing at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco when a bleary-eyed Costello, fresh off a flight from London, wandered into the venue just in time to see Iggy sing “The Passenger.” “My memory of it was I was slightly scared,” Costello tells Iggy. “At one point, you got this tiny chair and inserted yourself into it. It was kind of like if you took Marlene Dietrich and put her in a rock & roll band.” When the show was done, Costello was ushered backstage for a quick chat. “You put your arm around me and said, ‘Just take care,’” Costello continues. “You…

KEVIN PARKER REMEMBERS hearing his older brother play Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream when they were growing up in Perth, Australia. “It was like an indescribable cross between optimistic and sad music,” says Parker. “All my friends were into Rage Against the Machine. Siamese Dream was my internal headspace album, I guess.” That 1993 album helped inspire Parker to start making songs as Tame Impala, a solo project that has since grown into one of the biggest rock acts in the world, blending hazy guitars, disco beats, and huge pop melodies. That success has helped Parker, 34, become an in-demand collaborator for everyone from Rihanna to Kendrick Lamar, but he’s never met Corgan — who, it turns out, is a fan of his as well. “There’s a beautiful tastefulness in…

USUALLY, THAT KID CLOMPING DOWN his mother’s porch is a tractor beam of charm. On the South Side of Chicago, where Gangster Disciples shoot the Black Disciples over slights and side-eyed infractions, nobody seems to hassle Calvin Cross — he’s too much fun to be around. He does a thousand voices, and all of them are funny, from 50 Cent impressions to Dave Chappelle to the cast of Diff’rent Strokes. Every night, he calls his girlfriend, Tunoka Jett, to tell her he loves and misses her — and to sometimes sing to her that dopey song from Dirty Dancing. “You can’t never be down when you’re around him,” Tunoka says. “He’ll just keep at you and at you till you laugh.” ¶ Tonight, though, Calvin’s high beams are dimmed…

ESSAY So Long, Peak TV, We Hardly Knew Ye How streaming services are becoming just like the old networks — and bringing an era of wild creativity to an end. STREAMING TELEVISION has been one of the few constants of our strange and scary pandemic lives — except in all the ways it hasn’t been. Yes, it’s been reassuring to binge Schitt’s Creek or The Sopranos when we can’t go out to see movies, or friends, or families, or … anyone. But the streaming world has gone through a huge amount of tumult since March. Those changes may not be fully felt for a while, but they’ll still significantly transform how and what we stream. The past nine months have seen the launch of three high-profile streaming services: the…

“It is imperative for the democracy of this country to bring people together. Without democracy, things will get worse for us all.”—Cynthia Cortes, via Twitter Rebuilding a Divided America For our November issue, former Vice President Joe Biden appeared on our cover with ROLLING STONE’s endorsement [“Joe Biden for President,” RS 1345]. As Americans voted early, stood in line at their polling places, and awaited results, our readers also wrote in expressing their hopes and anxieties for the nation. “I so deeply wanted to feel hope around the idea that our country would unite around a sense of justice and morality, but I am sad to see that we remain deeply divided in a way that I should have, but did not, expect,” wrote Sarah Anderson. “How did we…

Great New Reads That Rock The Office: An Oral History BY ANDY GREENE ROLLING STONE senior writer Andy Greene’s hilarious, revealing oral history of The Office is essential reading for fans of the beloved 2000s sitcom. A Life in Ink BY RALPH STEADMAN Steadman’s satiric cover illustrations for classic 1970s books by Hunter S. Thompson helped define the look of the counterculture, and this coffee-table anthology is an ideal survey of his career. Songteller: My Life in Lyrics BY DOLLY PARTON The country legend offers a fascinating glimpse behind her creative process, exploring the stories and personal memories that inspired her songs. For more suggestions from the Rolling Stone 2020 Holiday Gift Guide, visit RollingStone.com…

GROWING UP IN Compton in the 2010s, Roddy Ricch listened more to the Atlanta rap hymns of Future than to his iconic West Coast forebears. (“I was born in ’98,” he has said. “What do you expect me to rap like?”) He’s since become one of the most popular artists in the world with the borderless melodic instincts heard on his unstoppable hit “The Box.” So it makes sense that Roddy, 22, would request to speak with Future, 37, who is celebrating nearly a decade as one of rap’s most prolific hitmakers, with an influential style that uses alien vocal processing to accentuate deeply human pain. Future has spent most of that time as a critical and listener darling, too, with the possible exception of 2014’s Honest, which stands…

LAST YEAR, Jason Isbell came home to his wife and bandmate, Amanda Shires, and played her a duet he’d just recorded with Barry Gibb. “She said, ‘That’s the best I’ve heard you sing,’” Isbell says. “I said, ‘Well, I was singing with Barry Gibb. I had to do my absolute best.’” Isbell may be a rootsy songwriter from Alabama, but he’s been a Bee Gees fan his entire life. The song he and Gibb recorded, “Words of a Fool,” appears on Gibb’s upcoming album, Greenfields, which features rerecordings of his catalog with artists including Brandi Carlile, Dolly Parton, and Alison Krauss. “I’ve always been a real freak on old country music,” Gibb says. “After the Bee Gees no longer existed, I drifted into my own bliss, which is this…

SHAWN MENDES GETS LOST IN LOVE The sensitive pop heartthrob makes romance sound sweet and scary on his fourth album Shawn Mendes Wonder ISLAND CANADIAN HEART-throb Shawn Mendes made his bones playing a version of boy pop that was more James Taylor than Justin Bieber — strumming his acoustic guitar and singing earnestly about the battle scars of romance. He was a dress-shirt-and-sport-coat guy in a sleeve-tat world, and on his self-titled third LP, from 2018, he continued to grow, carefully making the transition to adult themes as he mixed rock moves, Prince-ly vocals, and lyrics about hookups that he hoped might become something bigger. The deluxe edition of Shawn Mendes tacked on “Señorita,” his steamy hit with girlfriend Camila Cabello. She doesn’t appear here, at least not in…

What are the best and worst parts of success? The upsides are access, options, creative expression, being able to communicate. The worst part about success and fame is not meeting strangers anymore. The world is already coming in with an idea of me. It’s why I went away to Peru or Mali. I want to go someplace where, when I leave, the hugs goodbye are all based on the man they met when I showed up. McConaughey’s book, ‘Greenlights,’ drawn from his diaries, is out now. You confirm in your book that the story of being arrested for playing bongos nude in your living room is precisely what people thought. But what does the nudity add? Just freedom! I had played bongos late at night buck naked many times…

IN THE SPRING OF 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic tore through New York City at terrifying speed, Robin Pecknold stayed home in his rented one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village. “I wasn’t being creative at all,” says the Fleet Foxes singer-songwriter, 34. “There were some dark weeks where I would end up waking up at 7 or 8 p.m. and stay up until noon. The world just seemed like it was more sane at night.” On top of everything else — “the stress that we’ve all been going through, just by being alive in 2020,” as he puts it — he had an album to worry about. He’d spent the previous fall and winter recording instrumental tracks for a new Fleet Foxes project, but the songs were half-finished at best,…

LATE ON A Friday night, Lil Wayne fires up a joint at his Miami studio and logs into Zoom as “Mr. Carter.” “What up, Baby?” he says. “How’s the fam?” “Good, man,” says Lil Baby, grinning from L.A. “That’s what’s up,” says Wayne. Wayne doesn’t listen to a lot of new music — “I listen to myself,” he’s said — but he loves Lil Baby, the 25-year-old Atlanta rapper who, in just a few years, has gone from serving time to becoming one of rap’s most urgent voices. Wayne points to Baby’s lyrics, which combine politically conscious statements with playful wordplay (“I done made a quarter this week in huaraches/Top model with me, trying to feed me hibachi”), delivered in some of rap’s smoothest cadences. “I got the utmost…