Indice dei contenuti per June 2021 in Rolling Stone

ALBUM 1. Loraine James’ ‘Reflection’ Maverick London producer James’ fearlessly inventive LP takes listeners on a ride through an electronic underworld, with voices echoing eerily off walls of dreamlike synths and deftly programmed beats. BOOK 2. ‘In Defense of Ska’ Drummer-turned-journalist Aaron Carnes mixes reporting and memoir-esque essays in this deep dive from CLASH Books, bringing new meaning to underground legends like Operation Ivy. RADIO APP 3. Nostalgie This Parisian station streams New Wave, pop, disco, and obscure cuts by artists you know (Donna Summer) and French ones you might not (Johnny Hallyday). It’s a passport to another time, when travel feels like a dream. ALBUM 4. Amythyst Kiah’s ‘Wary + Strange’ On her label debut, singer-songwriter Kiah — one of roots music’s most promising new voices since joining…

OLIVIA RODRIGO could have been designed in a laboratory as the perfect teen pop star — except the best part is how gloriously, messily, authentically human she is. She’s a whole new pop-queen paradigm, ripping up the old playbook and starting again. She seemingly blew in out of nowhere to hit Number One with her instant-classic debut single, “Drivers License.” It’s one of the all-time great debuts — yet somehow the sequel, “Deja Vu,” is even better? And it’s about taunting her ex about how they used to bond over listening to Billy Joel? Who had his last hit 10 years before Olivia Rodrigo was born? She’s a new kind of star because she reps the next wave of hitmakers, who grew up idolizing Taylor Swift. So her whole…

1. This is Joe Manchin’s moment It was the morning of Friday, March 5th, and victory was in sight. Joe Biden’s first major act as president, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, had gone to the Senate, and it appeared to be headed for a swift passage. The moderates in the Democratic caucus had quibbled over the size and duration of the bill’s weekly unemployment benefits, but those concerns were addressed, and the day began that Friday in March with the belief that all 50 Senate Democrats were ready to vote “aye.” But when the latest text of the bill circulated that morning, one senator took a look at the text and balked. What Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saw in print was not the deal he and…

PEOPLE WROTE OFF Lil Nas X as a fluke. His self-released country-and-rap medley “Old Town Road” had pulled in blockbuster streams in 2019, but it was a novelty, surely a one-hit thing, and Columbia Records was making a bad bet by signing him to an expensive record deal. Yet Columbia threw Billy Ray Cyrus on a remix and poured gas all over the song, fanning it into a global beast. Then in 2021, Lil Nas X, under Columbia’s watch, vaulted back to the apex of music charts with the pointedly raunchy “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” surfing wave after wave of controversy. (Gimmicks included a blood-stained, “satanic” Nike shoe and a music-video lap dance on the devil’s groin.) The 22-year-old’s masterful antics as a rapper and puritan-baiting troll…

WHEN DORIS MUÑOZ MET CUCO, one of the first things she told him was that his art was pure and should never be exploited. “I said, ‘I want to advocate for you because I don’t want you to get Ritchie Valens’d,’” she recalls, referring to the Chicano rock & roller whose label owner, Bob Keane, kept Valens’ recording rights in perpetuity. Valens’ mother had to wait until 1987, 28 years after her son’s death in a plane crash, to take back his publishing. Muñoz began managing Cuco in 2017, when labels were pulling out all the stops to sign the 18-year-old artist, whose bedroom productions were burning up SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The pair were flown out to New York and dazzled in meetings with label chairmen. “And we’re just…

ANITA MULDOON could sense that this might be her last chance to make it as a cop. She was riding shotgun in a Minneapolis squad car in the fall of 1993 when her training officer offered a blunt assessment of her standing. “You’re not trusted,” he told her. “And you won’t be until you’re in a physical fight.” ▪ To rectify this, he said, she’d need to “leak” someone, as in make them bleed. Muldoon felt her stomach drop. She had known she would stick out from her peers — a liberal woman embarking on a law-enforcement career in her mid-thirties. She just hadn’t understood all the reasons why. Since coming to the 3rd Precinct, she’d often heard the n-word from her colleagues. Now her training officer motioned toward…

SYD GRINS AS SHE REVS UP the engine of her beige 1975 Ford Bronco, the truck growling and sputtering loud enough to wake the neighbors in the singer-songwriter-producer’s quiet Central L.A. neighborhood. Syd’s been busy readying new music; in February, she released her first solo single in four years, a woozily beautiful R&B track called “Missing Out,” and she’s got a new album of similarly vibe-y songs on the way. But she’s also spent lots of time on her hobby: amassing a small fleet of vintage trucks and fixing them up herself. “The biggest thing for me about these cars is the empowerment of knowing what the fuck is wrong and trying to diagnose it,” she says. “Getting under the hood reminds me how I felt when I started…

This is a very serious and deep question,” says RM, the 26-year-old leader of the world’s biggest band. He pauses to think. We’re talking about utopian and dystopian futures, about how the boundary-smashing, hegemony-overturning global success of his group, the wildly talented seven-member South Korean juggernaut BTS, feels like a glimpse of a new and better world, of an interconnected 21st century actually living up to its promise. BTS’ downright magical levels of charisma, their genre-defying, sleek-but-personal music, even their casually nontoxic, skin-care-intensive brand of masculinity — every bit of it feels like a visitation from some brighter, more hopeful timeline. What RM is currently pondering, however, is how all of it contrasts with a darker landscape all around them, particularly the horrifying recent wave of anti-Asian violence and…

JEFF JAMPOL has managed the estates of everyone from the Doors and Janis Joplin to Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. “None of my clients tour,” he says. “They’re all dead.” But that hasn’t stopped him from generating big money on their behalf, whether it’s organizing a touring exhibition of Cobain’s artwork, setting up Oliver Stone’s 1991 Doors biopic (which tripled the band’s catalog sales), or producing the 2015 Joplin documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue. Jampol compares an artist’s legacy to a dark, cold fireplace with five or six matches on the mantelpiece. Each represents a tool that can spark new interest in the brand — from a book to a docuseries, Broadway musical, or biopic. “If you light the fire incorrectly with one of those matches, it glows for…

Amapiano WHAT IT IS This dance style out of South Africa blends elements of deep house and kwaito, a local genre dating to the Nineties. Deep bass lines, jazzy keyboards, and synths blend to bring good vibes to the dance floor. WHO’S DOING IT MFR Souls are pioneers of amapiano, and have a number of streaming hits. Perhaps the biggest crossover story is Kabza de Small, who has hits with the likes of Burna Boy and Wizkid, and a fan in Usher. STANDOUT TRACK In 2019, Samthing Soweto found his first streaming hit with the amapiano tune “Akulaleki,” a pulsing, nimble example of the genre at its best. WHERE IT’S GOING Amapiano is starting to spread globally. In the past year, streams in the U.S. for Spotify’s AmaPiano Grooves…

A TWEETCAR NAMED DESIRE An epic, viral Twitter thread about two strippers’ misadventures details a social media odyssey from hell Zola STARRING Taylour Paige Riley Keough Colman Domingo Nicholas Braun DIRECTED BY Janicza Bravo A FILM INSPIRED BY a viral tweet thread could have gone any number of ways — indeed, Aziah “Zola” Wells King’s 2015 Twitter tale out of which director Janicza Bravo and playwright-screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris’ Zola was born, does go any number of ways. A stripper misadventure, a Backpage okey-dokey, a chance encounter from hell, some savory racial tension, an extra helping of terrifying unpredictability — all of it tied together with a cutting sense of humor (“So we vibing over our hoe-ism or whatever?”). Pitch this story as a movie, however, without the previous…

IN 1979, when Edgar Wright was five years old, he turned on Top of the Pops to find a boyish-looking singer bopping manically in place. A keyboardist next to him stood stock still, sporting floppy bangs and a Hitler-esque mustache, looking alternately bored and angry. The music sounded like a disco LP played at 45 rpm. “If you should die while crossing the street,” the first guy sang in a near falsetto, “The song you’ll hear, I guarantee/It’s number one all over heaven!” The moment stuck with the future Shaun of the Dead filmmaker enough that when he was going through a retro-glam-rock phase in his teens, he was surprised to find the group’s name — Sparks — among the Bowie and T. Rex cuts on album compilations. Those…

NOT SINCE the teen pop craze of the early 2000s have we seen a music movement quite like this. Acts like BTS and Blackpink have led K-pop boldly into the mainstream, winning fans around the globe with catchy hooks, colorful videos, and irresistible personalities. But that’s only a sampling of what Korea’s hottest acts have to offer. While K-pop isn’t a new phenomenon — the supergroup Super Junior just celebrated their 15th anniversary, and rapper CL is as relevant as ever, five years after her longtime girl group 2NE1 broke up — it’s never been a more exciting time to be a K-pop fan. Today, a new wave of artists is pushing the genre forward with A-list collaborations, adventurous new sounds, and surprising emotional heft. Just as Latin pop…

SHAUN CLAIR HAS seen the future of rock & roll, and it’s a 3D pig. Starting in the Sixties, Clair Global, the company co-founded by Clair’s grandfather, has provided sound systems for major rock tours, from Elton John’s and the Stones’ up through more recent ones like Roger Waters’ The Wall extravaganza. But with advances in AI, lighting tricks, robots, lasers, and other new technologies in the offing, what could the Wall of the future look like? For one, Clair says, the music would be piped into your ears by way of AirPods or similar in-ear tech — so when that plane smashes into the brick wall at the show’s end, “it will sound authentic,” no matter where you’re sitting. Then, picture everyone sporting Google Glass or similar headgear…

AI MUSIC FN Meka has 9 million TikTok followers. He’s also not alive. So-called virtual stars or robot rappers — their tunes supplied by real vocal cords, supercharged with Auto-Tune — are offering music execs an intriguing proposition: Celebrity isn’t real, so maybe celebrities don’t have to be, either. EMERGING MARKETS It may feel a bit anachronistic to refer to any country in the world as “emerging” in 2021. But as far as the hitmaking industry goes, dozens of regions are still uncracked eggs, with millions of people yet to sign on to music streaming, and entrepreneurs especially see Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa as huge areas of future growth. NFT What if an artist’s merch table only sold one T-shirt that could never be replicated, and had…

The Underground Railroad NETWORK Amazon Prime Video AIR DATE Streaming now STARRING Thuso Mbedu Aaron Pierre Joel Edgerton William Jackson Harper EVIL SURFACES IN ‘UNDERGROUND’ Barry Jenkins’ new limited series about an escaped slave is a gorgeous exploration of America’s darkest impulses AGAIN AND AGAIN throughout Barry Jenkins’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, the Oscar-winning Moonlight director will pause the story to present tableaus of his huge cast of black characters. These shots are stunning in their composition, as if Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton are painting an entirely different vision of American history than the one you most commonly find in textbooks and on museum walls. It’s an appropriate touch for a story that weaves in agonizingly real details from our horrible past…