Indice dei contenuti per September 2021 in Rolling Stone

THESE DAYS, rock, punk, and hip-hop share the same fans and can be found on the same playlists — and for that, thank the New York City of the early Eighties. Back then, established pop acts like Blondie and up-and-comers like Madonna were close with rappers and graffiti artists, making for a melting pot of sounds and sensibilities that resonates to this day. That scene is celebrated in “New York, New Music: 1980–1986,” a multimedia exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York that runs through next spring, with vintage flyers, instruments, posters, and photos like these. “You saw all these different genres of music meeting and sharing ideas,” says curator Sean Corcoran. “There were no boundaries.”…

IT’S SAID THAT everyone who saw the Velvet Underground went out and started their own band. In a perfect world, everyone who sees The Velvet Underground (October 15th on Apple TV+), Todd Haynes’ extraordinary look back at the seminal New York band, would not only start their own group but also pick up a camera. The first documentary from the director of the glam-rock time capsule Velvet Goldmine (1998) and the many-sides-of-Bob-Dylan biopic I’m Not There (2007), it includes archival footage, behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and interviews with Velvets co-founder John Cale, drummer Maureen Tucker, and many surviving collaborators. But Haynes also borrows from the same sources that inspired the transgressive group — avant-garde cinema, pop art, downtown bohemianism, rock & roll rebelliousness — in telling the story of the Velvets’…

THE PAST YEAR and a half has been a time of unprecedented hardship for the live-music industry, with venues — from the nation’s biggest stadiums to the tiniest DIY nooks — forced to shutter due to the threat of Covid-19, and musicians, venue staff, and road-crew members left out of work. Despite these challenges, many local scenes have found ways to evolve and thrive. In Washington, D.C., the long-running go-go heroes Rare Essence found a new audience around the world by turning to livestreams; in New Orleans, electro-pop visionary Dawn Richard tapped into her family history to develop her sound and imagine a brighter future; and Austin, a city that calls itself the live-music capital of the world, wrestled with what happens when the music stops. In this package,…

A COMEDY THAT SHOOTS TO KILL ‘Only Murders in the Building’ puts true-crime obsessives at the center of a hilarious amateur investigation Only Murders in the Building NETWORK Hulu AIR DATE New episodes Tuesdays STARRING Steve Martin Martin Short Selena Gomez Nathan Lane ‘ONLY MURDERS in the Building” centers on three neighbors in a fancy Manhattan apartment complex — Steve Martin, as has-been actor Charles; Martin Short, as unemployable theater director Oliver; and Selena Gomez, as directionless Mabel — who have nothing to say to one another until realizing they’re all fans of the same true-crime podcast. When a suspicious death in their building is dismissed as a suicide, the trio realize they can cross the fan-creator divide and begin investigating, and recording, on their own. If Only Murders…

“IT’S SOUNDING BEAUTIFUL, Y’ALL,” Orville Peck tells the musicians gathered at Neon Cross studio in East Nashville, where the famously masked singer has been working on his next album, with producer Jay Joyce. The sessions include a pair of riveting tunes that hint at a more expansive, even sumptuous, approach to Peck’s left-of-center take on country. The project will be his “most personal and ambitious album,” Peck says, and bear the unlikely influences of “Seventies California psych-rock and casino music.” Peck and his band recorded most parts live in one room, a rare Covid-era privilege that isn’t lost on him: “We felt lucky to be able to capture that live energy,” he says. “It’s what I love about old country and rock albums.”…

MINISERIES 1. ‘Impeachment: American Crime Story’ Ryan Murphy got Monica Lewinsky herself to help produce this retelling of the Clinton affair in the most Murphy-esque way possible: from the POV of Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Paula Jones. COFFEE-TABLE BOOK 2. ‘Nirvana: Never Mind the Photos’ Photographer Kirk Weddle offers an in-depth view of Nirvana’s October 1991 poolside promo shoot, as well as the iconic Nevermind-cover session a few months earlier. PODCAST 3. ‘33 1/3: The Podcast’ Host Prince Paul uses the long-running Bloomsbury book series to shape conversations with celebrated artists (starting with De la Soul’s Posdnuos), offering deep dives into some of the most influential albums of our time. ALBUM 4. Sturgill Simpson’s ‘The Ballad of Dood and Juanita’ From Nashville’s wildest card comes a concept album about…

ON A DARK TORONTO night in the middle of a bleak pandemic winter, the cast and crew of What We Do in the Shadows are cracking themselves up with poop jokes. In the scene being filmed, the four lead vampires of the FX mockumentary series — bickering lovers Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), ancient warrior Nandor (Kayvan Novak), and superhumanly boring “energy vampire” Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) — are debating what to do with Nandor’s human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who recently outed himself as a vampire hunter. Guillermo is being kept in a cage in the basement of the group’s Staten Island home, and Colin Robinson has been obsessively studying the contents of Guillermo’s toilet bucket. The actors traditionally stick to the script for the first…

“WE WENT FROM homeless to limitless, y’all,” Dawn Richard coos sweetly on her sixth studio album, Second Line. That lyric neatly encapsulates her trek through the music industry. It also tells a story about the place Richard comes from. Richard was 20 years old in 2005, when she was chosen as a contestant on the third season of the Diddy-helmed MTV reality show Making the Band. Before the final five young women were chosen for Diddy’s girl group, Richard went home to her native New Orleans. She was there when Hurricane Katrina hit, in all its devastation; she spent three weeks living in a car before being summoned back to New York to take her spot in Danity Kane, named for a comic-book character Richard created. It’s only now,…

BARELY THREE DAYS after Dave Brown toasted the 15th anniversary of his Nashville rock venue the BASEMENT with a celebratory concert on February 29th, 2020, the club owner was awoken by a phone call that tragedy had struck at the BASEMENT EAST, his other venue, across the Cumberland River. A tornado had touched down in East Nashville, leaving a trail of destruction and resulting in more than 20 dead across the state. Brown’s club was among the businesses that took a direct hit: The tornado leveled its front wall while six employees, cleaning up after a fundraising concert for Bernie Sanders, huddled together in the Basement East’s actual basement. “Punchy, our head door guy, called me and said, ‘Man, we’re all OK, but the Basement East is gone,’” says…

FROM THE GREEN ROOM at STUBB’S BBQ, a narrow hallway lined by rope lighting leads to the stage. Usually, the glowing amber string is merely an accent to guide performers down a dimly lit passage in the moments before the show begins. But at the end of this past May, when Black Pumas played the first full-capacity show in Austin since March 2020, it felt like a runway for the relaunch of live music in a city where that means everything — where statues of Willie Nelson and Stevie Ray Vaughan stand downtown, a stage with a live band welcomes travelers at the airport, and music normally fills more than 200 venues nightly. Congregants at Stubb’s that night — people such as Pablo Martínez, who journeyed there all the…

BRUNO MARS and Anderson .Paak are enjoying the sun-dappled courtyard of a recording studio — lighting up American Spirits with a Gucci-monogrammed lighter, appreciating the gentle birdsong wafting down from the trees overhead, admiring some orange hibiscus flowers growing up a nearby wall — when a studio assistant named Alex walks over with a surprise to complete the laid-back scene: “Rumritas!” he announces, setting down three frothing salt-rimmed glasses. “We hide the stress well,” .Paak says, sitting back, taking a sip. It’s late June in Los Angeles, and work is nearly done on An Evening With Silk Sonic, the debut LP from Mars and .Paak’s superduo of the same name, which began life five years ago as a joke the two friends hatched on the road, then got real…

‘I’VE NEVER BEEN HERE. This is not a representation of my character,” says Alessandro Nivola, sliding into the broad, beige-y booth of a Park Avenue joint with a decidedly ladies-who-lunch vibe one recent Sunday morning in New York. The lighting is flattering. The prices alarm. The waitstaff scurry about as if catering to nobility. “I’ve got some photo shoot around the corner,” Nivola demurs, dimples flashing, about his request to meet here. “I’m not like, ‘This is me!’” In fact, Nivola has spent the better part of the past few decades trying to explain to Hollywood folks (casting directors, regular directors, industry bigwigs) who exactly he is — a character actor in a leading man’s body — and what exactly to do with him. It’s not that he hasn’t…

SWEET AND (VERY) SOUR HORROR A reboot/sequel/update of a 1992 horror classic doesn’t exactly inspire you to say its name again Candyman STARRING Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Teyonah Parris Colman Domingo Nathan Stewart-Jarrett DIRECTED BY Nia DaCosta ‘BE MY VICTIM. Sweets for the sweet.” For those who’ve seen it, the original Candyman remains unforgettable (and for some, unforgivable). Memorably played by Tony Todd, this hook-handed villain is set up as the boogeyman of Chicago’s ill-fated Cabrini-Green projects, a specter stalking Chicago’s lower-class Black community with as much traumatic force as any of the era’s social ills. Probably the least surprising thing about Nia DaCosta’s new take on this 1992 horror film is that it was produced and co-written by Jordan Peele, whose Get Out was cleverly marketed as a “social…