Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2019 i Rolling Stone

“No matter how powerful our military is, no matter how impressive our space program is, it isn’t going to come to much if we can’t deliver a good, everyday life for Americans.”—PETE BUTTIGIEG FOR THE PAST YEAR, photographer Theo Wenner embedded with the NYPD’s Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, one of the city’s elite detective units. It’s a tense time for the NYPD: Despite historically low crime rates, murders have surged in north Brooklyn (21 through March this year, up from 12 in the same 2018 period), and police face unprecedented mistrust and scrutiny, especially in minority communities. “The political atmosphere is intense around police now,” says Wenner. “But the thing I noticed is, these detectives get a ton of respect on the street. They know the neighborhoods they work,…

LAST YEAR, Brittany Howard called a meeting with her bandmates and told them some news they probably didn’t want to hear. Alabama Shakes — who met in high school, broke through with 2012’s “Hold On” and went on to win four Grammys — would not be recording a follow-up to 2015’s Sound & Color anytime soon. Instead, Howard would be making a solo album. “It was like, ‘I’m going to do this record by myself,’” she says. “I knew that I needed to be in control of everything: the music, the arrangements, all that stuff. And when am I going to do it if not now?” Howard’s solo debut, Jaime, is her most ambitious recording ever, full of synthed-out psychedelic funk, druggy soul ballads, hip-hop loops, and lyrics grappling…

Governors Ball Brings the Thunder Nine years ago, Governors Ball began as a small indie fest with sets by Girl Talk, Pretty Lights and Big Boi. Now, it is one of the summer’s biggest, with hitmakers of all genres — this year included Tyler, the Creator, Florence and the Machine, Kacey Musgraves, Major Lazer and Nas (“Anyone here ever own a cassette?” Nas asked during his set, stunned at how young the crowd was). The weekend ended on a sour note when thunder and lightning caused evacuations and the cancellation of Sunday-night headliners the Strokes. “Sometimes Mother Nature has a mind of its own,” the band said in a statement. “We love New York. Until next time!” RANDOM QUOTE “People are now taking this seriously. This is fucking real.…

THIS MAY COME as a surprise to no one, but Halsey is pretty good with a knife. Today she is wielding it against a cucumber, which would seem like a joke or a meme — given her man-eater rep in the pop-star pantheon — were it not for the bowls of lettuce idling nearby. “I’m kind of on autopilot,” she says over her shoulder, blade flashing. A few days back, she’d thrown friends an Easter feast of “baked ziti, rosemary rack of lamb, garlic Parmesan chicken, angel-hair pasta, meatballs, a fillet, mashed potatoes, bacon-wrapped asparagus, green beans and roasted potatoes,” she says. And this being L.A., “It kind of stressed me the fuck out because I was like, ‘Of the four trays of ziti I’m cooking, which one’s vegan?…

The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead DOUBLEDAY COLSON WHITEHEAD’S previous novel, 2016’s The Underground Railroad, won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a feat only seven other novels have achieved. The praise was well-earned. Whitehead’s story of two slaves fleeing the Deep South was a magical-realist odyssey full of faint hope and inescapable horror. In his latest, The Nickel Boys, he further dramatizes the brutality of the past — this time the book is set at a racially segregated reform school in Jim Crow Florida — but with darker, tauter machinations. Elwood Curtis is one of the Nickel Boys, a student-slash-prisoner at the Nickel School, where he was sent for unwittingly hitchhiking in a stolen car. Elwood is a teen with hopes and dreams; it’s the…

“I was never really a fan, but I am now. I’m impressed by his singular ability to work on himself and change. Plus, cats!”—Kenneth, via the internet Howard Stern Repents Our June issue marked the fourth time Howard Stern has appeared on our cover [“A Softer Side of Howard Stern,” RS 1328], and the interview showed Stern at his most vulnerable: After years of psychotherapy, he looked back on his life, sharing his deepest regrets and hopes for the future. Chris Vaccaro tweeted that the issue made him “feel like a kid on Christmas.” Debra Phillips tweeted, “I am in the 40% women audience that listens to you. I used to not stand the old Howard, but I love the guy you are now.” Dave Hobson wrote, “I have…

1. Halsey “Nightmare” Halsey’s latest blockbuster is a bloodthirsty anthem that taps the emo she loved as a New Jersey teenager to deliver a message of resistance and empowerment: “I’ve been polite, but I won’t be caught dead/Letting a man tell me what I should do with my bed.” It’s a cathartic dose of drama. 2. Lana Del Rey “Doin’ Time” The Cali-goth queen rings in beach season with a cover of rasta-pop crew Sublime’s 1997 jam “Summertime (Doin’ Time).” Naturally, she gives the spliffy original an eerie makeover. Can a Nineties ska revival be far behind? 3. Sleater-Kinney “Hurry on Home” “Disconnect me from my bones,” Carrie Brownstein sings on the first single from the indie-rock heroes’ upcoming LP. She sounds ready to explode, and the slicing guitars…

IT COULD HAVE been an episode of The Apprentice. On a summer day in 2016, a group of businessmen and women descended on Trump Tower in Manhattan. They exited their black SUVs and rode the golden elevators to the 26th floor, where they assembled in a boardroom and awaited the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party. A year earlier, surely no one in that meeting had the faintest notion that Donald Trump would make a credible run for president. But by the spring, he’d dispatched Low-Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted and the rest, and was well on his way to securing enough delegates to clinch the nomination. The corporate leaders who formed one of the GOP’s most reliable constituencies faced a dilemma: Get behind Trump or find yourself potentially…

THIS YEAR, Beanie Feldstein became immortal. First on FX’s vampire comedy, What We Do in the Shadows, when her character gets chomped. “Wowie-zowie!” she gasps. “Is this like a Tony Robbins unleash-the-power-within thing?” The reaction is quintessentially Beanie: an innocent thrilled by the flush of adventure. Then it happened on the big screen, with her star-making turn in May’s genre-upending high school buddy comedy, Booksmart, where she played a nerd-gone-bad the night before graduation. How to Build a Girl, based on a novel about a teenage music critic in Nineties Britain and due later this year, should seal the deal. It took Feldstein only three films to level up from sidekick status, a feat for a 26-year-old who “grew up deeply, embarrassingly obsessed with musical theater,” she says at…

The Black Keys “Let’s Rock” The Raconteurs Help Us Stranger IF ROCK IS DEAD, that memo did not reach Nashville, where these albums were recorded. And Detroit — the Raconteurs’ real home, where singer-guitarists Jack White and Brendan Benson each grew up in the local garage-punk ruckus — has always ignored that message. “I’ve been riding this thing out since I was eight years old,” Benson sings on Help Us Stranger, in “Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying),” which starts in Seventies-arena-ballad distress but jumps to a thumping, electric vengeance as he and White crow “I’m here right now/I’m not dead yet” like a super-caffeinated Queen. The Black Keys, in turn, affirm their continuing mission in the title of their first album in five years. Singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach and…

What are the best and worst parts of success? The best is flying first class when you don’t have to pay for it. The worst is when you’re sick and people recognize you. I had a kidney stone a couple of years back in the middle of a book tour and had to be rushed to the hospital. You’re sitting there and people yell out, “Hey, it’s John Waters!” And somebody else says, “Who’s John Waters?” You’re from Baltimore. What’s the most Baltimorean thing about you? I never pay to park. A Baltimorean would rather die than pay to park. You were raised Catholic. How did that affect you later on? I’m glad I was raised Catholic because sex will always be dirty. But I hate the new pope.…

AFTER MAKING 2018’s wild Boarding House Reach, Jack White decided it was time to take a little pressure off himself. So he re-formed the Raconteurs — the band he put together in 2006, just before the dissolution of the White Stripes, with fellow Detroit musicians including co-frontman Brendan Benson. Their first two albums have become fan favorites; their third, Help Us Stranger, is a welcome return to their garage-y looseness and the blend of White’s aggressive vocals with Benson’s “sweet-sounding voice,” as White, calling from Nashville, puts it. “He’s an actual singer,” he adds. “I’m not.” This time, White branched out by taking on some of the more sentimental songs while letting Benson sing some of the rockers. “What’s cool is it’s not competitive,” White says. “It’s more like…

FOR THE 2020 election, Democrats are proposing policies of sweep and ambition not seen since the New Deal or the Great Society. Ideas that would have seemed radical even five years ago — publicly funded college, a Green New Deal, Medicare for All — are now at the top of many candidates’ platforms. Most intriguing: As once-fringe ideas enter the mainstream debate, they are proving popular. “Medicare for All is supported by at least 55 percent of the public,” says Sean McElwee, a co-founder of the progressive think tank Data for Progress. “So why is that treated as an extreme position?” By offering visionary reforms for a defective democracy, a foundering middle class, the climate crisis and a system rigged for the wealthiest, progressives hope to inspire an electorate…

PLUMBERS AND STEAMFITTERS Local Union 33 has a sculpture of two 20-foot wrenches emerging from the mud out by its pocked parking lot in Des Moines, Iowa. Inside, a public bathroom features a shower adorned with gone-gray towels and multiple containers of industrial-strength body wash, presumably for cleaning up after some kind of toxic toilet encounter. It is all very manly. If this were a Joe Biden event, the ex-VP would just grunt “Scranton, Scranton” for 30 minutes before waving and disappearing back into his motorcade. ¶ But it’s not. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg sits up front. Well, he sits for a moment but then stands because he is not tall. He is jacketless, and wearing one of his 612 white-shirt-and-blue-tie combos. The outfit and his Supercuts haircut…

Mark Ronson Late Night Feelings Sony MARK RONSON branded himself a nostalgia alchemist as a producer for Amy Winehouse’s landmark LPs, updating midcentury R&B with a rare-groove-fanatic’s ear for detail. Where superproducers like Diplo might make serviceable magic with anyone, Ronson’s classicism generally requires the wearer to animate it. Winehouse was an ideal match — as was Bruno Mars, whose Prince homage “Uptown Funk” proved how lucrative Ronson’s science could be. Late Night Feelings is a sort of feminine inverse of Ronson’s 2015 LP, Uptown Special, the latter’s dude roster swapped for a compelling mix of women, its brittle chromed funk replaced with a plush, dubby quiet-storm vibe. It’s a better album — rangy, sexy and fairly seamless, a record to play all the way through after a night…

Amazing Grace Perfection is rarely achieved in movies, but this heaven-sent concert doc, my only five-star film of 2019 to date, hits the sweet spot. Over two days in January 1972, the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin — she was 29 at the time — sweeps into the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts in front of a congregation and testifies to God in song. The blessed thing took nearly half a century to come out because director Sydney Pollack failed to sync the image with the sound. Then digital angels stepped in, and glory, glory, hallelujah! During Franklin’s euphoric vocal on the title song, the Rev. James Cleveland gets up, sits to one side and cries like a baby. No mystery. That’s what you do when you…