Table of contents for Aug-13-15 in Rolling Stone

1. Drake “Energy” video Drizzy makes fun of his many imitators by CGI-grafting his face onto Miley Cyrus, Oprah, President Obama and more in this very funny (and slightly creepy) video for the catchiest song from If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. 2. Foals “What Went Down” Find a lighter and spark it up high – even if you’re home alone, the U.K. rockers’ driving new single hits like an arena anthem. 3. Kurt Vile “Pretty Pimpin” Some of us look in the mirror to adjust our hair or pick a bit of spinach out of our teeth. Kurt Vile stares at his reflection and writes a shaggy psychedelic folk-rock tune about it. Nice! 4. Wilco “Cold Slope” The art-rock kings of the Midwest pack 11 killer songs into…

About eight years ago, Jamaican singer Omar Pasley woke up with a melody in his head that he couldn’t shake. It was the beginning of “Cheerleader,” which has since become one of the more unlikely – and slowest-rising – Number One pop hits ever. “Cheerleader” started as a radio favorite in Jamaica in 2012, became a hit all over Europe in 2014, and finally topped the Hot 100 in mid-July. “Man,” says Pasley, “it’s overwhelming.” Pasley, 28, grew up loving rappers like Tupac and Eminem, but things changed in his early twenties. “I got exposed to melodic aspects of music when I started listening to John Legend, Nat King Cole and Sam Cooke,” he says. His life changed forever when he met with Jamaican producer Clifton Dillon, who fell in…

GARY CLARK JR.’S 2012 MAJORlabel debut, Blak and Blu, was one of the most acclaimed blues albums in recent memory. Recording in Los Angeles with pop and rock producers Mike Elizondo (Dr. Dre, Fiona Apple) and Rob Cavallo (Green Day), the singerguitarist fused classic influences like Willie Dixon and Albert King with a love for Nirvana and hip-hop, yanking traditional American music into the present. For his new album, The Story of Sonny Boy Slim, the 30-year-old Clark brought it all back home, recording in his native Austin in search of a more relaxed, familiar vibe. “I went in feeling vulnerable – I was very aware of the sophomore slump,” says Clark. “I really wanted to just come home and be in the studio, hang out and go back to…

THE DOOR TO ROOM 1226 AT Austin’s Hilton Garden Inn is propped open. Kevin Parker is in bed, and the room is a mess – empty cans of Tecate litter the tables; underwear, skinny jeans and scarves spill from a suitcase. Hangover cures – Advil, Tums – rest on the nightstand. “I like a messy hotel room,” Parker deadpans in his thick Australian accent. “It’s a little slice of home.” His memory of last night is hazy, but he knows he climbed down from a second-floor balcony at the hotel and ended up in a nearby creek, where he sat on a rock and watched the sunrise. Today, he wants to take it easy: “Fucking codeine and South Park.” But it’s the day before Tame Impala’s five-week summer tour kicks…

LAST YEAR, TA-NEHISI COATES wrote “The Case for Reparations,” a painstakingly researched Atlantic cover story that confirmed him as one of the 21st century’s most important writers on race. For his new book, Between the World and Me, he shifted tactics, exploring the impact of racist violence in America through an extraordinary blend of memoir and history. “I wanted to think about the problem from a more literary perspective,” says Coates, 39. “I really wanted to make something beautiful.” The book is especially timely this summer: Its release was moved up from September to July after the killings in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. James Baldwin is one of the clearest influences on your writing in this book. When did you first read his work? I have this fond memory…

JASON ISBELL FELT A RUSH OF familiarity when he watched the final episode of Mad Men on his tour bus. As he saw Don Draper go AWOL from his advertising job and embark on an aimless cross-country road trip, Isbell recalled his own life around 2008, after his first marriage had fallen apart and he’d been fired from the Drive-By Truckers due largely to his heavy drinking. Isbell bought a motorcycle and took off from his home in Alabama. “I drove down to Florida, back up through Georgia and visited some of the girls I had met on the road,” he says in a husky Alabama drawl. “It’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. I got home feeling and looking worse than when I’d left, just completely lost.” Isbell eventually…

British actress Bel Powley has appeared onscreen and onstage for a decade. But the 23-year-old’s role in the widely acclaimed film The Diary of a Teenage Girl involved a “scary” first – a series of sex scenes with co-star Alexander Skarsgård. “I’d never even had an onscreen kiss before,” she says, “let alone an onscreen shag. I was like, ‘This is the worst idea in the world!’_” By the time the film was finished, she’d shot eight of them – “including the lesbian sex scene.” In Diary, Powley stars as Minnie, a 15-year-old in 1970s San Francisco who worships Iggy Pop, drops acid and just happens to be sleeping with her mom’s boyfriend. The film premiered at Sundance in January, earning a jury award and making Powley the It girl…

IN HIS NEW MOVIE “THE END OF THE TOUR,” Jason Segel plays the revered, troubled late author David Foster Wallace – a casting choice the media intelligentsia scrutinized like Comic-Con attendees fretting over Ben Affleck playing Batman. Tour is based on writer David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, with Jesse Eisenberg playing Lipsky, trailing Wallace on his Infinite Jest book tour for a never-published Rolling Stone profile. “The first viewing was scary,” says Segel, 35, who’s getting Oscar buzz for the role. “Coming from comedy into a movie like this – just as a body rejects a perfectly good organ – no matter how well I did, people could just decide, ‘Nope!’ Luckily when I watched it, that didn’t happen.” What’s it like playing someone who’s…

“If a rock star sticks his wang in a bagel, it sells on eBay.” —Courtney Love, on Ariana Grande’s doughnut-licking scandal Unchained! “Ed gets ’em in the tent,” says David Lee Roth of Van Halen’s current tour. “I sell ’em the Bibles!” Bassist Wolfie Van Halen planned the set list for the band’s Irvine, California, show (“Y’all are gonna flip,” he tweeted beforehand), dropping in deep cuts such as 1984’s “Drop Dead Legs” and Van Halen II’s “Light Up the Sky” alongside classics like “Beautiful Girls” and “Hot for Teacher.” City of Blinding Lights At the first night of U2’s eight-show run at Madison Square Garden, Bono looked back at their early New York gigs. “When we first played a club called the Ritz in this great city, we thought…

DAWN IS JUST BREAKING ON JUNE 5TH AT DJIBOUTI’S INTERNATIONAL airport, but it’s already boiling hot on the tarmac. Mohammed Issa, a rotund and mustachioed border-police officer, gestures to a massive U.S. Air Force transport jet – a gray C-17 Globemaster – sitting a short distance away. “Since the start of the war in Yemen, it’s been crazy here,” he says. “Military flights, humanitarian aid – sometimes there’s no space to park on the tarmac.” ¶ Djibouti is a tiny state of citrus-colored shacks and goat-lined boulevards tucked into a barren, volcanic stretch of the Horn of Africa. It sits astride the narrow straits that lead to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, and is home to the U.S.’s only permanent military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, linchpin of…

Mac DeMarco Another One Captured Tracks A boy hero to indie-rock fans who prize delicately demented pop, Mac DeMarco has the casual grace of early Beck, bringing a shambolic scuzz to the creamy sounds of Seventies soft rock. His melodies and slide guitar stumble and dance their way through songs that often feel like reverse Polaroids: A fully developed image fades into haze as you watch. Over the course of four releases since 2012 – not one of them more than 35 minutes long – the Canadian singersongwriter has continually upped the ante without exactly playing high stakes, and this eight-track mini-LP is his craftiest set of tunes yet. The lyrics are full of heartbreak and longing, with DeMarco’s voice and guitar threading through melancholy keyboards like a cat…

Pixels Adam Sandler, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad Directed by Chris Columbus Aliens attack Earth disguised as characters from 1980s video games. Right, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong want to kill us. Our only hope lies with arcade geeks now grown up but still immature and played by Adam Sandler, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage and Kevin James (he’s the president). Director Chris Columbus surely hopes that today’s teen gamers, hooked on Halo and Call of Duty, will care about what happened 30 years ago. That’s iffy, unless 13-year-olds think it’s a scream when Dinklage asks to be part of a sex sandwich with Serena Williams and Martha Stewart, who both do cameos. Yikes! I saw Pixels as a 3D metaphor for Hollywood’s digital assault on our eyes and brains. Not funny. Just…

Rush to the Top OPENING MY MAILBOX TO see Rush finally on the cover of Rolling Stone [“From Rush With Love,” RS 1238] and then reading such a well-written piece on these “three men of Willowdale” confirms that good things truly do come to those who wait. Russ DiBella, Sicklerville, NJ WHAT AN ENGAGING FEAture by Brian Hiatt. Great musicians and thoughtful people. Their intelligence, humor, commitment to excellence, and humanity are inspirational. Reid Whitton, Syracuse, NY GEDDY LEE CALLS RECORDing the vocals for Hemispheres “just the worst two weeks of my life.” Having listened to Hemispheres at least once a month for the past 37 years, and having loved every minute, I have to ask, “Wasn’t it worth two terrible weeks of your life to give a fan years…

CLASSIC Eddie Cochran “Somethin’ Else” I’m hearing this song for the first time, and it sounds so modern. But I don’t know if we walk that line of so-tough and so-pop anymore. Oh, the times, they keep changing. The Rolling Stones “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” This is one of my favorite songs. It feels thick with humidity and wonder. It’s sexual and fun. Neil Young “Sample and Hold” I love Neil Young very much, but I didn’t enjoy the verse on this one that much. Maybe you had to be there. I’m going to loop the chorus for my pleasure. NEW The Libertines “Gunga Din” What a fun return! I’m intrigued. The guitar in the intro is cleverly simple. Tame Impala “Cuz I’m a Man” This took me a…

JIMMY PAGE CAN TELL YOU EXACTly when he will become a solo artist again: on August 2nd, right after the Led Zeppelin guitarist concludes his yearlong deluxe reissues of the band’s studio albums with the July 31st release of expanded editions of 1976’s Presence, 1979’s In Through the Out Door and the 1982 compilation, Coda. On August 1st, “I’ll wipe my brow, lay in bed and read the paper,” Page says with a grin in a New York hotel room. The next day, “I’ll pick up the guitar, and I won’t stop from that point on. “I’ve got new material,” he insists. “I’ve played guitar in so many different styles, and I want to revisit them all.” Page says that “the focus and energies I have been putting into this…

COLORADO-RAISED ECO-ACTIVIST and rapper Xiuhtezcatl Martinez is only 15 years old, but he’s already a leading voice in the environmental movement. In June, Martinez stunned representatives of nearly 200 countries when he delivered an impassioned climate-change address at the U.N., and he’ll soon appear in a short film being produced by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project. Right now, he’s busy preparing his band, Earth Guardians (which also includes his 12-year-old brother, Itzcuauhtli), for a main-stage set at the politically charged Arise festival in Colorado this month. “We don’t just get recognition because we’re young,” Martinez says. “We get recognition because we bring a unique conscious hiphop to the stage that people aren’t seeing anywhere else.” Martinez enjoys the attention his music is getting. But he’s also young enough to know…

A pivotal influence on hip-hop, EDM and synth-pop, not to mention David Bowie and Brian Eno, the mysterious Sixties and Seventies German music dubbed krautrock has mainly remained a hipster reference point in the U.S. British music writer David Stubbs may change that with Future Days: Krautrock and the Birth of a Revolutionary New Music. The hefty volume maps a freaky but fierce scene defined by radical beats and futuristic electronic soundscapes – a musical attempt at nothing less than a complete “re-establishment of cultural identity” after the horrors of World War II. Among the book’s stars are Kraftwerk, the only band of the era to break through in the U.S. (inspiring hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, among others), and Can, art-funk adventurers committed to collective improvisation (“No one was allowed…

AMERICA WILL MISS Jon Stewart. But it’s fair to say we miss him already, because his America is gone. The political climate – angrier, more bitter, more violently divided – is radically different from the one he signed up to make fun of. Political satire, as Stewart defined it on The Daily Show, requires him to appear equally tough on the left and the right. But that means he has to pretend there’s such a thing as a moderate center. The Daily Show Weeknights, 11 p.m., Comedy Central If his show got more predictable in the past few years – making the same jokes every night about the same Fox News/Tea Party bullshit – that’s because America did too. And it clearly took a toll on him. “Watching these channels…

Wilco Star Wars dBpm BY JON DOLAN Wilco are one of the most respected bands on the planet – paragons of good taste, masters of genre-bridging craftsmanship and chill independence. Considering that heavy rep, it’s strange to think that when Jeff Tweedy put together Wilco’s first lineup 20 years ago, their loose bar-band vibe was a defiant response to the weighty myth he’d shouldered as a member of alt-country pioneers Uncle Tupelo. Wilco’s first album in four years recalls their early “hey, what the hell” freedom, in spirit if not in sound. It’s their most concise, catchy, naturally songful album in at least a decade – the sound of a band reconnecting with the fun of rocking out together in a room. Wilco’s two most recent studio LPs –…

EVENTUALLY, STUDIES will show that fracking is the cause of all these things and more. By then, the damage will be irreparable and blame will be a moot point. This is America, after all, where profit is king. Jody Higinbotham Via the Internet THANK YOU FOR SHEDding light on the dark side of the fracking boom. Those working in the industry can’t think about their future health or question the promises of fracking’s safety when without these jobs they can’t put food on the table. Andrew Protas White Lake, MI I GREW UP IN GARfield County, Colorado, which Solotaroff mentions. I’ve always been struck by how people in oil country vote against their own interests; their inability to think long-term is painful. Why not elect officials who want to create…

Dave grohl was lost in a fog. It was mid-June, a few days after he had toppled o_ a 12-foot-tall platform during a Foo Fighters gig in Sweden, breaking his right fibula and dislocating his ankle. The damage was significant, requiring surgery and six metal screws in his leg. “A physical therapist told me it was like my ankle got into a 40-mile-per-hour car crash,” Grohl says. “It’s like my ankle got its ass kicked by Ronda Rousey.” Worst of all, the Foos had to cancel the rest of their European tour, seven dates in all. Their upcoming North American tour – including a 20th-anniversary concert in Washington, D.C., on July 4th – was in jeopardy as well. Now, as he sat in an OxyContininduced haze in London, Grohl had…

Feels Like, the debut album from Nashville’s Bully, opens with a blast of pain. “I remember getting too fucked up,” singer-guitarist Alicia Bognanno yells at the top of her lungs over churning chords. “I remember showing up at your house/And I remember hurting you so bad/And I remember the way your sheets smelled.” For Bognanno – who also produced and engineered the album – capturing the song’s raw fury on record was no challenge. “_‘I Remember’ is a minute and 25 seconds of screaming,” she says. “I used ambient mics to make it feel a little bit like I felt inside.” Bognanno, 25, learned how to get that 120 Minutes-worthy sound from an alt-rock OG: In college, she interned at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio founded by the Nirvana and…

Last year, Australian poppunk band 5 Seconds of Summer released a chart-topping debut and opened for One Direction. They celebrated their success by getting right back into the studio: In January, they moved into a house in L.A. and brought in members of their favorite bands – Good Charlotte, Goldfinger and Sum 41 – to help write and produce an upcoming LP (tentatively due this year). Get ready for an all-out 5SOS blitz: They’re headlining amphit-heaters and arenas in America right now, and their label expects them to only get huger. “I think they absolutely have One Direction potential,” says Capitol Records’ Mitra Darab.…

JAMES TAYLOR’S NEW ALBUM, Before This World, is his first collection of original songs in 13 years, though he wasn’t exactly taking it easy during that stretch – he toured regularly, released live and cover albums, and helped raise twin boys, now 14. But a few years ago, Taylor realized that he needed to make songwriting a top priority in his life if he was ever going to release another album of new songs. So he borrowed a friend’s apartment and camped out to write what would become Before This World, a sweet, reflective disc that evokes memories of his classic 1970s albums. “I’m not the type of musician who reinvents himself over and over again,” he says. “I am a slow evolution of a style of recording and writing,…

IT’S BEEN SEVEN YEARS SINCE TOM Petty reassembled Mudcrutch, the short-lived band he formed in the early Seventies, years before finding fame with the Heartbreakers. Mudcrutch’s self-titled 2008 debut ranks among Petty’s best recent work. Now, he’s readying a second Mudcrutch set. “I’ve spent the last month frantically working on material,” Petty says, noting he has four songs that he’s happy with. “The good thing about Mudcrutch is that everyone brings in a song, so I don’t have to write 12 or something. Following up the last one is intimidating because I think that’s one of the better albums I was ever involved with.” Mudcrutch originally featured drummer Randall Marsh and rhythm guitarist Tom Leadon (brother of founding Eagles guitarist Bernie Leadon) alongside two future Heartbreakers, guitarist Mike Campbell and…

In 1972, Leon Russell went into a Nashville studio to record Hank Wilson’s Back. Documentary filmmaker Les Blank chronicled the sessions for the album and spent two years at Russell’s lakeside compound in Oklahoma, taking a job at a place called Pappy Reeve’s Floating Motel and Fish Camp while there. But the resulting film, A Poem Is a Naked Person, was rarely screened due to tensions between Russell and Blank, who died in 2013. (“I might have killed him,” says Russell on why they didn’t speak for decades.) Now, 43 years later, the movie is finally being released. With cameos from George Jones and Willie Nelson, and plenty of live footage of Russell, it’s a fascinating portrait of one of the Seventies’ great eccentrics. “He was a collector of the…

Difficult People Hulu Before there was warm and fuzzy New York, there was rude and unbearable New York – the town Difficult People proudly calls home. Executive-produced by Amy Poehler, it’s the adventures of two BFFs doing what they can to make city life more miserable. Julie Klausner comes on like Larry David in Ann-Margret drag, while Billy Eichner earns a first-ballot spot in the Eyeroll Hall of Fame. When he’s asked why he doesn’t know how to use a power drill, he snaps, “My father is dead. And before that, he was Jewish.” He’s a waiter, she’s a TV recapper. They’re underemployed and underlaid – but never underfriended, because they have each other to complain to (and about). Their toxic chemistry is gaspfor-oxygen funny.…

PROCEED PAST A TAN STUCCO SECURITY BOOTH IN THE LOS ANGELES SUBURB of Tarzana, into one of the neighborhood’s opulent gated communities, and find the large house on the left with the black Mercedes SLS AMG out front, its gull-wing doors raised in an ostentatious overhead greeting. Pause to admire the white Ferrari 458 Spider in front of it, which, like the SLS, is being washed and waxed on this blazing June day by a team of guys in matching gray polo shirts. Walk up the home’s stone pathway, through the heavy wooden front doors, and try not to stumble over the luggage – Goyard, Vuitton, Givenchy – piled in the marble-floored foyer. Wave to the saleswoman from Cartier, who’s made a house call with an array of Love Bracelets…

Luke Bryan Kill the Lights Capitol Nashville “I’m not an outlaw country singer,” Luke Bryan recently informed a journalist. No shit: He’s a platinum-selling bro-country standard-bearer, a stadium-packing springbreak soundtracker, a good ol’ boy you could bring home to Mom – a pop star with a drawl, a ball cap and a Chevy Z71 full of cheeseball power-ballad guitar lines. Bryan’s fifth studio album is well-turned Nashville radio bait, trite yet undeniable, sure to drive up bar tabs in 50 states and beyond. Dude knows his core fan base, and it’s no accident the lead three songs target ladies: The cornfield line-dance anthem “Kick the Dust Up” asks one gal to “back it on up,” the Eighties-rockin’ title track asks another to “pull me in,” and the sexy, quiet-storm-ish…

For his second RS cover story, Marilyn Manson met writer Chris Heath at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Hollywood and saw the Christina Ricci movie The Opposite of Sex. “He was open about the fact there was some theater involved,” Heath says, “but you can see from what he was saying that there’s some very weird, dark stuff working its way out through him.” Says photographer Mark Seliger, “The John Wayne Gacy clown pictures in his house were a little nutty and dark. Besides that, he was pretty lovely and normal in every other way.” 1998: On the Charts Week of Oct. 10 1 The First Night Monica Arista 2 One Week Barenaked Ladies Reprise 3 I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing Aerosmith Columbia 4 Crush Jennifer Paige Edel…