Table of contents for April 2019 in Rolling Stone

1. Tierra Whack “Only Child” Rap trailblazer Tierra Whack’s 2018 LP, Whack World, was one of the most exciting debuts in recent memory. Here she delivers a perfect slow-roll breakup jam, full of wobbly synths and lines like “You did turn my heart so cold I should work at Friendly’s.” More, please. 2. Stephen Malkmus “Rushing the Acid Frat” The indie-rock don just released a new solo album, full of loopy synth pop and offhand garage-rock tunes like this funny, super-laid-back ode to high times on the college quad. 3. Guordon Banks “Can’t Keep Runnin’ ” R&B singer Banks works with surgical precision on his latest single, nicking a melody from a tune by Eighties funk gods the Gap Band, and flipping it into a shimmeringly forlorn flirtfest. 4. Luedji…

1. Street Fighting Man 1968 Early in the tour, the band kicked off with “Sympathy for the Devil.” But then, Mick Jagger (who makes the set lists) switched to this explosive political rocker for the rest of the run. “It just felt good,” says Keith Richards. “I don’t know if there’s another that can top it.” 2. Ride ‘Em on Down 2016 The Stones’ take on Eddie Taylor’s 1955 deep cut keeps the early-show momentum going. “Mick decided to keep it to one blues song last tour,” says Ronnie Wood. “I disagree. I think, ‘C’mon, let’s do more!’ ” 3. Bitch 1971 “It comes off pretty smooth, but it’s quite tricky,” says Richards. “There’s an interesting bridge you have to watch out for. Otherwise, it’s straightforward rock and soul that…

1. Cersei Bombs the Sept “The Winds of Winter” SEASON SIX Narratively, this is GoT killing off characters who’d grown superfluous. But it’s the best the series has ever been, between the editing, the direction and the unnerving inclusion of a piano (never before used in the show). It’s The Godfather’s baptism/murder sequence by way of Hitchcock. 2. Off With Ned’s Head “Baelor” SEASON ONE The moment when Game of Thrones fully became Game of Thrones. 3. Hodor Holds the Door “The Door” SEASON SIX For years, the Starks’ sweet servant had been a figure of comic relief spun around his dogged use of the nonsense word “hodor,” which became the name everyone called him. But Bran Stark’s mental powers reach back to show Hodor’s life had been a…

Teen Spirit Some singers start young, before they have a clue about how the music business can chew up their talent. Take Violet, the 17-year-old dreamer played with shy loveliness by Elle Fanning. She lives on the Isle of Wight, cleaning houses and performing in pubs. Her Polish-immigrant mother (Agnieszka Grochowska) warns her against a London TV singing competition called Teen Spirit that’s firing her up. It’s a tale as old as time — or at least American Idol — and the script follows the formula. But actor Max Minghella, making his directorial debut, has a flair for dazzling detours. He excels playing Elisabeth Moss’ forbidden love on The Handmaid’s Tale. He’s also the son of the late English Patient director, Anthony Minghella, who grew up on the Isle…

ELISABETH MOSS WAS a teen in the Nineties, but she never paid much attention to grunge or punk. “I just wasn’t cool enough,” she says. “I was definitely more into Britney Spears.” But she had to learn about it for Alex Ross Perry’s film Her Smell. Moss plays the unhinged, drug-addicted lead singer of Something She, a punk trio similar to L7 or Bikini Kill. Moss prepared while filming her hit series The Handmaid’s Tale, and calls the role one of her hardest ever. She explains how she did it. KORY GROW Grunge 101 Moss had to educate herself on punk and grunge’s early days: “I started out with Nirvana, and then I focused on the women,” she says. “I went back to the Runaways. I was really interested…

“No men, just sugar.” Clementine Creevy is reading the ingredients of a candy bar she keeps on a shelf in her living room. The novelty treat is one of several prized possessions on view at her duplex in Highland Park, Los Angeles, along with shelves of records she’s been collecting since age 14: Sade, Butthole Surfers, Captain Beefheart and Apocalipstick, the 2017 album from her sweet, savage feminist punk-rock band, Cherry Glazerr. “Yeah, they’re all right,” she jokes when she sees the LP. “The lead singer’s kind of a quack, though.” When she started Cherry Glazerr in 2013, Creevy and her bandmates were still in high school and making whimsical garage-pop songs about grilled cheese. Their latest album, Stuffed ’n’ Ready, is a major leap forward, full of sharp…

THE SHOW’S HERO is led out, wrists bound, before a bloodthirsty crowd, accused of high treason against the king. He has made many foolish decisions, but he’s still the hero, played by the series’ most famous actor, and the story has given him an out: exile over execution. Surely, he’ll be banished for a season or two, then slowly work his way back to prominence until he’s once again doing good for goodness’ sake. That’s how this works, right? Well, that’s how it worked until Ned Stark’s head got chopped off near the end of Game of Thrones Season One, kicking off perhaps television’s last great watercooler phenomenon. A dozen years earlier, The Sopranos had tossed out many of TV’s unwritten rules with the episode where Tony strangled an…

PAUL NICKLEN is different from the rest of us. He likes to swim in 29-degree water beneath the Arctic ice, alone, in search of potentially predatory animals. Which can sometimes get him into trouble, like when he was nearly body-slammed by an 7,000-pound elephant seal. “The only thing, almost ever, that can kill you is panic,” he says. “It’s not that I’m willing to die. I think that I’m just not scared.” A marine biologist and wildlife photographer with more than 20 National Geographic assignments and 5.2 million Instagram followers to his credit, Nicklen grew up in Canada’s far-north Nunavut province and lived in the Arctic on and off for 25 years. “Being around big animals and nature and the cold and diving and ice is definitely my comfort…

Fosse/Verdon NETWORK FX AIR DATE April 9th, 10 p.m. STARRING Sam Rockwell Michelle Williams Norbert Leo Butz Margaret Qualley Paul Reiser WHEN WE first meet the main characters of FX’s electric new limited series Fosse/Verdon, stage and screen director-choreographer Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) assumes such control over his wife, the dancer Gwen Verdon (Michelle Williams), that he moves her body into the position he wants. She tries it his way, then moments later does her own version. “Yours is better,” he admits. That scene, along with the use of both their names in the title, makes clear that while Fosse/Verdon will depict the triumphs, tragedies and bad behavior of the legendary Fosse, it will not be yet another stylish celebration of a brilliant but damaged male antihero from a…

“IN THE OLD DAYS, you partied all night,” George Clinton says. “You didn’t go to bed till 7 [a.m.], and then you got back up at 10. Back then I had every kind of drug I could get my hands on, illegal or not.” The Funkmaster General changed his hard-partying ways about six or seven years ago — he’s not sure of the precise date. “That wasn’t long ago, but I ain’t trying to count no days either,” he says. Now 77, he spends most of his Parliament-Funkadelic touring days resting in his dressing room, so he can save up energy for his legendarily wild stage act. Clinton, who founded the core bands in the P-Funk collective more than 50 years ago, is boarding the Mothership one more time…

WHEN COACHELLA released its 2019 lineup poster, one name in near-microscopic print, buried under the likes of Weezer and Childish Gambino, confused a few people: Idris Elba. The British actor is famous for his leading role on The Wire and the BBC crime drama Luther, but few Americans know about his side career as a DJ. And for DJ Big Driis, as he once billed himself, this gig is a dream come true. “Doesn’t matter how big my name is on the poster,” he says. “This is massive for me!” Elba hopes the Coachella set and his new Netflix series, Turn Up Charlie, in which he plays a down-on-his-luck DJ, will show how serious he is about music. The character of Charlie — who’s forced to become a nanny…

ON FEBRUARY 2nd, Marshmello performed for millions of fans in a made-up world. The masked DJ — who’s released hits with Khalid, Selena Gomez, Bastille and others — was the first star to play a virtual concert in the wildly popular online game Fortnite, performing for a reported 10 million concurrent gamers. (A music-industry source tells ROLLING STONE the audience was likely “significantly bigger.”) To put that in perspective, 10 million people is nearly three times the world record for a real-life concert, set by French musician Jean-Michel Jarre in Moscow in 1997, which drew 3.5 million on the city’s 850th anniversary. To see Marshmello, Fortnite players had to halt their usual in-game activities (i.e., shooting one another) and travel to a virtual venue, where trucks had been spotted…

‘I LIVE ON quite a murdery street, so I don’t want you to hear me getting murdered,” says Emerald Fennell over the phone as she fumbles with her keys outside the gate of her L.A. home. Then she reconsiders: Her untimely, violent death might make for a good story. “The best, I think,” she muses. “Maybe you’re not as bloodthirsty as I am, but I would be absolutely delighted to be on the other side of the murder call.” This tells you a lot about Fennell’s psychology and, by extension, volumes’ worth of info on the upcoming second season of BBC America’s Killing Eve, the bulk of which Fennell wrote and the whole of which she executive-produced. Based on a series of e-book novellas titled Codename Villanelle — about…

IT WAS FIVE HOURS before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered in the mid-80s. In the back lounge, the AC was cranked, and Peep, wearing a black, studded vest and multicolored checkered pants, had folded his long, lean frame onto an upholstered seat. Between him and the fans was a plastic table scattered with lighters, pens, rolling papers, scissors, ground-up bits of marijuana and a black sticker with the phrase ALIVE + WELL on it. For then-16-year-old Nick Dowd, a massive Peep fan who’d come to the venue with his friend…

Warrior NETWORK Cinemax AIR DATE April 5th, 10 p.m. THE GOOD FIGHT This lush action drama, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1878, feels like someone asked, “How about The Knick but with more hatchet fights?” Much of the creative team comes from Cinemax’s Banshee, and like that show Warrior is all about swagger, colorful characters and thrilling fight scenes. But there’s also effective social commentary. Andrew Koji plays a Chinese fighter who comes to America in search of his sister, only to get caught up in both a war between tongs and a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment. (“We can’t own, we can’t vote and yet somehow we’re responsible for the economic woes of their entire nation,” says one character.) It’s inspired by a Bruce Lee pitch that…