Table of contents for August 10, 2017 in Rolling Stone

Maddow’s World I SO ENJOYED THE “ROLLING Stone Interview” with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow [RS 1290]. In an age of fake news and near-universal deceit, Maddow’s reporting is a clear and concise breath of fresh air. Well done! Aaron H. WarnerSeattle MADDOW KNOWS HER strengths but is totally candid about her weaknesses. No excuses, no BS and especially no self-promotion. Just an honest view of her place in the world as she sees it. Patrick FortEagle River, AK I HAVE BEEN A FAN OF MADDOW'S for years. She has braved the putrid quagmire of our current political state to expertly define what the current situation means to our nation. America is finally listening! And the well-earned ratings are there to prove it. Scott OliverGorham, ME EVERYONE LOVES RACHEL. But where…

AFTER FOO FIGHTERS went on hiatus at the end of 2015, Dave Grohl didn’t know what to do with himself. “I barbecued for fucking months, man,” he says. “I was doing eight briskets a week. It got a little dark.” But Grohl needed time to recuperate from anonstage fall in Sweden the previous summer, which turned out to be more serious than he thought. Grohl snapped his fibula, tearing several ligaments and requiring surgery. “I still have hardware in me,” he says. “I was in physical therapy for two or three hours a day for almost a year.” Grohl finished the rest of the band’s Sonic Highways stadium tour perched atop a giant “throne.” But after the final date, he told his band he didn’t want to touch an instrument…

When Chance the Rapper played 2013’s Lollapalooza in Chicago, he was a little-known recent high school graduate who released mixtapes on SoundCloud. “We barely knew who he was,” says Huston Powell, the fest’s head talent booker. Chance was such a hit that Perry Farrell invited him to play again the following year. This year, Chance will headline the main-stage Saturday-night slot. “It’s a special moment to bring the hometown hero back to the festival he grew up down the street from,” says Powell. “It means a lot to him.” Taking place August 3rd-6th at Grant Park, the fest also features vets Arcade Fire, Liam Gallagher and Lorde, plus first-timers like Migos. “We do festivals all over the world, and Grant Park is the best festival site,” says Powell, who’s already…

WHEN YOU PLAY A character like Darius, the pothead-philosopher of FX’s Atlanta, people want to get you stoned. At the club, in a mall, walking down the street – doesn’t matter. “They assume I smoke,” the 25-year-old actor Lakeith Stanfield says of the show’s fans. “I don’t, but yeah, I get a lot of offers. I’ve had three very large bags of pot just handed to me. My friends like hanging around because they get free weed.” Now, after a series of high- profile supporting turns in everything from Straight Outta Compton (he played Snoop Dogg) to Get Out, Stanfield is putting his stoner act on hold in two leading roles in August. Crown Heights, which won an audience award at Sundance, finds him playing Colin Warner, a Trinidadian immigrant…

GAME OF THRONES SUNDAYS, 9 P.M., HBO “Leave one wolf alive and the sheep are never safe” – well said, Arya Stark. That’s a perfect credo for Game of Thrones as the George R.R. Martin crew heads into its penultimate season. In Westeros, everybody knows it’s never safe to leave anyone alive – especially since most of the sheep are wolves in disguise. The new season gets off to a roaring start with Arya wearing the face of a man she’d just butchered, Walder Frey, so she can slaughter his entire family by leading them in a poison-wine toast. Even Ed Sheeran does himself proud, making a cameo appearance as a merry bard singing a ballad about the Lannisters’ sex lives. The new season is already loaded with surprises –…

LET’S BEGIN BY SYNCHRONIZING our watches. We are in the Eastern time zone. The legislative session is over, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is about to give his wrap-up press conference. The reporters trudge into the gallery, grumbling, as reporters like to do, about traffic and editors. Someone gives the “10 seconds” signal, and Trudeau strides to the podium. He gives a nod and starts ticking off his accomplishments. The first is self-praise for cutting taxes on the middle class and raising them on the one percent. “We’ve given nine out of 10 families more money each month to help with the costs of raising their kids,” Trudeau says. It’s strange to witness: He speaks in a modulated, indoor voice. His dark hair is a color found in nature.…

Randy NewmanDark Matter Nonesuch HHH½ Randy Newman is so busy as a film composer (most recently with Cars 3) that we get new albums from him only about once a decade. But the guy’s got pretty good timing: Just as 2008’s excellent Harps and Angels served as a sardonic send-off to the Bush era, Dark Matter greets #MAGA America with his signature brutal comic irony and heartbreaking grandeur. The nine-minute “The Great Debate” is a Broadway-scale throwdown between religion and reason that’s so nuanced Newman himself even comes on trial for the hanging offense of elite liberal condescension, and the laugh-out-loud “Putin” celebrates the dictator’s sexual powers with mock-heroic orchestration and backing singers that suggest the Andrews Sisters in heat. Some of the more sweeping moments can feel forced; “Brothers”…

The Killers September Brandon Flowers had one goal for his band’s fifth LP: “Be more personal.” On Wonderful Wonderful, he reflects on everything from his childhood love of boxing (“Tyson vs. Douglas”) to his wife’s difficult childhood (the Brian Eno-sampling “Some Kind of Love”). “I wanted to inhabit my age,” says Flowers. “I don’t want to chase what’s on the radio. It’s a more honest approach.” Prophets of Rage September 15th The heavy supergroup featuring members of Rage Against the Machine, plus Chuck D and B-Real, made a topical LP touching on homelessness, marijuana legalization and more. “It’s not all ‘Fuck Trump,’ ” says B-Real. Fall Out Boy September 15th “Every once in a while, you’ve gotta do a hard restart,” says Pete Wentz, adding that the band’s seventh album, Mania,…

A few years ago, jason isbell was an ex-member of Drive-By Truckers, playing clubs and drinking way too much whiskey. Now, the Alabama native is headlining venues like Baltimore’s 19,000-seat Merriweather Post Pavilion while turning out sharp country-rock story-songs. (John Mayer has called him “the best lyric writer of my generation.”) Isbell’s new album, The Nashville Sound, gets heavier and more political than 2015’s Something More Than Free, which won Grammys, including Best Americana Album. On “White Man’s World,” he confronts the struggle his two-year-old daughter will face later in life, and “Cumberland Gap” captures the dismal anxiety of working in coal country. Isbell says his songwriting hot streak “had to do with when I got sober [in 2012]. That gave me a lot more time to work. I had…

Scott pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, wants you to know that he was responsible for persuading President Trump to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. Pruitt has never said that explicitly, of course – he understands that if he wants to keep his job, he needs to pretend that the decision was Trump’s alone. But Pruitt did everything he could to telegraph to the world that he thought Paris was a bad deal for America, and urged Big Coal executives to make their views known to the president as well. Trump, who has dismissed climate change as a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, was lobbied equally hard by major business leaders and some of his own advisers, including his daughter Ivanka and Secretary of State Rex…

Coldplay Kaleidoscope EP Parlophone HHH½ Big Sean and Brian Eno help out on a tranquil EP Titled after a soothing interlude from the band’s 2015 LP, A Head Full of Dreams, this five-song EP continues that album’s mood of tranquil satisfaction. Its lead track, “All I Can Think About Is You,” goes from moody restraint to stadium shimmer, with Chris Martin radiating euphoria. Big Sean lends a few surprisingly organic lines to the uplifting dance-pop snugglet “Miracles (Someone Special),” and Brian Eno produces the skitter-grooved “Aliens.” A live version of Martin’s hit Chainsmokers collaboration, “Something Just Like This,” breaks the flow on a record that otherwise goes down as easy as Sunday brunch with a cool uncle. JON DOLAN Damian Marley Stony Hill Republic HHH½ Bob Marley’s youngest son keeps…

What are the best and worst parts of success? Well, I never had to work in a factory, so that’s a blessing. The worst part is the distractions: money, women, partying. When you’re young it’s easy to lose your perspective. I started believing I was who everybody thought I was, which was a crazy rock star. You know, “Life’s Been Good,” that whole story. It took me away from working at my craft. Me and a lot of the guys I ran with, we were party monsters. It was a real challenge just to stay alive. So many of your friends from that era – Keith Moon, John Belushi – didn’t make it. How did you survive? I wonder every day. People ask me if I believe in God, and…

Nick Lowe Five Songs My Son Loves Lowe, whose 1980s records were recently reissued, selected an eclectic mixture of songs he has played for his 12-year-old son, Roy, to expose him to different kinds of music. Eddie Cochran “Cut Across Shorty” This sounds like a nursery rhyme with a very agreeable skiffle beat, which was an English version of rockabilly. Eddie Cochran had it all going on. Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong “Now You Has Jazz” It sounds like an aural cartoon, since the voices have so much character. Bing Crosby was able to swing in this very white kind of way. John Holt “Ali Baba” This is John’s dream of being pursued by a posse of fairy-tale characters set to a monster Studio One groove. Exquisite. Ron Sexsmith “Gold…

In october 1967, as the first issue of Rolling Stone was going to press, the magazine’s small staff learned some stunning news: Members of the Grateful Dead had been busted for weed at their communal house in Haight-Ashbury, just a few miles from the magazine’s San Francisco office. “It was really weird,” recalls chief photographer Baron Wolman. “The bail-bonds office was around the corner from the office, so I went there and found them posting bail.” Founder and editor Jann S. Wenner told Wolman to snap a shot of the band, and Wenner wrote the accompanying story for the first issue, describing eight narcotics agents who “carried no warrant and broke in the front door even after being denied entry.” By then, rock & roll and drugs had become inseparable.…

Lil Yachty AGE 19 BACKSTORY The rapper scored a Top Five LP thanks to a happily naive spin on Southern hip-hop referred to as “bubblegum trap.” GROWING PAINS “I don’t want to be 20 yet,” he says. “I dread my teenage years being over.” Shawn Mendes AGE 19 BACKSTORY Mendes has gone from hockey-loving Canadian kid to Vine star to chart-topper, thanks to a gift for singer-songwriter intimacy (John Mayer is a mentor). THE NATURAL “I was one of those kids who was just . . . always on YouTube, so it was easy for me to do it. It’s not work, it’s just fun.” Noah Cyrus AGE 17 BACKSTORY Miley’s little sis is finishing up her debut, NC-17, which blends country, pop and R&B. NO-HATE ZONE “Miley always says, ‘Don’t ever look yourself…

Arcade Fire Everything Now Columbia HHHH BY WILL HERMES On their last LP, Arcade Fire wrestled with an age-old question: How does an earnest rock band reclaim the music’s dance-floor birthright? Reflektor’s answer sprawled over two discs of impressive groove curation – synth-pop, disco, electro, Haitian rara, dub reggae and more – with help from LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, a battery of Haitian drummers and even a cameo by the patron saint of rock & roll transformations, David Bowie. The set was ambitious and frequently dazzling. But sonically and thematically, the LP also pulled back on the emphatic intensity that’s defined the band, and made it matter, ever since its landmark 2004 debut, Funeral. More comfortable in their dancing shoes, Arcade Fire have it both ways on Everything Now, zeroing…