Table of contents for September 8, 2016 in Rolling Stone

The soul singer has spent the past year touring with his band the Night Sweats in support of their self-titled breakthrough album. Blake Mills “If I’m Unworthy” This is a bizarre, smooth song with a wild guitar solo that’s just gorgeous. It talks about relationships, which we can all relate to being on the road. C.W. Stoneking “On a Desert Isle” Sonically, this feels like it was made in the 1930s or 1940s. It sounds a little dirty and like everybody is in one room playing together. Damien Jurado “Museum of Flight” This is really rich and warm, with the perfect amount of flavor. Damien’s delivery is just impeccable. Delta Spirit “Bushwick Blues” A great love song. It’s about talking to a person and remembering a train trip they took…

WHEN MATT SHULTZ ISN’T PLAYING arenas with garage-rock kings Cage the Elephant, you’ll often find him camped out in a tiny vintage-clothing shop. The 32-year-old spends hours hunting for the next piece of his grunge-chic wardrobe, mixing unpretentious staples with unexpected flair – a touch of Bowie glam or a bit of cowboy cool, like his signatureedition Vans boots. “A couple hundred bucks on a jacket is expensive for me,” says the Kentucky native. “I stay away from trends instead of trying to become a fashion icon.”…

Movin’ the Crowd Hip-hop veterans are making bank on the road – from “I Love the ’90s” (featuring Vanilla Ice, Tone Loc and Salt-N-Pepa) to Puff Daddy’s Bad Boy tour (with Lil’ Kim and Mase); Public Enemy, Ice-T and EPMD are also filling big venues. Boombox Nation Classic hip-hop as a radio format started a decade ago, but it has caught fire in the past few years – popping up in Atlanta, Dallas, Philly and Detroit, where the station that used to broadcast Pistons games went old-school as “the Bounce.” All Eyez on Me A rap-biopic miniboom is following the success of Straight Outta Compton, with films in the works about Tupac and Roxanne Shanté Yo, Cable Raps Beyond the hyped launch of The Get Down, new series The Breaks,…

“I was too high To change my bid. Always afraid to be A normal American kid.” —WILCO, “Normal American Kids” Wilco Schmilco dBpm On “Normal American Kids,” the opener of Wilco’s 10th studio LP, Jeff Tweedy delivers maybe his most straightforward lyrics ever. Over coffeehouse strums and muted electricguitar lines that swirl like an old movie flashback, the singer recalls being a teenage stoner with a chip on his shoulder, getting high “behind the garden shed” and “under the sheets in my bedroom,” loathing the “normal” kids – but also fearing them and maybe, secretly, envying them. Misfits of all ages should relate, and the reflective sentiment brands a deceptively pastoral Wilco record, their most folkrockingly introspective since 2007’s Sky Blue Sky. It’s a nice followup to last…

A Father’s Best Hope In a deeply personal piece, Paul Solotaroff wrote about the obstacles facing millions of Americans whose children with autism are coming of age [“Luke’s Best Chance,” RS 1267]. Readers and parents wrote in to comment. THANKS FOR THE ELOquent account of life as the parent of a young adult with severe autism. My 22-yearold son is now contributing as much as he is capable of, learning along the way and leading a meaningful life. Everyone deserves that chance. Vicky McWilliams Twinsburg, OH AS THE PARENT OF A man with autism, who also works on issues related to people with disabilities, I found the article both thoughtprovoking and exasperating. We don’t make progress by railing against the state or those who serve. We do it by involving…

Afew years ago, right before Metallica began work on their new album, drummer Lars Ulrich was handed an iPod containing 1,650 sound files – studio jams, soundchecks, backstage warm-ups and random riffs the band had generated since its last album, 2008’s Death Magnetic. “We record everything we do,” Ulrich says. “I started listening to the iPod and putting check marks next to stuff that stands out. I’d be like, ‘ID 723 really sounds good.’ ” Metallica built songs around those jams and fragments, and the process proved to be extremely productive, resulting in their first-ever double album of original material, Hardwired... to Self-Destruct (due November 18th). The title track finds frontman James Hetfield, who penned all the lyrics, in a dark place. “We’re so fucked!” he growls in the chorus. “Shit…

Two years ago, ruth b was a 19-year-old working at Marshalls in Edmonton, Canada, when she had an idea. Inspired by her love of fantasy novels, she wrote her first song, “Lost Boy,” a spare, soulful piano ballad about loneliness, packed with Peter Pan references. She uploaded six seconds of the chorus to Vine, which she’d previously used to post clips of herself singing Drake and Lana Del Rey songs. “Lost Boy” scored 84,000 likes in just a week, and a few months later, she had a deal with Columbia. This summer, the song became a Top 40hit. “If someone toldme a year ago that people would ask me for pictures at Starbucks,” she says, “I would’ve just laughed.” On a recent summer afternoon, Ruth, 21, sits in a Laurel…

BLACK SABBATH’S CURRENT tour is called the End, but to Ozzy Osbourne, it feels like a new beginning. The farewell tour, which runs throughNovember in the States and wraps with a gig in Sabbath’s hometown of Birmingham, England, in February, has featured some of the band’s best shows ever. “Nobody gets stoned. Nobody gets drunk,” Osbourne says. “I used to resent going out on the road. But now it’s fun.” The singer’s personal life is another matter – all he’ll say about his rocky relationship with wife Sharon is that “it’s great,” although he has since announced he’s undergoing therapy for sex addiction. Osbourne also co-stars in a new History Channel series, Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour, in which he and his son, Jack, road-trip to various historical sites. “I’m…

Rae Sremmurd SremmLife 2 Interscope/Ear Drummer Exuberant Mississippi brothers Rae Sremmurd exploded in 2014 with three consecutive Top 40 singles and a debut LP that combined stomping Southern rap and pop concision into a sound as reliably tight as an old AC/DC record. For the follow-up (guided once again by the massive beats of producer and mentor Mike Will Made It), they return a little bit grown-up and a lot more hyped up. Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi’s indelible appeal remains their elastic voices, which squeak, squawk, shout or (as in the case of “Swang”) break into a gauzy falsetto. The sound here is less melodic than on their debut; it’s an in-the-red reboot of mid-’00s Southern crunk music, with cameos from vintage champagne sprayers like Lil Jon…

You’ve worked steadily for 50 years, but you’ve never been a superstar. Do you think you’ve benefited from not having one huge period of success? My father, Lloyd Bridges, had a big TV series in the late Fifties and early Sixties called Sea Hunt. He was so good at playing a skin diver that people thought he actually was that character. That’s as great a compliment as an actor can get, but it was also frustrating, because he kept getting offered skin-diving scripts. In my career, I really set out not to develop too strong a persona, so that you wouldn’t have a hard time imagining me in any given role. I wanted to pleasantly confuse the audience on who I was. When you’re not making movies, you lead a…

Earlier this summer, as Lin-Manuel Miranda prepared to take his final bow as the star of Broadway’s Hamilton, a thought kept nagging him. Ticket scalpers had reportedly used electronic “bots” to snatch up more than 20,000 Hamilton tickets as soon as they went on sale. Resellers charged an average of $1,000 per seat, according to one estimate – more than twice that of the top face-value ticket at the time – en route to earning $15.5 million from Hamilton during Miranda’s run. “I’m so scared of the way scalpers fuck with prices,” he told Rolling Stone. The concert industry faces the same problems: Bots buy and sell tens of thousands of concert tickets in a typical year, marking them up an average of 49 percent, according to the office of…

UZ PERSONA Cutting a shadowy figure in a masquerade mask and hat that reads fuck in Old English letters, UZ surfaced in 2011 and even played Coachella in 2014. His sound: ominous trap music to match his ominous look. WHO IS THIS GUY? Diplo, whose Mad Decent label releases UZ’s music, has said, “All I know is he’s definitely not me.” Some fans are convinced that UZ is French oddball DJ Troubl, who uses the alter ego to make more-accessible music. Malaa PERSONA Spinning moody house in a ski mask, Malaa plays frequent live gigs and has baited fans with a series of mixes called Who Is Malaa? WHO IS THIS GUY? He has the same booking agency as Paris’ DJ Snake, Mercer and Tchami. Most theories suggest one or…

When donald trump claimed, “The Election’s going to be rigged,” he wasn’t entirely wrong. But the threat was not, as Trump warned, from Americans committing the crime of “voting many, many times.” What’s far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls. The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists…

In the orange light of late afternoon, a mile-long Army convoy of 33 heavily loaded trucks crossed a bridge over the Tigris River into the dusty, trash-strewn streets of Al Amarah, Iraq. Sgt. Stuart Redus was at the wheel of a boxy old big-rig, 28th in line, with Staff Sgt. Fernando Torres in the passenger seat. Plates of rusty steel were bolted to the doors, a kind of homemade armor, but the truck, hauling a shipping container full of weapons, was otherwise unprotected. They had no radio or satellite phone in the cab, just a store-bought walkie-talkie hanging from a bungee cord. On a wide boulevard in the center of town, they heard a pinging noise, like the first drops of rain. Then it was like a thunderstorm broke…

Sully SEPTEMBER 9th TOM HANKS HITS A NEW CAREER peak as Capt. Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who crashlanded into the icy Hudson River on January 15th, 2009, saving all 155 passengers. Hailed as a hero, Sully is privately haunted by nightmares and aviation experts who say he did wrong. Director Clint Eastwood, shooting with IMAX cameras, nails the visuals. But it’s aspersonaldrama thatSully soars. Hanks catches Sully in one line: “I did my job.” Eastwood, 86, can relate. Having worked in Hollywood for 60 years, he values Sully’s experience over computers that ignore the human factor. The Magnificent Seven SEPTEMBER 23rd “LET’S DO IT,” SAID DENZEL Washington when director Antoine Fuqua urged a reboot of 1960’s The Magnificent Seven. Washington rides like gangbusters into his first Western, to save a…