Table of contents for January 2021 in Rolling Stone

Mirror Sound Prestel, $40 “IT’S NOT THAT the recording studio got smaller,” Carrie Brownstein writes in the foreword to Spencer Tweedy’s Mirror Sound. “It’s that the bedroom became bigger.” Tweedy (whose father is Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy) collaborated with designer Lawrence Azerrad and photographer Daniel Topete on the new coffee-table book exploring indie musicians’ home-recording spaces — a timely theme when so much of the music world is stuck in place. “It comes across in how at ease the artists were when we were visiting them,” Tweedy says. “They felt like they were at home, because they literally were.”…

TWENTY YEARS AGO in The Village Voice’s yearly poll of music critics, one of the writers quipped about the future: “So who’s going to be paying $300 a seat for the Backstreet Boys reunion at AOL Hard Rock Cafe in 2020?” As it happens, $300 would have snagged you a general-admission pit ticket for the Backstreet Boys’ summer tour at the Jiffy Lube Live venue in Bristow, Virginia, on July 21st. Except this show didn’t happen, and neither did the rest of their DNA tour. Nor did anybody else’s tour. Instead, the Backstreet Boys combined for one of the year’s most strangely touching music moments: Zoom-harmonizing “I Want It That Way” from their separate homes for Elton John’s Covid-19 benefit in April. They looked awkward, perhaps feeling a bit…

THREE YEARS ago, Saweetie released a freestyle over Florida rapper Khia’s raunchy 2002 hit “My Neck, My Back.” She called it “Icy Girl,” and it quickly became one of that summer’s biggest anthems, with more than 110 million YouTube views to date — the first in a series of fun, catchy, confident singles, including 2019’s “My Type” and 2020’s “Tap In.” “Everything that I say is going to happen, happens,” says the 27-year-old artist, full of smiles over Zoom from her Los Angeles home. “It’s scary. I just spoke [my career] into existence. But I’m so happy that I am here.” In a time when women are running rap like never before, Saweetie — born Diamonté Harper, with Filipina Chinese and African American roots — sits at the genre’s…

THE TWO AMERICANS left late on May 2nd, 2020, well after dark had fallen on an arid beach near Castilletes, in northern Colombia. The men, both ex-Special Forces, had been waiting to pile into a flat-bottomed boat stocked with guns and ammunition and about 50 Venezuelan revolutionaries for a journey into the heart of enemy territory. The mission was Operation Gideon, and its objective was to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro. But the weather wasn’t cooperating, and the 5 p.m. launch had been delayed by an hour, then another. One pilot boat carrying 11 had already shipped out, but the Americans waited for the all-clear from the operation’s leader, Jordan Goudreau, the intense ex-Green Beret and head of the private-security company Silvercorp USA. Goudreau was some 1,100 miles northwest in…

Lil Baby Takes His Turn IN LIL BABY’S August 2020 ROLLING STONE cover story, Quality Control founder Kevin “Coach K” Lee recalled the flocks of new fans Baby won with “The Bigger Picture,” now a Grammy-nominated protest song: “They went back to listen to his work. ‘Oh, my God. Oh, this kid.’ Now they’re listening,” he said. “That song caught them. I watched the 13th week, up four percent. The 14th week, up 12 percent.” This kind of momentum isn’t unusual for Lil Baby. The Atlanta native has been moving at breakneck speed since 2017’s Perfect Timing, seeing double-digit, sometimes triple-digit, growth in streams nearly every year since. In 2020, that helped him become a global crossover star. It’s fitting then, that he’s landed at Number One on ROLLING…

IN AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE, Nic Weldon would be focusing one of his video cameras on Janet Jackson right about now. At 35, he’s spent most of his working life on road crews, as either a director or a cameraman on tours with the Eagles, Kings of Leon, and Ricky Martin. Thanks to him, footage of arena crowds is seamlessly woven together with shots of live onstage antics and prerecorded visuals; he can be almost as integral to a concert as the headliner. But these days, instead of capturing Jackson and her dancers on her planned Black Diamond arena tour, Weldon spends every day in the same city — San Jose, California — heading not to an arena but to his local Whole Foods, where he spends his time chopping…

NOW WHAT? After four years of manias and catastrophizing, with constant warnings about the “existential threat” posed by Donald Trump, the monster is dead. Trump, the democratic Saddam, has lost, and his metaphorical statue will soon be dragged out of the White House, to the cheers of nearly every pundit in the land. From there, the hard part begins. We know who Joe Biden is, but what is the Democratic Party in the post-Trump era? At the national level anyway, a combination of good and bad luck has allowed the party to avoid defining itself for nearly two decades. For the past two presidential election cycles, the Democrats campaigned as the party of not-Trump. In the two cycles before that, the Democrats mostly ran on the skill and personal…

THE SUN IS JUST BEGINNING TO SET IN L.A.’S SAN FERNANDO VALLEY and Miley Cyrus is busy “tweaking on some harmonies,” as she proudly puts it. She’s been holed up in her home studio all afternoon with producer Andrew Watt. Her new album, Plastic Hearts, has long been done, but the pair still have more tricks up their sleeves, like a cover of Metallica’s 1992 single “Nothing Else Matters” for an upcoming compilation. Cyrus has been belting the chorus for the past hour, in a growl that once made Waylon Jennings ask her dad, Billy Ray Cyrus, why he let a three-year-old smoke cigarettes. “You can hear me screaming down here?” she asks, surprised her voice was loud enough to bounce off the zebra-print soundboards, down a staircase decorated…

Phoebe Bridgers Who: The 26-year-old singer-songwriter first captured critics’ attention with her bleak, honest songwriting about sadness on 2017’s Stranger in the Alps and its single “Motion Sickness.” Ever since, she’s been inescapable for fans of rock and folk, collaborating with everyone from Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus (as the indie supergroup Boygenius) to Conor Oberst, the 1975, and Matt Berninger. Bridgers’ latest LP, Punisher, has been hailed as one of the best albums of 2020, but what makes her stand out even more is that she’s never lost her distinct sense of humor. Aside from a riotous Twitter account, she recently promised to cover the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” if Donald Trump lost the presidential election — and then she actually did it, with Maggie Rogers. The Hit(s):…

KHALEA EDWARDS didn’t believe it at first. Someone on a text chain of organizers from Occupy City Hall STL, a movement she helped lead this past summer calling for the resignation of St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, informed the group in November that Krewson was retiring. Edwards wanted proof. Then Krewson made the announcement herself. “We spent the whole day in shock,” Edwards says. “We were crying.” “Protesting works. Pro-tes-ting works,” the 21-year-old says of the bombshell from the mayor, who in June had broadcast the names and addresses of activists calling for the city to defund the police. “Folks said our demands were impossible to meet, but now we’re here and Lyda Krewson is a one-term mayor, which is exactly what we were chanting for in the streets.…

THE BEST TELEVISION SERIES OF THE YEAR Covid made 2020 confusing and sad. These excellent shows provided a much-needed escape By ALAN SEPINWALL ILLUSTRATION BY Nazario Graziano 1. Better Call Saul AMC Just as Breaking Bad’s most iconic moments tended to involve explosions or gunshots, plenty of stuff blew up real good in the prequel’s fifth season. But the parts that have lingered — and made clear that Saul now rivals its parent show — were quieter ones, where the weapons of choice were words, or even pointed fingers. In one of those moments, our beloved lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) lets his inner shyster Saul Goodman slip out, ranting that he’s grown so powerful that “lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!” In another, dogged Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn,…

ESSAY The Year in Movies 2020: The Home Edition Hollywood flailed and theaters shut their doors — but you could still find great films one click away By K. AUSTIN COLLINS ANY HONEST ACCOUNTING OF 2020’s year in movies has to start with the resurgence of a 2011 artifact, after Covid-19’s spread to the U.S. had finally become undeniable among rational people, and Steven Soderbergh’s pandemic movie Contagion became one of the most rented films on iTunes. You know, the star-studded viral thriller in which a supervirus, borne of an infected bat, starts to spread out of China and eventually conquers much of the planet, including poor Kate Winslet? It’s also a movie in which an international community of hypercapable scientists — the Good Guys — get the unfailing…