Table of contents for July 2018 in Rolling Stone

“So are you here to hear the truth?” asks Johnny Depp. “It’s full of betrayal.”—JOHNNY DEPP Welcome to the new ROLLING STONE. As you can see, we’ve significantly evolved the magazine into a larger format that will publish monthly rather than biweekly. What isn’t changing is our commitment to the integrity, honesty and quality of our journalism and to our tradition of bold, clean design and original photography. It is our intention to continue that tradition for as long as we exist. The modernization of the magazine, with its increased pages and improved paper quality, coincides with Penske Media Corp. – a dynamic publishing company with a thriving online presence – taking ownership of ROLLING STONE. PMC shares our vision for the future, which includes dramatically increasing the size and…

1. Gorillaz feat. Snoop Dogg and Jamie Principle “Hollywood” Gorillaz’ new LP, The Now Now, is a soulful pleasure; on the standout “Hollywood,” Snoop Dogg swings by for some Funkadelic-style Cali dreaming. 2. Dirty Projectors “That’s a Lifestyle” A return to the beloved art-pop band’s ping-ponging vocal sound with help from Haim; leader Dave Longstreth critiques end-stage capitalism while also getting his guitar god on. 3. Melody’s Echo Chamber “Desert Horse” A French singer (Melody Prochet) hooks up with members of a Swedish psych-rock band (Dungen), and hallucinatory awesomeness ensues on this gorgeously strange Arabic-funk gem. 4. Future feat. Partynextdoor “No Shame” On this luxuriantly stretched-out song from the Superfly soundtrack, Future and ace producer Partynextdoor make being nose-deep in performance enhancers sound sexy and weirdly vulnerable. 5.…

SUMMER IS no time for a vacation when you’re Charli XCX. From now through late November, the U.K. singer is holding down one of the most coveted spots in pop as one of two opening acts on Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour, alongside her friend Camila Cabello. “We’re such an interesting lineup of girls in control of their own shit,” Charli says. “It feels good.” Pop fans first met Charli as the rebellious charmer singing on and co-writing supercatchy hits like Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and her own “Boom Clap.” (She bonded with Swift after the star brought her out to sing the song in 2014.) Lately, Charli has turned up the attitude and reinvented her sound, filling two 2017 mixtapes with trippy, hypersaturated club music in collaboration with the…

JOHN PASCHE was in his final year at London’s Royal College of Art when Mick Jagger asked to collaborate with a student on a poster for the Rolling Stones’ 1970 European tour. “He wanted a logo that would stand alone, without necessarily the band’s name on it,” says Pasche. Jagger showed him an image of the Indian goddess Kali, with an outstretched tongue, for inspiration. “I wanted to get at the idea of kids sticking their tongue out, the anti-authority process,” says Pasche. He nailed it, and the tongue is still evolving, as the band’s modern posters prove. In the 1980s, the Stones bought the copyright from Pasche for about £24,000. “A lot back then,” he says. “In hindsight, maybe I could have held on to it.”…

OVER A RECENT lunch in Chicago, George Papadopoulos searches for words strong enough to describe the importance of his wife, Simona Mangiante. “She really has saved my life,” says George, the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. “After the arrest – and I have never been in trouble in my life – I was half a man.” We’re tucked into a table at London House Hotel’s 21st-floor restaurant, a dimly lit room with marble walls and a flickering fireplace. Between bites of a smashed cucumber salad, Simona, a 33-year-old Italian-born lawyer-model-actress, says, “I felt that he was caught in something bigger than him.” It’s the first public interview that George, who is 30, has given in the months since agreeing to cooperate with special…

Since 2000, music has changed faster than at any time in history, giving us everything from the Strokes to Kanye to Adele, from indie guitar bangers to genre-splicing club jams. We polled artists, critics and industry insiders to create a list of the era’s truly essential moments 1 Crazy in Love Beyoncé feat. Jay-Z 2003 | COLUMBIA Highest Chart Position: 1 “It has this go-go feel to it, this old-school feel,” Beyoncé said of her debut solo single. “I wasn’t sure if people were going to get it.” In fact, the funk-fire horn blasts that opened “Crazy in Love” heralded her arrival as the boldest superstar of the century, the diva who made everyone else’s splashiest gestures seem tiny. Producer Rich Harrison constructed the song’s blockbuster beat around a horn…

“IT’S HILARIOUS people call this a job,” says Sam Kiszka, the 19-year-old bassist-keyboardist of Seventies-rock revivalists Greta Van Fleet. After stunning classic-rock fans with their uncanny ability to channel Led Zeppelin on their debut EP, Greta have proved themselves a genuinely great live band, even gaining the endorsements of Robert Plant and Sir Elton John (“He told us to be more flamboyant,” says Kiszka). At a recent stop in Nashville, the band – Sam and his brothers Jake and Josh Kiszka, plus drummer Danny Wagner – barbecued, lit a cardboard cutout of a country legend on fire, and played for a few thousand fans at Marathon Music Works. It was one of the dozens of places Greta sold out this summer, and they haven’t even released their first album yet.…

FOR RAMI MALEK, learning to play Freddie Mercury in the upcoming biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was a two-year odyssey. Malek, known for starring in the USA series Mr. Robot, was only a casual Queen fan when he was approached to portray one of rock’s most dynamic frontmen; to pull it off, he endured endless sessions with a movement coach (and had to learn to talk with giant prosthetic teeth). “I had to re-create things he did on the fly, onstage,” says Malek. “There were many days I said to myself, ‘This is a lost cause.’” Malek didn’t sing all of Mercury’s parts; producers used vocal stems from Queen recordings and filled them in with new recordings of Mercury impersonator Marc Martel. The film traces Mercury’s life from his early days…

$6.5 Billion in Retail Sales Nationwide Legal Marijuana’s Tax-Rich States In 2017, cannabis sales generated $794 million in tax revenue nationwide, much of it in the five states already enjoying the benefits of legalized recreational use. Case Study: What Weed Dollars Do for Colorado Pot-Industry Jobs vs. Other Sectors SEAN SPICER’S READY TO TALK ABOUT TRUMP The ex-White House flack on crowds, the Mooch and life after a ‘lonely’ job. His book, The Briefing, is due out in July. Is there anything you regret saying from the podium? Oh, fuck, yeah! Absolutely! There are some days when I wasn’t as precise as I could’ve been, and there are some days when I just stepped in it. Did Trump tell you to say his inauguration crowd was the “largest” ever? No.…

“We’ve already destroyed 18 percent of Amazonia. If you don’t pay attention, in a few years, all is gone.” “The Korubu live in special communion with nature. These tribes are the age-old guardians of the forest.” “A tropical jungle is not renewable, at least not on any large scale. it may take decades to restore the land’s natural cycle. The forest is infinitely more valuable left intact.” FOR MUCH OF Sebastião Salgado’s four-decade career, the renowned Brazilian photojournalist captured indelible images of human catastrophe – famine, poverty, genocide. The brutality he witnessed eventually pushed him to seek the other extreme: pockets of the planet not yet spoiled by mankind, a project that brought him to the most isolated places on Earth and resulted in his landmark book and exhibit, Genesis.…

A MILLION THINGS can go wrong when you’re on your first-ever solo tour. In Brisbane, Australia, a zipper on one of Harry Styles’ designer suits broke shortly before showtime. But Styles didn’t let that get in the way of his nightly ping-pong battle. As his stylist made a quick fix, he got into a serious match with one of his videographers, scoring the winning shot just as this image was taken. ¶ When Styles isn’t competing backstage, he reads a lot – lately, he’s been into Joan Didion and Haruki Murakami. Onstage, he’s just as relaxed. His new arena run has him breaking out Bowie moves, covering Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” and bantering with screaming crowds. In March, he stopped a show after a minor mishap: “Can we get the…

DOCUMENTARY BEHIND WHITNEY’S SADNESS Whitney Houston’s longtime agent Nicole David had one goal while producing a documentary about the singer: “I wanted to show she wasn’t just this beautiful girl with the best voice who pissed it all away.” The result is Whitney, directed by Kevin MacDonald (2012’s Marley), which traces the sources of Houston’s profound sadness, revealing how she was allegedly molested by her cousin, singer Dee Dee Warwick, and detailing how her father-manager sued her for $100 million in 2002, damaging their relationship forever. Says David, “I learned I never even had the chance to help her.” ANDY GREENE WHITNEY IN THEATERS July 6th RISING STAR An ‘It’ Girl Breaks Out SOPHIA LILLIS is only 16, but the Brooklyn actress already has a résumé full of what…

1. Climbing the Burj Khalifa Ghost Protocol (2011) Cruise scales the 2,700-foot Dubai landmark using adhesive gloves, suction-cupping himself to windows more than 100 stories high. “The Burj casts a long shadow over Mission,” says Rogue Nation and Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie. “It’s everything Mission aspires to be.” 2. Flight School Rogue Nation (2015) Yep, that’s really Cruise holding on to the side of an Airbus A400M Atlas in flight. “A lot of movies, that would have been done on a green screen with a wind machine,” says stunt coordinator Wade Eastwood. “But Tom likes ‘Method stunt acting.’” 3. Cliffhanger M:I 2 (2000) Over the opening credits of the second Mission film, Cruise free-climbs a cliff in Utah, leaping from foothold to foothold with no ropes. Even with hidden safety…

THE BREAKDOWN ‘DON’T TIE YOURSELF to the sinking ship,” Thom Yorke warned young artists in 2010. The vessel in question was the music industry: In the U.S. that year, recorded music coughed out $7 billion in revenue, down from $14.6 billion barely a decade before. The music business had once gloated about unstoppable growth – but after digital downloads began replacing physical records in the early 2000s, profits started tumbling down. It looked like a storm without end. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a lifeboat appeared. Despite being painfully slow to embrace digital formats at the turn of the century, the industry went all in on streaming, and in 2016, revenue rose by a double-digit percentage for the first time in two decades. Last year, it happened again. Services like…

1. Love Is All We Have Left 2017 Nearly every U2 show for the past 40 years kicked off with an explosive full-band tune. This time, they wanted to subvert expectations – so the show opens with Bono standing alone in the middle of the arena, singing the plaintive opening number to Songs of Experience. “Very still, very meditative,” says the Edge. 2. Gloria 1981 The early part of the set is thoughtfully laid out to evoke recent events in Bono’s life, particularly the still-unexplained “brush with mortality” that inspired much of 2017’s Songs of Experience. “The first three songs deal with mortality,” says the Edge. “Then we felt like, ‘Now we have to go back to the beginning very quickly, to start the story from where it really starts,…

THE ROAD and the studio are the only places I’ve ever felt completely OK,” Tom Petty told ROLLING STONE last summer, explaining why he was launching one last grueling tour to mark his 40th anniversary with the Heartbreakers. But the roadwork wasn’t easy for him. Petty spent the entire 53-date tour struggling with severe pain from a fracture in his left hip. He got through it with painkillers and used a golf cart to move around backstage. “Tom was ill,” said his friend Stevie Nicks. “He fought his way through that tour. He should have canceled and gone home. But not Tom. He was going to go down that river.” In October, a week after the final date at the Hollywood Bowl, Petty was dead. The 66-year-old had accidentally overdosed…

ONE HUMID afternoon in Atlanta, Cardi B, the new princess of hip-hop, wakes up in an endless white mansion flanked by tall trees. This is her fiancé’s castle – he’s Offset from Migos – and there are enough six-figure cars parked outside to form a small-town parade. By the curved dark-wood door, his friends smoke blunts in tracksuits as bright as British guardsmen’s jackets. Cardi, 25, and Offset, 26, are buying a new home shortly, and building a dream house too. But for now, this is the spot. Waking up late, Cardi pads around the house barefoot in a yellow cotton dress pulled tight over her swollen, nearly seven-and-a-half-months-pregnant belly. She eats a salad, manages the feat of typing on her phone with three-inch rhinestone-encrusted fake nails, and relaxes into…