Table of contents for September 2019 in Rolling Stone

“There is a shocking, unreported, fundamental change coming to the habitability of many parts of the planet.”—PETER GLEICK, co-founder of the Pacific Institute WHEN ROB SHEFFIELD is on deadline, he follows a strict routine: He wakes up at 5 a.m., hits “play” on a cassette mixtape he’s loaded the night before into his 1989 boombox (Rob has hundreds of cassette mixtapes stacked on shelves in his Brooklyn apartment), and makes a grilled-cheese sandwich on his George Foreman. Next, he wraps his hands and arms in black tape (“I hope it prevents injury,” he says, “but it’s probably just superstitious”) and sits down to write. “The internet hasn’t started that early in the morning,” he says. “You can have solitude.” This routine has helped Rob produce thousands of brilliant reviews,…

IT WAS HARD to miss Yola at July’s Newport Folk Festival. The brightly dressed, earthy-voiced singer appeared on multiple stages at the legendary Rhode Island event, dropping in on sets by the Highwomen — where she got the biggest cheers of the supergroup’s show — and Dolly Parton, who welcomed Yola for a raucous group singalong of “9 to 5.” She also drew an overflowing crowd to her own side-stage performance, delivering a deeply moving set of country-soul originals. “Yola is a force unlike any we’ve ever seen in this genre,” says Brandi Carlile, who considers Yola an “honorary member” of her group Highwomen. This kind of thing has been happening a lot this year, since the 36-year-old released Walk Through Fire. Her debut LP combines the lush heartbreak…

SPOTLIGHT LIL KEED: HOW AN ATLANTA-RAP PHENOM FOUND HIS VOICE ONE DAY LAST YEAR, Lil Keed’s friends were pestering him to come to the parking lot of his apartment complex on Atlanta’s Cleveland Avenue. One of the neighborhood’s most popular exports, Young Thug, happened to be there, and the congregation knew this was their moment to showcase the neighborhood’s rising star. “I had a song out called ‘Bag,’” says Keed. “[My friends] kept playing it over and over again, and Thug was dancing to it. Thug finally walked up on me like, ‘What you working on? Let me hear something.’ So I let him hear some of my songs, and he’s like, ‘I got you.’” Half a year later, Thug made good on his promise and signed Keed to…

HARRY STYLES ISN’T EXACTLY dressed down for lunch. He’s got a white floppy hat that Diana Ross might have won from Elton in a poker game at Cher’s mansion circa 1974, plus Gucci shades, a cashmere sweater, and blue denim bell-bottoms. His nail polish is pink and mint green. He’s also carrying his purse — no other word for it — a yellow patent-canvas bag with the logo CHATEAU MARMONT. The tough old ladies who work at this Beverly Hills deli know him well. Gloria and Raisa dote on him, calling him “my love” and bringing him his usual tuna salad and iced coffee. He turns heads, to put it mildly, but nobody comes near because the waitresses hover around the booth protectively. He was just a small-town English…

On a scorching day in downtown Phoenix, when the temperature soars to 115°F or higher, heat becomes a lethal force. Sunshine assaults you, forcing you to seek cover. The air feels solid, a hazy, ozone-soaked curtain of heat. You feel it radiating up from the parking lot through your shoes. Metal bus stops become convection ovens. Flights may be delayed at Sky Harbor International Airport because the planes can’t get enough lift in the thin, hot air. At City Hall, where the entrance to the building is emblazoned with a giant metallic emblem of the sun, workers eat lunch in the lobby rather than trek through the heat to nearby restaurants. On the outskirts of the city, power lines sag and buzz, overloaded with electrons as the demand for…

The Water Dancer Ta-Nehisi Coates ONE WORLD TA-NEHISI Coates is the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race with his 2015 memoir, Between the World and Me. So naturally his debut novel comes with slightly unrealistic expectations — and then proceeds to exceed them. The Water Dancer, Coates’ meditation on the legacy of slavery, is a work of both staggering imagination and rich historical significance. The novel opens with two men crashing a horse-drawn carriage into the Goose River in mid-1800s Virginia. One man drowns; the other finds himself enveloped in a blue mist and then jolted awake miles away, dazed and confused and unharmed. The man who emerges from that would-be watery grave is Hiram Walker, a slave,…

“She’s better than 95 percent of pop artists and [did it] without letting the industry decide what she sounds like.”—Mark Gard, via the internet Billie’s Teen Spirit For Billie Eilish’s first ROLLING STONE cover [“Triumph of the Weird,” RS 1330], traditional was out of the question. Photographer Petra Collins explained, “There have been a lot of young women on the covers, and I was like, ‘I want to do the opposite of what the Britney Spears cover was.’” For reader Rebecca Stout, this resonated. “As a mother of a teenage girl, what can I say but thank you, Billie Eilish, for proving girls don’t have to shop their body parts in order to be sexy, cool, or successful.” Other readers did not share in this sense of empowerment. “Why…

Let It Get Weird In 2014, Charli’s career blew up, set off by a trio of pop hits: “Fancy” with Iggy Azalea, solo single “Boom Clap,” and omnipresent Icona Pop collaboration “I Love It.” “But did it” — “it” meaning “global success” — “make me feel fulfilled artistically?” Charli asks. “No.” So for her third album, she stopped worrying and embraced the odd. On dissonantly Auto-Tuned songs like “Click” and “Next Level Charli,” she leans into the organized electronic chaos introduced on mixtape Pop 2. “I’m not thinking, ‘Is this too weird?’” Charli says. “I don’t care that it’s not going to get on the radio.” Make Music You Can Party To The last album Charli released wasn’t up to her standards in one crucial way. “Even though I’m…

‘IT WASN’T meant to be Cavalcade of Stars,” says Sheryl Crow. “Hopefully it feels natural and cohesive.” She’s talking about her impressive mic-drop of a new album, Threads, which includes a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony’s worth of guests (among them: Bonnie Raitt, Chuck D, Eric Clapton, Sting, Kris Kristofferson, St. Vincent, James Taylor, Maren Morris, Gary Clark Jr., Emmylou Harris, and Neil Young). The album is intended as the final full LP from Crow, 57, as she plans to focus on singles and other quicker releases. Still, she says, “Never say never.” This lineup is a real testament to how much your peers respect you. Is it also a bit of well-deserved muscle-flexing on your part? My fear would be that anybody would think that.…

FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS owe their existence to an old station wagon. When frontman Michael Fitzpatrick was growing up in L.A., his father allowed only two kinds of music in the house: classical and opera. But when Fitz rode in his mom’s car, he listened to Motown and soul on the radio. He liked the music so much he started singing along — and never stopped. “Much to my parents’ chagrin, by the time I was five or six years old, you couldn’t shut me up,” Fitz says while cruising on L.A.’s Angeles Crest Highway in Toyota’s much-anticipated new Supra, a model that hasn’t been sold in the U.S. since 1998. “Riding around listening to that music was the first place I could have my own musical identity, so…

EARLY EVENING, August, Cincinnati, Ohio. The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in to see Donald Trump. “Can we just get in for a minute?” complains a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot of kids here. Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America. He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills. If NASA traveled the country holding showings of the first captured alien…

IN THE SPRING OF 1990, Rivers Cuomo was 19 years old, and all of his plans were coming undone. The year before, he and his high school metal band, Avant Garde, moved from suburban Connecticut to L.A., all five members crammed into the same filthy studio apartment, sleeping on the floor. Cuomo was the lead guitarist, with an arsenal of squeal-y virtuoso licks and hair so long and majestically poufed-up that it essentially served as the band’s sixth member. Flamboyance aside, Cuomo left frontman duties to an operatically inclined friend. “I could have seen myself in the NBA as easily as being a lead singer in a metal band,” Cuomo says now. “That’s just, like, unthinkable.” Avant Garde gave themselves a slightly less embarrassing new name, Zoom, and streamlined…

The Highwomen The Highwomen ELEKTRA THE HIGHWOMEN come steeped in history — a history they rewrite, literally and figuratively. Their name, and the title track of their terrific self-titled debut, alludes to “The Highwayman,” Jimmy Webb’s 1977 song-turned-hit signature of the Highwaymen, the Eighties supergroup of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. Rewritten with Webb for a new singer-songwriting collective — Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, Amanda Shires, and Natalie Hemby — “The Highwomen” swaps the original’s mythic male narratives for female ones: an immigrant mom who dies fleeing Honduras through Mexico, a “witch” hanged in Salem, a murdered Freedom Rider, a preacher persecuted for her gender. “We are the highwomen, we sing of stories still untold/We carry the sons you can only hold,” the women declaim…

Who are your heroes? FDR. He overcame personal handicaps and adversity to become one of the great leaders of all time. I would also say Jackie Robinson. I was a huge Brooklyn Dodgers fan growing up — I used to live six blocks from Ebbets Field. Not only was [Robinson] a great ballplayer, but he emerged as a role model to become the first black [major league] ballplayer. Of all the artists you worked with who are no longer with us, who do you miss the most? Whitney. We had a very close relationship professionally from the time I found her in 1983. I would say the story of Whitney Houston has clearly not been told yet. She’s had two documentaries, and I think each of them failed to…

1. Charli XCX “Cross You Out” The punky U.K. pop diva is releasing her first LP in five years, full of confrontationally weird party jams like this emo collabo with fellow rules hater Sky Ferreira. Over a stomping, synth-glazed groove, they detonate the memory of an ex, creating their own killer moment of sisterly chaos. 2. DaBaby and Lil Baby “Baby” Lil Baby’s Drip Harder was one of our favorite hip-hop albums of 2018, and DaBaby’s Baby on Baby is one of our favorites from this year. What can we say? It’s a good time for rappers named Baby, as their frenetically banging tag-team “Baby” attests. 3. Vivian Girls “Sick” The Vivian Girls make sweetly bracing indie pop somewhere between the Go-Go’s and My Bloody Valentine, and they’re finally…

DONALD TRUMP was still months away from being elected president when Stephen King began writing his upcoming novel. But The Institute — out September 10th and centered on a 12-year-old boy stolen from his parents in the night and locked up in a mysterious facility — is likely to remind readers of certain immigration policies. “I can’t help but see similarity between what’s going on in The Institute and those pictures of kids in cages,” says King. “Sometimes fiction outpaces fact.” This isn’t the first time a King book predicted the political future: His 1979 book The Dead Zone was about a Trump-like aspiring president threatening global apocalypse if he took office. “Fiction has foreseen Trump before,” says King, “always as a nightmare. Now, the nightmare is here. But…

RANDOM QUOTE “I’ve got so many parkas I can’t hang them all up. I’d rather throw out the house than the parkas.”—Liam Gallagher…

Riding the Coaster With O.D.B. The Three Kids of Ol’ Dirty Bastard Taniqua Jones DOB 4/23/88 HOMETOWN Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn CALLING Craft specialist for the disabled; cast member, Growing Up Hip Hop New York; co-director of the estate of Russell Jones (otherwise known as O.D.B.) Barsun Jones a.k.a. Young Dirty Bastard DOB 4/9/89 HOMETOWN Bed-Stuy CALLING Entrepreneur Shaquita Jones DOB 3/11/92 HOMETOWN Bed-Stuy CALLING Mother; DeVry MBA student; co-director of the estate of Russell Jones THE MOMENT THEY KNEW THEIR DAD WAS FAMOUS “He came to my classroom because I was bad in school,” Barsun says. “He was supposed to set me right, but as soon as he came, teachers started acting different and classmates started participating in his celebrity. So now being bad for me was good: He was…

Brittany Howard Jaime ATO BRITTANY HOWARD is a Southern rock & roll radical with a centuries-deep sense of history and some inspiring ideas about how to reshape it to fit our moment. As the lead singer and guitarist for the expansively retro-minded Alabama Shakes, she’s combined garage rock, soul, and psychedelia. In 2015, she convened the well-named punk-rock side project Thunderbitch, reimagining vintage New York punk as roadhouse stomp. Now, she’s put the Shakes on hold to make her solo debut (though a couple of band members are on hand, as is co-producer Shawn Everett, who engineered the Shakes’ 2015 LP, Sound & Color). Still, it’s a total departure, her kaleidoscopic mix of decades’ worth of R&B, hip-hop, blues, and gospel, steeped in trippy laptop sonics and deeply personal…

HBO’S FIRST golden age had its holy trinity of Davids: The Sopranos’ David Chase, Deadwood’s David Milch, and The Wire’s David Simon. In the years since, Chase and Milch receded before returning to their old favorites — Chase with a Sopranos prequel, Milch with a Deadwood reunion. Simon, though, has no interest in reviving The Wire. He already told that story. Besides, HBO has kept him busy since the day we said goodbye to his fictionalized Baltimore: first with the Iraq War miniseries Generation Kill, then the post-Katrina drama Treme, the political miniseries Show Me a Hero, and the porn drama The Deuce, which begins its third and final season on September 9th. The Wire, little-watched when it originally aired, is now often hailed as the greatest show ever…