Innehållsförteckning för September 2020 från Rolling Stone

“The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.”—JOHN LEWIS THE BEATLES’ “We Can Work It Out” hit Number One the week before the writer of this issue’s cover story, Rob Sheffield, and I were born (in early February 1966). The group was just past the midpoint in its brief but magnificent, tumultuous, world-changing decade of existence, and the song (among my and Rob’s favorites) works as a parable for the challenges the Beatles faced as bandmates and brothers, and the resolve, as Rob says, “to give each other the confidence and courage to fight their way through it. The Beatles shared that faith that if they work together, they…

IN 2020 AMERICA, more people are raging against the machine than ever before — and Rage guitarist Tom Morello is no exception, though with his extended family in isolation with him at his Los Angeles house, his current activism is of the stay-at-home variety. He’s already released a new protest song, “Stand Up,” with more to come, and is also looking back, with a new photo book, Whatever It Takes, and an Audible release, Tom Morello at Minetta Lane Theatre. The book chronicles every era of Morello’s career, beginning with his childhood as one of the only black kids in his Illinois town; his time at Harvard; and his funky flop of a first major-label band, Lock Up. From there it traces the birth of Rage Against the Machine,…

Polo G has a record deal, a hit song, and two critically acclaimed albums, but he considers one of his greatest accomplishments to be simply making it to age 21. Surviving a violent childhood in Chicago is a persistent theme across the versatile rapper’s catalog. “You can be as young as 14, living life like a grown man,” he says. “I had to mature quickly growing up in the trenches.” Polo, who began rapping in his late teens three years ago, has already begun to define his city’s sound. Chicago is known for drill music, a brutal hip-hop offshoot that attempts to capture what it’s like to be young in a dangerous city. Polo is part of a new vanguard that’s moving away from drill’s harsh origins; he favors…

RICKY MARTIN had been an international star for years before “Livin’ La Vida Loca” topped the U.S. charts — and he’s hardly seen a dull moment in the two decades since. In 2010, the Puerto Rican singer came out to his fans as a gay man; nearly 10 years later, he received his first Emmy nomination, for his role in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. This spring, Martin — now a father of four with his husband, Syrian-born artist Jwan Yosef — released a new EP, Pausa, featuring collaborations with Sting and Bad Bunny. It’s a busy life, but he’s taken it all in stride, at least until Covid-19 hit. “Before this pandemic, I had no issues,” Martin, 48, says with a laugh. “I’m a delegator,…

IT TOOK TWO YEARS of phone calls and confusing negotiations to get myself invited to visit Toots Hibbert at his fortress-like pink stucco compound in the Red Hills section of Kingston, Jamaica. When I finally arrived, he wasn’t home. No one around seemed to know the whereabouts of the world’s greatest living reggae singer. His grandson, an aspiring reggae artist who calls himself King Trevi, was perched on some concrete steps and suggested that maybe Toots went to the gym. A woman hanging laundry on a rope strung across the dirt yard thought he’d gone to the country. Someone said he might be napping. ¶ I was directed to wait in the yard, near a dusty fence painted the colors of the Jamaican flag. A dreadlocked old-timer in a…

America is a major theme on your new album. Are you feeling optimistic about this country? You hate to say anything positive about the pandemic. We’ve all lost our jobs because we can’t go out and play concerts. But I feel optimistic that it’s allowed people to take a break from the onslaught of all the cool things that can occupy your attention. I don’t think the Black Lives Matter movement would have had as much power if there wereall these other things going on. I was very glad that there were no concerts and no sporting events — nothing else in the way. The Flaming Lips’ album ‘American Head’ is due out September 11th. You had your first child last year. How has fatherhood affected the way you…

“Lil Baby is a lyrical genius. His music is relevant and thought-provoking. It’s nice to see a rapper promote positive change from a non-confrontational standpoint.”—Nick Graham, via letter Inside the Rise of Lil Baby Atlanta rapper Lil Baby appeared on our August cover, his first for ROLLING STONE, pictured in his hometown, standing outside the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed by two police officers on June 12th. ROLLING STONE staff writer Charles Holmes spent two days with Baby (whose real name is Dominique Jones), playing dice, visiting Baby’s old West End neighborhood, and sharing wide-ranging conversations on everything from Scooby-Doo quips to conflicting views on what it means to be racist [“Lil Baby’s Uprising,” RS 1342]. Holmes’ candid and at times very personal piece about rap’s biggest new…

IT’S A MISERABLE Monday morning in January 1969, and the Beatles are trying to get back to where they once belonged. The Get Back project sounded like a perfect idea: just the four lads and their instruments, ready to hit the studio, return to their roots, conjure up some great songs out of thin air. Just like they used to. John, Paul, George, and Ringo have booked a TV concert special for January 18th — their first live show in years. They’ll rehearse for a couple of weeks, eyeball to eyeball, summon up genius on the spur of the moment. They’ve done it many times before. They’ve never not done it. The good news: Paul showed up today, and so did Ringo. So did the camera crew — these…

“I’m a pack rat by nature,” Cameron Crowe has said. “And I kept everything.” When the 20th anniversary of Almost Famous came around, the writer-director went into his garage, looked on a shelf near some fishing poles, and opened a box of artifacts from the film. Here’s what he found. A.M.…

ON JUNE 29TH, 2020, while America remained transfixed by anti-police protests, the chairman and CEO of the pharmaceutical company Gilead issued a much-anticipated announcement. In a breezy open letter, Daniel O’Day explained how much his company planned on charging for a course of remdesivir, one of many possible treatments for Covid-19. ¶ “In the weeks since we learned of remdesivir’s potential against Covid-19, one topic has attracted more speculation than any other: what price we might set for the medicine,” O’Day wrote, before plunging into a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak. The CEO noted a study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a division of the National Institutes of Health, showing that Covid-19 patients taking remdesivir recovered after 11 days, compared with 15 days for placebo takers.…

IN THE FALL of 2018, Angel Olsen left behind her life in Asheville, North Carolina, and traveled across the country to the remotest place she could find. To hear her tell it, there wasn’t much to leave: She’d just gotten out of a five-year relationship, which also spelled the end of several friendships. “That’s the hardest part of a relationship in a small town,” says Olsen, 33. “You realize who your friends are, who can deal with conflict between two people and not be shitty. … It was time for me to be alone for a while.” As painful as the experience was, it left Olsen with a batch of incisive songs about loss, solitude, and emotional crossroads. She took them to Anacortes, Washington, an even smaller town, near…

MICK JAGGER got a call from his label recently with some news: While working on a reissue of the Rolling Stones’ 1973 album Goats Head Soup, the crew found some unreleased tracks. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, no,’” Jagger says. “Unreleased tracks, to me that always means a lot of work. It’s like, ‘Things that you didn’t like and didn’t finish!’” Jagger’s mind changed when he heard the music. “Actually, it’s not bad at all,” he says. Soon, isolating at his home in the European countryside, he wrote new lyrics to “All the Rage,” a rocker he’d started writing 47 years earlier. “You finish [tracks] like you would if you recorded them last week,” says Jagger. “‘Where are my maracas? Surely I must have my maracas around here.’” Goats Head…

Adding Up Music’s 1 Percent Streaming could have leveled the playing field, but the top acts have an even bigger lead than before IN ITS EARLY DAYS, streaming offered users a glimmer of a utopian free-for-all: a musical landscape where all artists had access to the same audience, an endless buffet of options that would lead listeners beyond blockbuster albums to an array of underground obscurities. But in reality, today’s streaming landscape looks a lot like the music industry used to. There’s a small class of artists who see not just the majority of activity, but damn near all of it. In fact, streaming hasn’t just upheld the gap between music’s haves and have-nots — it’s widened it. An analysis of current music, using figures from Alpha Data for…

WHEN THE Rev. Dr. William Barber II saw that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was the first to eulogize the late John Lewis as he lay in state inside the Capitol rotunda on July 27th, the civil rights leader thought of Jesus admonishing the Pharisees. “We love the tombs of the prophets,” said Barber, paraphrasing Jesus in the New Testament. “We don’t need to be talking about how hard and how great it was that John Lewis stood so firm against injustice. What we need to be doing is repenting and saying, ‘We’re going to make it so nobody ever has to give their life for basic racial justice.’” ❡ It would be easy if McConnell, a man who was blocking a fix to the very Voting Rights Act…

HE WAS ALMOST HOME. ➧ In the early-morning hours of July 10th, 2016, Seth Rich walked alone across northwest Washington, D.C., making calls to his friends and family, thinking about his future. ➧ Like so many idealistic twentysomethings, he had moved to the nation’s capital after college to work in politics. It was the first place he’d lived outside of Omaha, and he’d gradually found his way, falling in with a group of fellow strivers, biking everywhere, cooking out, and playing soccer on the weekends. A glorified internship at a polling firm led to a job at the Democratic National Committee registering new voters and protecting against voter suppression. Days earlier, he’d gotten an offer to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in Brooklyn. Sitting in his drafts folder was…