Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från Rolling Stone

GUILLERMO DEL TORO HAS TWO smiles. The first one is an open-mouthed, midlaugh, 100-watt grin that smacks of pure, childlike enthusiasm. Spend any time with the Oscar-winning 57-year-old Mexican filmmaker and you’ll see that smile again and again. It’s there when the chef-owner of a Toronto restaurant is telling him about the secret, off-menu specials that evening, or when del Toro remembers catching a rare 1930s movie late one night on TV, or when he’s recommending some obscure 19th-century horror author you just have to read. It’s the smile del Toro has when he’s gently issuing orders to his postproduction team behind a mixing board (“That thunder needs to go up two decibels on the left, the footsteps down a decibel on the right”) and then everything onscreen suddenly…

You’ve been an icon to several different generations. When a fan approaches you, can you tell right away if they want to talk about Star Trek: The Next Generation, Reading Rainbow, or Roots? Ninety-five percent of the time. More often than not, I am absolutely able to tell what’s their entry point to LeVar and the work I do. It’s cool. I am very proud of the way my career has been able to speak to different generations simultaneously. If it were easy, everybody would do it. Is there any downside to living so much of your life in the public eye? Most recently I discovered that one of the downsides to fame is vulnerability. I put myself out there and publicly stated that I wanted the job on…

WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS ‘OH, MY GOD, I’m so sorry,” says Lindsey Jordan, 22, as she emerges from the leafy steps of Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, half an hour late, and approaches the Cloisters. “I was coming back from therapy, and I was like, ‘Either I’m going to pee at my apartment or, potentially, my pants.’ ” Jordan, who performs as Snail Mail, takes good care of the deep-indigo jeans she’s wearing — later, she’ll stop to trickle water on her knee after spilling some coffee. Clutching a black backpack and wearing a lavender sweater with white-and-brown Celine loafers, she looks like an impossibly fashionable middle schooler on a field trip. Even her lace face mask, which she got from her mother’s bra store in Maryland, wins…

THE IMAGE of outdoorsiness may be overwhelmingly white, but Alexis Nelson — a.k.a. @blackforager on Instagram and Twitter, and @AlexisNikole on TikTok — wants people to know that exploring the wild is very much Black. “Foraging almost feels like tapping back into a practice we forgot about for a couple of generations,” says Nelson, 29. Although she grew up watching her father cook and her mother garden, Nelson found foraging in 2015, when she was scraping by in Columbus, Ohio. “I was sick of ramen and Boca burgers,” she says. “Some neighbors had started doing urban foraging, and it lit up a lightbulb for me.” Nelson hit the outdoors, grabbing dock leaves to sprinkle into her noodles for a lemony taste, and field garlic greens to spice up her…

ABBA’S BRAVE NEW VOYAGE The Swedish pop super troupers ride again with their first new album in 40 years By ROB SHEFFIELD ABBA Voyage UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP NEARLY 40 YEARS AGO, ABBA were in the studio for one last time, to cut a tragic ballad called “The Day Before You Came.” They knew this was goodbye; both couples in the group had divorced. Agnetha Fältskog recited a bleak tale of emotional isolation, words scripted by her ex-husband, doing her vocals in a darkened studio with all the lights out. It was the last thing they ever recorded. A splendidly melodramatic finale for this most melodramatic of pop groups. And that — as far as the world knew — was that for ABBA. Until now. So how the hell did…

EARLY IN 1999, Radiohead began to size up the task of what to do next after 1997’s acclaimed OK Computer. “We were deeply suspicious of any level of success that we’d earned,” Thom Yorke says now. “Trying to get away from wherever the fuck we had found ourselves to somewhere new.” Over the next two years, with 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac, the band leapt forward into a new universe beyond rock’s horizon — accompanied by a rich world of eerie, dreamlike imagery created by Yorke and visual artist Stanley Donwood. Now, they are looking back with a pair of art books, Kid A Mnesia and Fear Stalks the Land!, and a deluxe reissue of the two albums. “At the end of it, the music and the artwork…

YOU’D HARDLY ever guess that Latto — a rapper as glamorous as she is braggadocious — was born with a name as understated as Alyssa Stephens. She has spent this year recording a new album, riding the high of her Mariah Carey-sampling single “Big Energy,” and enjoying popularity on TikTok. One key to her success: her choice to shorten her stage name from “Mulatto” in early 2021. “At first I wasn’t open to changing it. I was like, ‘If y’all don’t understand it, then that’s on y’all,’ ” she says on a recent Zoom call, adorned in micro cornrows and ultralong French tips. “But I’m maturing as a person.” 10-SECOND BIO HOME BASE Atlanta TIKTOK QUOTABLE “When I be doing these interviews, they always ask me, what’s my hobbies…

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN the election, the pandemic, and the looming environmental catastrophe, the world forgot why it was so mad at Azealia Banks. Ten years ago, the rapper put out “212,” a tune that had an instinctive grip on hip-hop’s many contours. In the years that followed, despite a steady stream of equally transcendent hits, Banks became more associated with controversy than with music — from a weird encounter with Elon Musk and Grimes to Russell Crowe allegedly assaulting her in his hotel room. (Crowe denied the allegations.) But in the past year, it’s been hard to deny Banks’ unfiltered brashness. She has spent the latter half of 2021 selling out arenas, and she isn’t even mad that the mainstream is coming around almost a decade late. She’d rather let…

Much of 30 is an open letter to Adele’s son. “He’s quite the understanding nine-year-old. He’s a Libra, so he’s like, ‘It’s fine, Mama. Just chill out.’” ADELE THOUGHT THAT MAYBE, just maybe, she could quietly slip news of her and her husband’s separation into the world without much notice. It was Good Friday 2019, and their marriage had been over for some time. A holiday weekend, she figured, might deflect some of the attention she had been dreading. ¶ “Fucking idiot,” she says of her plan. ¶ Adele and her husband, Simon Konecki, had been together since 2011. Their relationship was remarkably under the radar given Adele’s growing stardom, partly because she really only emerged from her life as a wife and mother to their son, Angelo, to…

IT STARTED AS A VOCAL BOOTH. A DECADE OR SO before Marilyn Manson rented the apartment above a West Hollywood liquor store circa 2010, a former tenant — a label and recording studio specializing in electronic music — had built the cramped glass enclosure in the corner of a room with the goal of making uptempo, life-affirming house music. The only adornment was some foam for soundproofing on the walls. Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, soon converted the booth into what several people who dated and worked with him now describe as a solitary-confinement cell used to psychologically torture women. They say Warner frequently banished his girlfriends there, keeping them inside for hours on end to punish them for the tiniest perceived transgressions. He called it the…