Table of contents for January 2020 in Rolling Stone

THERE WAS A TIME when Celine Dion did not have to beg rappers not to tattoo her face on their bodies. But as the lady once sang, those days are gone. When Drake announced his plans to get the fellow Canadian icon’s visage inked on his rib cage, joining his tats of Aaliyah, Rihanna, Sade, Denzel, and the Beatles, Celine pleaded, “Please, Drake, I love you very much. … We can sing together. I can talk to your mother. Whatever you want, but please.” Oh, the price of being a legend. One day you’re standing tall on the prow of the Titanic, ululating “My Heart Will Go On” over Celtic pipes; the next, you’re giving tough love to the guy who wrote “God’s Plan.” It’s just another weird moment…

I’ll cut right to the point: I’m curious to try heroin. The government says it’s evil, but why should I believe them? And I won’t become an addict. I just want to try it once and see what it’s like. Is that so wrong? —Stewart Baker, OH Nobody ever managed to try it just once. If you try it once, you’ll want to do it again. Don’t experiment with it. It’s like experimenting with a nightmare. The feeling you get from heroin isn’t worth it. You get a momentary cessation of pain. That’s why I did it. It stopped the pain. The pain was in my heart, and it slowed it down for a minute and then brought its own pain, which was even bigger. I’ve been in a…

LONG BEFORE she started calling herself H.E.R., Gabi Wilson was on an almost preordained path to stardom. She appeared on the Today Show as a 10-year-old prodigy, performing an eerily accomplished cover of Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You,” before signing a record deal at age 14. She grew up to be a multi-instrumentalist (lead-guitar chops very much included) alt-R&B auteur in the tradition of Keys and Prince, with exquisite control of her powerhouse voice. With five Grammy nominations for 2019 and a new album due early this year, H.E.R. is well on the way to fulfilling her considerable potential at age 22. “I’ve really put in the time and work,” she says. “I’m so happy that everything has been, you know, manifesting.” What was your journey like…

Senator Graham once enjoyed respect on both sides of the aisle. Why has he become a blind loyalist to Trump? LINDSEY GRAHAM and Donald Trump were born nine years and one month apart. Trump came first, but when they appear side by side, as they often do these days, the men look about the same age. On November 6th, in the East Room of the White House, the president held an event to mark the record number of federal judges his administration has appointed, and Graham was there, having played a critical role in the achievement as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Trump’s staff had scheduled the event in part to shift focus from the House impeachment investigation, to remind any wobbly Republicans of the reason they’d held…

1 My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Kanye West 2010 FORGET, IF YOU CAN, THE RED HAT, THE OUTRAGEOUS tweets, the overpriced sweatpants. (You’ve maybe already forgotten the gospel record he put out two months ago.) Remember, instead, the gravity-defying artistic leap that Kanye pulled off with his fifth LP. Stung by the ferocious backlash to his 2009 VMAs meltdown — a moment that, quaintly in retrospect, seemed like rock bottom for his public image — he hid out in Hawaii and emerged with the ultimate case for his genius/jerk-off duality. The secret sessions at Avex Honolulu Studios saw Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Justin Vernon, and others turning in career-best performances under the guidance of Kanye’s absurd yet effective house rules (“No hipster hats” … “Just shut the fuck up…

Harry Styles Fine Line COLUMBIA IF YOU’RE LISTENING for evidence of the many psychedelic mushrooms Harry Styles says he ate while making his outstanding second album, you will have to wait until Fine Line’s second-to-last song. But when “Treat People With Kindness” arrives, it trips balls. Musing about “floating up and dreaming, dropping into the deep end” over a feverish groove of congas, hand claps, and Mellotron, Styles calls upon a gospel chorus to take him even higher: “Maaaaybe, we can find a place to feeeel good,” they thunder. “To feel good!” On his 2017 debut, Harry Styles, the breakout One Direction heartthrob believably staked his claim to Seventies rock-star tradition. But Fine Line is not exactly the magical mystery tour one might have assumed he’d set his sights…

1. Fleabag Amazon Prime Video The second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragic farce began with her face covered in blood. It ended with her gently waving goodbye to us — her invisible, silent confidants. The wave proved the far more powerful moment. That seemed about right for this season, which was as much about the relationship between fictional characters and their audiences as it was about Fleabag’s attempt to repair things with her estranged sister Claire (Sian Clifford), or grappling with her feelings for a hot priest (Andrew Scott). Season Two continued to break the fourth wall — then broke it twice over when the priest (who has his own invisible, all-knowing confidant in God) began to notice Fleabag talking to us — in a way that laced Waller-Bridge’s…

“Patsy Cline stood alone. And [she] just had this voice that kind of — whatever you’re doing, she could reach inside your chest, grab your heart and twist it a quarter-turn.”—ELIZABETH WARREN WE STARTED DEBATING the decade’s best albums and songs last summer, battling over how many Drake songs to include (he got three), which Black Keys record rocked hardest (we chose Brothers), and how high “Old Town Road” should be (it ended up at 12). The biggest argument was over which album to crown number one: Beyoncé’s Lemonade or Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In the end, Kanye’s 2010 masterwork was undeniable. Throw it on today, and all the confounding things Kanye has done since then melt away. Like Brian Wilson’s most daring creation, Smile, Twisted…

SIX YEARS AGO, Marcus King felt lost. A long-haired, pot-smoking kid going to school in the small town of Piedmont, South Carolina, he struggled to fit in — he hated sports and missed enough classes to nearly be expelled for truancy. “I have nothing good to say about Piedmont, no good memories,” says the guitarist. “They were trying to put me away, trying to put me into a juvenile detention center, trying to shave my head, put me in a jail. And I was like, ‘I didn’t do anything. I just missed a couple days of class.’” But it all turned out OK. King started taking classes at a local music school to study jazz, leading him to where he is now: one of the most exciting guitarists to…

Hit Man This mix of music and murder focuses on Motown producer Lawrence Horn, who in 1993 hired a hit man to take out his family. The killer made use of a mysterious book, Hit Man: A Technical Manual for Independent Contractors, by the ominously named Rex Feral. What drove a man who recorded the Supremes and Smokey Robinson to risk it all? Can books kill? Hit Man has the answers. Final Sessions Harry Nilsson’s cult of fans — and his influence on other artists — have only grown since his death in 1994. Former RS editor Joe Levy tells the story of Losst and Founnd, an album of material recorded just before Nilsson’s death, taking time out for fascinating asides — including Nilsson’s boozy friendship with John Lennon.…

IT’S ALWAYS been tricky to understand what, exactly, it means to be nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammy Awards. The 2020 contenders make it less clear than ever. Nominees Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, Lizzo, Maggie Rogers, Rosalía, Tank and the Bangas, Black Pumas, and Yola span the gamut in streams, sales, and audience size. Of the eight candidates, Lil Nas X has had the fastest rise. Funk duo Black Pumas are technically the newest artists, releasing their debut album in June 2019, while Lizzo has been putting out LPs since 2013. Eilish has roughly 1,000 times more streams and sales than Yola each week. The Recording Academy, which selects nominees through an opaque, byzantine voting process, admits that Best New Artist “probably has the most complicated…

For more lists of 2019’s biggest stars by the numbers and a breakdown of the year’s most interesting trends, visit http://RollingStone.com/t/2019yearinreview/. This list reflects U.S. on-demand audio streams from December 28th, 2018, to December 2nd, 2019, as recorded by Alpha Data. Check out the full Rolling Stone Charts at RollingStone.com/Charts SPOTLIGHT YOUNGBOY’S QUIETLY HUGE 2019 FOUR OF THE TOP FIVE most-streamed artists of 2019 are household names. Then there is Youngboy Never Broke Again, a 20-year-old rapper-singer from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He doesn’t even have a Top 25 hit on the hip-hop airwaves, much less pop radio, and the Grammys have ignored him. Yet he’s a streaming sensation, with more than 3 billion on-demand audio streams in 2019 — 1.4 billion more than in 2018. For comparison’s sake, Youngboy…

ON INSTAGRAM SHE WAS “escty,” the Lolita goth princess, pouting and preening next to heart-shaped handcuffs, Louis Vuitton-branded handguns, and bound-and-gagged Hello Kittys. She was also “beegtfo,” the girl next door, mugging with her sister in Christmas photos, donning pastel barrettes and holding her toddler half-sister to her hip. She was “oxiecontin,” the teen queen of darkness, boozy-eyed and bruise-kneed in short plaid skirts and Converse, smoking and rolling her eyes as her world collapsed around her (“literally so tired and everything’s annoying and I’m going through an episode lol,” she wrote). On Tumblr she was “switchblades,” on 4chan she was “Oxy,” on Snapchat she was “virgovenus,” and on Discord she was “bia.” The people who loved her called her Bia, or Bee. Those who hated her (mostly men,…

1 Dancing on My Own Robyn 2010 “I’M RIGHT OVER HERE, WHY CAN’T YOU see me?” Robyn might as well have been singing to U.S. pop audiences in the 2000s, who mostly ignored her as she spent years refining her bright, fizzy synth-pop sound to perfection. Then came “Dancing on My Own,” the killer single that elevated her to something approaching voice-of-a-generation status among America’s burned-out youth. Written and produced with fellow Swedish ace Patrik Berger, it’s a relatable hit of heartbreak at the club with a chaser of empowering uplift — exactly the disco anthem we needed in the long hangover of the financial crisis. Robyn was no torch diva, but she sang the hell out of this one, her warm vocals pushing against the precision-tuned track. “Dancing…

WHEN COLDPLAY first appeared in our pages, in 2000, ROLLING STONE wondered: Were the new Brit-pop group “the next Radiohead? Or the next Verve, or Travis?” Today, it’s clear they were none of those things. Over the past 20 years, Coldplay have carved out their own place in the world: as stadium-filling, genre-defying optimists in an age of irony. They are arguably the biggest band in the world today — their tour behind 2015’s A Head Full of Dreams grossed $523 million, a run they kicked off with a set at the Super Bowl with Beyoncé and Bruno Mars. All of that success caused frontman Chris Martin to take a step back. “There was a slight sense of peace,” he says on a recent afternoon in New York. “All…

EARLY ON HALSEY’S excellent new album, Manic, she samples a bit of movie dialogue: “I’m just a fucked-up girl looking for my own piece of mind. Don’t assign me yours.” It’s from the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, spoken by the manic, pixie dream-girl heroine Clementine. But she definitely speaks for Halsey. And as you’ve probably guessed, the singer doesn’t even come close to finding peace of mind in these songs. Still, she knows how to make it a thrilling quest. Manic is Halsey’s raw autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young mess, craving her share of love and tenderness in a hostile world. Yet Halsey’s Ashley Frangipane is a mess who’s a hungrily ambitious artist seeing herself as a mirror for her entire generation. Halsey…

“I’ve come to expect Driver’s onscreen intensity, but it was fascinating to read this and learn that’s how he approaches all aspects of his life.”—Lena Oliver, via Facebook War Stories For our December issue [“Star Wars,” RS 1334], we marked the end of the Skywalker saga by sitting down with Adam Driver, J.J. Abrams, and Billy Dee Williams for a deep dive into the makings of the final film. Driver wrestled with how to live up to the epic’s legacy, and he wasn't the only one reflecting once the tale ended: “Adam Driver is the best thing to come out of this new trilogy,” wrote Renee Lasswell. Readers were more skeptical of the film itself. “I can appreciate your articles,” wrote Scott Oliver, “but Disney forgot what made Star…

ON A CHILLY NIGHT in Palm Springs, California, last spring, Juice WRLD drove a DeLorean across an abandoned airfield. He was set to perform at Coachella that weekend, and his record label, Interscope, had thrown him a party to celebrate the recent release of Death Race for Love, his second and best album, complete with fighter jets and the car from Back to the Future. Still new to fame and months away from turning 21, the rapper didn’t talk much to the crowds of industry insiders, fans, and journalists. Instead, he mostly whispered into the ear of his girlfriend and posed for a seemingly unlimited amount of pictures, leaning against the silver car door sticking straight up into the sky. Sensing the shoot might never end, I left the…

Beerbongs and Billie Billie Eilish ran into her pal Post Malone at the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, where Eilish took home honors for New Artist of the Year and Favorite Artist – Alternative, and Post Malone’s latest LP, Hollywood’s Bleeding, was named Best Hip-Hop Album. “I’ve grown up watching you all,” Eilish told her fellow nominees.…

On the campaign trail in Iowa with the progressive warrior as she tries to prove she’s the Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump IT’S LATE NOVEMBER AT THE Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines, Iowa, a Forties dance hall converted from a World War I tire factory with ancient plumbing and a buzzing neon sign. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is listed on the marquee just above the cage fights and the craft show taking place next month. Hundreds of people have crowded onto the well-worn maple floor: old ladies in NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED T-shirts, college students home for Thanksgiving, young couples with small kids. H But not everyone who has shown up tonight is sold on Elizabeth Warren. (A middle-aged man behind me says he’s choosing between Tom Steyer…

1 Thank U, Next Ariana Grande GRANDE’S 2018 LP, Sweetener, was framed as a post-tragedy bright-side opus. But then life happened: Her ex Mac Miller died soon after the album’s release, and her whirlwind engagement to Pete Davidson came to a screeching halt. In just two weeks, Grande let the tears flow and wrote a trap-R&B-pop masterpiece that nods to ’NSync and The Sound of Music, features appearances from her grandma and drag queen Shangela, and flexes her whistle register (“Imagine”) alongside her rap skills (“7 Rings”). We’re so fuckin’ grateful for her exes too. 2. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Billie Eilish EILISH DISMANTLED and rebuilt the pop song on her debut LP. The 17-year-old layered bizarre sounds (the clicking of a crosswalk signal,…

What are the best and worst parts of success? The best part of success, real success, is getting a chance to work the way you want to work, do what you want to do. Your projects are funded, your ideas are funded, your content is marketed. The worst part of success is being more famous than you are rich. I know that sounds funny, but I’m involved in fundraisers all the time, and I have to ask people for money, which I hate doing more than anything else on the planet. And they look at you like, “What are you asking me for money for? I’ve seen you on TV. You must be fucking rich.” You’d never acted before you took the role of Silvio on The Sopranos. How…