Rolling StoneJuly/August 2025的目錄

BRUCE! AMAARAE! KESHA! RANDOM NOTES Ghanaian American star Amaarae has her eyes on global domination (p.9). Five big ideas from journalist Jeff Weiss’ new book about 2000s tabloid culture, Waiting for Britney Spears (p.11). Matty Matheson reveals his wild ride from small-town kid to chef to addict to family man (p.12), and pop duo Haute and Freddy get the carnival started (p.14). Four undergrad Harvard Lampoon contributors share a platform to beat Trump (p.16).Noah Hawley tackles a classic film series with Hulu’s Alien: Earth (p.17), and we step inside of Billy Woods’ house of horrors (p.18). Find out how AI chatbots are giving some people a messiah complex (p.20), and which lost albums Bruce Springsteen plans to dig out of the vault (p.22). “We’re living through an American tragedy, and…

When you meet Amaarae, it’s hard not to notice how much deeper her speaking voice is compared with the sweet falsetto she constantly deploys in her music. It’s all intentional: “There’s a sensitivity and a vulnerability that I get to tap into in my music that isn’t very easy for me to express,” she tells me under the shade of a teahouse at the Japanese Garden outside of Los Angeles. “Deep down, I’m a sensitive and mushy person.” Amaarae has been thinking a lot about who she really is. She’s currently hard at work on Black Star, her upcoming third album, which sees her diving deeper into her identity as both a woman and an artist. The album title is a triple entendre referencing herself, the Ghanaian flag, and the…

If you had been one of the two other shoppers browsing the trinkets at the empty Sherman Oaks Antique Mall in California in early April, you probably would have seen a couple who looked like they’d time-traveled from the Renaissance. They were staring at a two-headed, taxidermied rodent with a cowboy hat. “How do you ethically source a two-headed rat?” asks Lance Shipp, reading a disclaimer above the dressed-up dead animals. “They can’t be real, right?” “It’s the 18th century, but we’re allowed to wear shoulder pads,” Buzz jokes. “It’s fine!” adds Shipp. “I don’t know how to feel about this,” says his partner, Michelle Buzz, looking at a two-headed rabbit wearing a ruffled clown collar just like the one she has on right now. (Buzz is also wearing powder-blue…

Billy Woods didn’t intend to make his latest solo album. Over zlauded MC tells me that he initially planned to work on something new with Elucid, his partner in the duo Armand Hammer. But scheduling conflicts guided him toward something different from that, or from past projects like 2023’s Maps (his concept album with producer Kenny Segal) and 2022’s Aethiopes (produced entirely by Preservation). The result was Golliwog — the latest chapter in an ever-growing catalog that’s made Woods a darling of underground-rap-heads. “Hallway was barely lit, air thick with dread/It’s a room full of record execs on the other end.…” “I knew it was my first multiple-producer product in a long time,” he says. “I knew that I had more connections than ever before. So, I tried to cast…

It’s a hot-as-fuck Los Angeles morning. Near 80 degrees at 8 a.m., and Stephen A. Smith is having half of a lightly jellied bagel. We’re on the border of a big-ass private park that abuts a 40-story black glass building rumored to house or have housed LeBron James’ business partner Maverick Carter, Demi Lovato, Addison Rae, Dixie D’Amelio, and sundry Qatari royalty. The structure feels too tall for the quaky City of Angels, and one can only hope it stays as unshakable as its most garrulous current resident, Stephen A. Smith. ● Because sports media has belatedly begun a messy process of reinvention, and Smith, 57, is flourishing. The Bronx-born journalist who made his bones covering the Philadelphia 76ers’ radical Allen Iverson era recently signed a five-year, $100 million contract…

It’s not hard to find James Gunn’s office on the Warner Bros. lot. A huge, glowing Superman “S” symbol beckons from an entrance wall, visible through a glass door from yards away. Gunn, 58, is in his third year as co-CEO of the company’s newly created DC Studios, sharing the title and office with Peter Safran, who handles the business side of the operation. Together, they’re creating a new superhero universe around some very old characters, aiming to finally make Superman and friends (and family, and flying pet) truly competitive with the currently shaky Marvel Cinematic Universe. ● Gunn is a refugee from that universe, after writing and directing his final MCU movie, 2022’s Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Superman, due July 11, is the first feature film set in…

It’s New Year’s Eve, and the roads that lead to Jamaica’s National Stadium are filled with food vendors manning their oil-drum grills. Some sell orange bandannas like the pair Vybz Kartel wore when he walked out of the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre five months earlier, on July 31, 2024. Jamaicans from across the island have taken Knutsford Express buses into Kingston, and foreigners have booked nearly all of the hotel rooms in town to see Freedom Street, Kartel’s first concert since 2011. Inside the open-air arena, which is also home to Jamaica’s soccer team and its annual independence ceremony, fans yell above the vuvuzelas. A little after 11 p.m., the house lights go down and Kartel rises up from beneath the stage wearing a gray pinstripe suit with gold…

“I play every scene as serious as I can.” What’s the worst part of success? Someone once said, “It’s terrible when people are talking about you, and it’s even worse when they’re not talking about you.” Do you have any acting heroes? I’ll go back to the old days, Forties, Fifties. I did very much like Spencer Tracy as a performer, because he was always so real. Without putting on false noses and strange accents and all this sort of shit — he was just always present and real. How have you tried to embody that in your work? If the audience believes the words coming out of your mouth, that’s good enough for me. You haven’t done a lot of comedy. What intrigued you about starring in a Naked…

ANGIE MARTOCCIO Senior Writer Angie Martoccio wasn’t scared to cold plunge with cover star Sabrina Carpenter. “I’ve done a lot of weirder shit,” she says. In the past, the senior writer forged knives with actor Martin Starr and played tennis in the rain with indie rocker Faye Webster. So cold plunging “was actually comforting” by comparison, she adds. Carpenter’s commitment to wellness impressed Martoccio, as did her deep-seated knowledge of music history. “She is a whiz with old discographies and careers of her heroes,” she says. An RS staffer since 2018, Martoccio has also written cover stories on boygenius, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish. DAVID LACHAPELLE Photographer Before shooting this issue’s cover photo, David LaChapelle had never thought to use the bathroom in his central Hollywood home studio for a…

As college students on the cusp of graduation, we face an uncertain future. Gazing into the abyss of postgraduate life, we can’t help but ask: What’s the fastest track to success? Med school plus residency would take eight years. Becoming a CEO, nine. Even the failed-actor-to-barista pipeline is six years. But there’s one job that’s available to every American. A job that you can get in one day, with no interview: the presidency. We know that the president technically needs to be 35 years of age. But to that we say: What does 22 plus 22 plus 22 plus 22 equal? Surely it’s over 35. Historically, the president has never been four separate people. But think about how much the president has to do on a daily basis: Shaking hands.…

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. By 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship,” says the 41-year-old education-nonprofit worker. Previously, he had used AI models for a coding camp he had quit without explanation. Then it seemed he was on his phone all of the time, asking his AI bot “philosophical questions,” Kat says, trying to train it “to help him get to ‘the truth.’ ” When the couple separated in August 2023, Kat blocked him on social media. But people kept reaching out about his strange and troubling posts, asking if he was in the throes of a mental crisis. When she finally got…

Eric Church has a story he wants to tell me. It’s mid-May, a month since the country superstar first sat down for what will become his Rolling Stone Interview, and a lot has happened in that time. For one thing: Bruce Springsteen heard Church’s new album, Evangeline vs. the Machine, an adventurous project that introduces orchestral and choral sounds to Church’s rebellious brand of country music. ● Calling from London, where he’s about to headline Royal Albert Hall, Church recounts a recent backstage visit with Springsteen in Manchester, England, just before he and the E Street Band kicked off their 2025 overseas tour. “He held out his hand, and goes, ‘I just finished listening to your record again, and it’s wonderful. It’s really creative, but the biggest thing is, it’s…

Suppose your idea of radio personality Charlamagne tha God comes from clips of the veteran host’s most absurd moments on his show, The Breakfast Club. Like, when he asked Magic Johnson his first thought after receiving his HIV diagnosis. Or when, during a segment with rapper and actor Safaree, he blurted out “Nah, that ain’t it” in response to the artist freestyling. You might expect the real-life Charlamagne, born Lenard Larry McKelvey in Charleston, South Carolina, to mirror the unfiltered provocateur listeners have tuned into for nearly 30 years. In person, he is no doubt an apostle of the Biggie Smalls lyric “Bite my tongue for no one.” Adorned in a T-shirt featuring the animated political satire The Boondocks, he’s at ease in the iHeartRadio studios in midtown Manhattan, more…

Meg Stalter was fighting in a hot tub. She had come to a water park in Wisconsin to relax between stops on her comedy tour, which was styled as a series of fake rallies for a rich, famous, and clueless person running for president. (I know this is a difficult political scenario to imagine, but please stay with me.) While Stalter soaked, she became enraged by a group of hot-tub dwellers who were not embodying what she considered to be the spirit of the aquatic center, and she began screaming back and forth with them. “Wow, you seem like a lot of fun,” Stalter yelled, informing them that there were three other sections of the park they could move to if they had a problem with this particular one. Then…

COUNTRY Last I saw Willie Nelson, on the Outlaw Music Festival tour, he gave well-earned solo space to son LUKAS NELSON, who just released his first solo album. It’s high time. Dude’s a lifelong utility player — rock solid on guitar and vocals with the family band, while Willie circles the beat, and a team player with frequent Neil Young backing crew Promise of the Real. He’s become a go-to duet partner, notably with fellow next-gen icon Sierra Ferrell. Ferrell’s cameo on Nelson’s new American Romance is “Friend in the End,” a song about a bond that can see us through darkness, until “the clouds blew south/And the rain thinned out/And the sky was all sunlight again.” It’s a timely metaphor, and a good example of country’s ability to mirror…

The Love Club I saw this [“Lorde: ‘I’m an Intense Bitch,’ ” June 2025] was written by Brittany Spanos and went, “Oh, thank God, this will be good and authentic reporting.” @2nnjenn_, via the internet Pop-Girl Whisperer Another Brittany Spanos x pop girl banger. @sakcore18, via the internet A Moment of Gratitude I just wanted to give positive feedback and say thank you so much to all of your staff and editors for being firm in reporting issues on the Trump administration and the negative impacts its actions could have on all of us. It’s been sad to see other media outlets give in to Trump and to refrain from critiquing him, and it has been amazing seeing your articles go into detail on what is currently happening and not…

It’s an early May afternoon in Washington, D.C., and as a group of demonstrators gather outside of the Capitol protesting cuts to Medicaid, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is in her congressional office, excitedly pulling bright pink, blue, and yellow yarns out of her purse. ● “I am knitting a cardigan; I call it my Fruity Pebble sweater,” says Ocasio-Cortez, holding the colorful jumble against her black dress. The congresswoman has recently started knitting as an alternative to doomscrolling. “This is a practice that forces me to slow down. In a moment like this, when there’s so much chaos, it is designed to basically just wear our nervous system down raw, so we are then overwhelmed, paralyzed, and have to accept whatever new development there is going on that day.” Ocasio-Cortez is…

Pull into the tree-cloaked driveway of Joan Baez’s home south of San Francisco and roam around her house and the first thing you’ll notice are oversize portraits she’s painted of Volodymyr Zelensky, Martin Luther King Jr., Anthony Fauci, Gandhi, and the late congressman John Lewis. For years, Baez would display two at a time in her front yard, but now they lean forlornly on a porch. ● “Just after Trump got elected [last fall], somebody tattled to somebody in the city, who says, ‘Does she have permits?’ ” Baez says. “It was clearly a snitchy kind of thing.” While one of her friends cut the paintings down, Baez went into the tree house in her front yard and blasted recordings by soprano opera singer Renée Fleming. “It was my way…

Givēon’s Next-Gen Old-School R&B Heartbreak Gurn the lights down low: This classic crooner offers a stunning depiction of love at the boiling point. By Mankaprr Conteh With his oaky baritone, Givēon often sounds like he teleported to us from the 1970s. In the rapid-fire internet age, his love songs — frequently lost-love songs — are unhurried. At his best, he’s like a barrel-aged cognac — warm, earthy, and mature. Still, when he rose to prominence at around the age of 25 about five years ago, in a landscape where more modern, edgy alternative R&B dominated, he allowed his steady, soulful production to ride on top of subtle rap drums; across his debut EP, Take Time, and album, Give or Take, he even dipped into cloudy MC cadences, too. Now, on…