Table of contents for August 25, 2016 in Rolling Stone

Two years ago, Billie Joe Armstrong was driving into Manhattan when he came across a throng of protesters. Outraged by a grand jury’s decision not to indict a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer for the killing of Michael Brown, they filled the streets and backed up traffic for miles. Armstrong was moved. “I got out of my car and marched with the people,” he says. “It was a trip to see people rebel against the old order.” The experience inspired the title track of Green Day’s new album, Revolution Radio (due October 7th), a collection of songs about the chaotic state of America in 2016. It’s not a political concept album like American Idiot – there are also more-personal songs like “Ordinary World,” a sweet ballad that ends the album. But…

Brent Cobb jumps from county jail to country radio When Brent Cobb was five, he saw songwriting up close while visiting family in Cleveland. “It was the first time I’d ever seen snow,” says the Georgia-raised singer. “My daddy and my mama’s brother were writing a song called ‘Country Bound.’ It was my favorite song. They’d play it every year over the holidays.” Their family’s living-room hit – his father was a “weekend warrior” with a country band – inspired Cobb’s current career as an A-list Nashville songwriter with clients including Miranda Lambert and Luke Bryan. Now, “Country Bound” is a standout on what promises to be Cobb’s breakout LP as a singer-songwriter. “It came full circle,” says Cobb, 30, with a laugh. Due in October, Shine on Rainy Day…

Paul mccartney strums an acoustic guitar on a sofa in his London office, humming to himself as he tries to recall a melody from his adolescence – one of the first, never-recorded songs he wrote with his teenage friend John Lennon, on their way to starting the Beatles in Liverpool. “It was like . . .” McCartney says, then hits a rockabilly rhythm on his guitar and sings in a familiar, robust voice: “They said our love was just fun/The day that our friendship begun/There’s no blue moon that I can see/There’s never been in history/Because our love was just fun.” “‘Just Fun,’” McCartney says, announcing the title proudly. “I had a little school-exercise book where I wrote those lyrics down. And in the top right-hand corner of the page,…

Florida Georgia Line Dig Your Roots Big Machine HHH <div class="thin-border"></div> The Cadillac Three Bury Me in My Boots Big Machine HHH <div class="thin-border"></div> Jake Owen American Love RCA Nashville HHH ½ <div class="thin-border"></div> Whither the bro? After a half-decade of radio dominance, country music’s party-hearty dudes are loosening their grip on Nashville. Blame (or thank) the rise of tough, smart female stars like Miranda Lambert, Brandy Clark and Maren Morris. Or call it a cyclical thing: Eventually, every rager stalls out in a puddle of stale backwash. In any case, turn on country radio in 2016 and you’ll hear bros toning down the talk of trucks and Daisy Dukes, and freshening up their sounds. Exhibit A is the third album by Florida Georgia Line.…

“Janine”Space Oddity 1969 Young folkie Bowie tries to woo a beatnik lass. This ends with a line Paul Westerberg could have written: “Take your glasses off and don’t act so sincere.” “Holy Holy” Non-LP single 1971 A glam ode to dazed gnostic egomania. He cut it twice – the keeper is the lean-and-mean second version, from 1974 with the Spiders From Mars. “See Emily Play”Pin Ups 1973 A tribute to one of his early heroes, Pink Floyd’s doomed Syd Barrett. It turned Barrett’s jauntiest tune into an orchestral psychic meltdown. “Growing Up and I’m Fine” Demo 1973 He donated this perfect piece of girl-group-style pop to Mick Ronson to launch his solo career, which sadly bombed. “Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)”Diamond Dogs 1974 A nine-minute suite with an invitation no one…

1. Father John Misty “Real Love Baby” Indie-folk hero Father John Misty usually undercuts his sensitive-Seventies tunefulness with dark irony. Not this time. The achingly lovely “Real Love Baby” might be his prettiest song, and it’s definitely his sweetest. 2. Green Day “Bang Bang” Green Day’s first studio album in four long years is out in October, and its first single is a harrowing punk rager, sung from the perspective of a mass shooter drunk on twisted fame. They’ve never channeled American angst so terrifyingly. 3. Noname “Sunny Duet” Chicago rapper-poet and Chance the Rapper pal Noname kicks some lithe, fluttery R&B with a summer-stoop vibe. It’s like vintage Erykah Badu at her most optimistically chill. 4. Radiohead “The National Anthem” (live) A Kid A classic thrown down on the…

When chris cornell and three future members of Pearl Jam came together in 1990 to record Temple of the Dog’s one and only album, they never could have imagined playing the songs in arenas a quartercentury later – it was merely a one-off tribute LP in honor of a friend, Andy Wood of the Seattle band Mother Love Bone, who had just died of a heroin overdose. Despite producing an MTV hit, “Hunger Strike,” the album remained a grunge footnote. So, last year, when the bandmates began talking about reuniting for their first-ever tour, they weren’t sure how it would be received. “We were anxious about what size venues we could play,” says bassist Jeff Ament. “We’ve never toured. We’re essentially a baby band.” Temple of the Dog decided to…

‘My whole life, even now, I’m attracted to mayhem,” Todd Phillips is saying, feet resting on a spotless coffee table inside his spotless office on the Warner Bros. film-studio lot in Burbank, him having turned this lifelong attraction into so much money you can’t believe it. Take the three Hangover movies, from 2009 to 2013, all of which Phillips directed and two of which he co-wrote. Altogether, they’ve raked in $1.4 billion, with lunacy galore, chain-smoking monkeys, unexpected face tattoos, roofie-puffed marshmallows and so forth, ad nauseam. Crazy stuff, none of which would have happened had Phillips not allowed his $8 million paycheck for the first installment to be cut to exactly $0.00 (“Yeah, zero dollars,” he says) to get it made at a price the studio would approve. He’d…

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I’m interested in why I always seem to press the button,” says M.I.A. “Everyone knows that pressing buttons is bad. You press a button and you get punished.” It’s a sparkling July morning, and she’s drinking coffee in London’s Hyde Park, dressed in a forest-green sweater dress and matching dark-green shades. It happens to be her 41st birthday, but M.I.A., who was born Mathangi Arulpragasam but goes by Maya, says she doesn’t care about birthdays. Instead, what’s on her mind is her seemingly endless ability to stir up trouble. In recent years, M.I.A. has managed to piss off both the NFL (which sued her for $16.6 million for flipping the bird as Madonna’s guest at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show; the case was settled for an undisclosed amount) and…

Gucci Mane Everybody Looking Atlantic HHH ½ For the past decade, Gucci Mane has been the wild card of Atlanta trap rap – growling sing-song, stream-of-consciousness lines like “Gucci Mane crazy I might pull up on a zebra/Land on top a eagle” over spacious synth-heavy beats on dozens of mixtapes and albums. Where peers like T.I. and Young Jeezy can be self-serious, Gucci is playful, serving as Southern hip-hop’s absurdist id and remaking the scene in his own fun-house image. Everybody Looking, Gucci’s ninth album and first after nearly three years in federal prison, is a compelling left turn, deeper and more mature-sounding. This should be a victory lap. But even the flirtatious “Gucci Please” feels claustrophobic. In the past, his gruff, cloudy voice and offkilter imagery mirrored…

Hell or High Water Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges Directed by David Mackenzie HHH ½ chris pine proves he can act. Ben Foster, well, he always could. And Jeff Bridges shows them both new tricks. How’s that for three riveting reasons to pony up for Hell or High Water? Hot damn, this one’s a goodie, a mesmerizing modern-day Western that strikes with the coiled intensity of a rattlesnake. Set in West Texas, this hell-raiser takes surprising turns we don’t see coming. Tightly directed by David Mackenzie, from a dynamite script by Sicario’s Taylor Sheridan, the film starts with a series of bank holdups. Two brothers in masks: Toby (Pine) is focused; Tanner (Foster), a recent parolee, is a loose cannon. The crooks are bankers out to grab the family…

On weekdays around lunchtime, you can sometimes find Sharon Jones at the Black Cat Cafe and Bakery in Sharon Springs, New York, a small town about an hour west of Albany. On this sleepy Tuesday, she greets a handful of customers by name with hugs, before ordering half of a Cuban sandwich and a glass of water with honey. Then the alarm on her phone sounds off. “Medicine time,” she says, opening an app that keeps track of the more than nine medications she takes around the clock, including oxycodone, tizanidine and fentanyl. “Without these,” she says, “I would be doubled over in pain.” Jones first arrived in Sharon Springs in 2013, at what should have been a triumphant moment. After decades in obscurity – in which she worked security at…

GLOBE-TROTTER Mitski Miyawaki DANIEL DORSA For mitski, american pop culture has been a lifelong infatuation, for better and worse. The 25-year-old singer – whose new album, Puberty 2, stands as one of 2016’s rawest and most assured rock LPs–was born in Japan and grew up shuttling around the world: China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Turkey, numerous stops in between. She made uneasy peace with this unmoored life by clutching certain American exports. “I created this romanticized America in my head,” she recalls, although “the only access I had to America was The Simpsons, Britney Spears, ’NSync and teen movies: We had a tape of The Breakfast Club I watched religiously.” When she finally enrolled in an American high school, she discovered the gap between fantasy and reality. “I remember thinking…

‘It can look a bit strange – ‘Who’s this old guy in a school suit?’ ” says AC/DC guitarist Angus Young, 61. “Somebody once commented, ‘From a distance, he looks quite youthful.’ It’s only when you get up close that you can see the weathered look.” That wear and tear are real for Young as he leads AC/DC through their toughest and possibly final world tour, which ends September 20th in Philadelphia. But he speaks candidly and as cheerfully as possible about the severe hearing problems that recently forced singer Brian Johnson to retire from touring; the immediate offer to fill in from Guns N’ Roses vocalist Axl Rose; bassist Cliff Williams’ recent announcement that this tour would be his last; and the current health of ex-guitarist and Angus’ older…

The political spectacle of the past year has turned the 2016 election into a chasm with profound historical significance. By nominating Donald Trump, the Republican Party has become the vehicle for an authoritarian, nativist nationalism that until now lurked at the fringes of modern American politics. Hillary Clinton has launched a mainstream progressive campaign, in an updated Democratic tradition that stretches back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. This is the choice Americans face – between alternatives as starkly opposed to each other as in any election in our history, excepting the one in 1860, which led to the Civil War. This year’s political conventions substantively and symbolically revealed the fate of both parties in this crucial election year. The Democratic delegates in Philadelphia looked as culturally polyglot as the party’s…

The murder-for-hire deal went down inside the Edison Diner, a small red-brick eatery off Route 1 in New Jersey, on September 13th, 2009. Joe Passalaqua, a dark-haired 54-year-old with arms as thick as his Long Island accent, scribbled “$30,000” on a piece of paper and slipped it across the table to Chris Kontos, a Greek-American who owned strip clubs and restaurants throughout the state. “Thirty for the three,” Passalaqua said. “I need cash, half upfront.” He also asked Kontos to supply the weapon, “a .357 or a .40-caliber, has to be a revolver. And if you can, get hollow-points.” When Kontos asked how soon the hit could be done, Passalaqua told him, “Within two weeks, maybe sooner.” Six months earlier, on St. Patrick’s Day, two masked men with guns…

Circa 1973 CHRIS WALTER/WIREIMAGE <div class="thick-border"></div> MUST HAVES <div class="thin-border"></div> Hunky Dory 1971 Planet Earth, meet David Bowie. One of him, anyway – even in 1971, the former David Jones had already burned through a few pop disguises, posing as a folkie hippie songbird or a London mod pinup boy. He scored a novelty hit in the summer of 1969, “Space Oddity.” But Hunky Dory was the album where he staked his claim as the most altered ego in rock & roll, billing himself as “The Actor” on the back cover while stretching out as a singer, songwriter and all-around mind-freaker. Bowie croons surreal ballads such as “Life on Mars?” and “Quicksand” like a cosmic theater queen. He also steals guitar flash from the Velvet Underground in “Queen Bitch.” Led…

Sausage Party Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig Directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon YOU LEAVE THE FUCKED-UP fun house of Sausage Party thinking: Did I see this movie or hallucinate it? I mean that as high praise. Seth Rogen, who wrote the script with Evan Goldberg, Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, has dreamed for years of dishing out an Rrated cartoon treat that would tackle the crisis in the Middle East, the nonexistence of God and the sex lives of supermarket products. He does it all in Sausage Party, as well as voicing Frank, a furter who longs to pull out of his prophylactic packaging and slip into a bun named Brenda (Kristen Wiig). Rogen is a live-wire satirist who’s probably taken on too much. But you gotta love…

You were a teenager in Berkeley during the Beat era. What are your memories of that time? In high school, we would go over to San Francisco and hang out at [the bookstore] City Lights and the Co-Existence Bagel Shop. We never met any of the great Beats. They were just in the air. The closest I ever came was a poetry reading in ’64 or ’65 with Lew Welch, Gary Snyder and four or five others. My favorite memory was Lew Welch’s line in one of his poems. He was describing looking in the mirror in the morning: “I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to shave you anyway.” Who were your heroes then? [The composer] Charles Ives and John Coltrane. The music of Ives contains the…