Table of contents for March 2022 in Rolling Stone

ALBUM 1. Stromae’s ‘Multitude’ Laced with experimental sounds from all over the world, this LP marks the Belgian singer’s return to music after eight years. With tracks like “Santé,” a tribute to overlooked workers, it’s a lyrical collage inspired by everyday people. FILM 2. ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Michelle Yeoh plays a dry cleaner taking on an evil tax auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis) with the help of alternate-timeline versions of herself. From A24 and the Daniels, the directors of Lil Jon’s WTF video “Turn Down for What.” BOOK 3. ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure’ In tandem with an upcoming NYC exhibition of the same name, this book offers exclusive art, as well as anecdotes from the late artist’s family, reliving the influences of his early life with this intimate…

ON A WARM December day in her West Hollywood offices, actress, singer, dancer, producer, mogul, brand, and multi-multimillionaire Jennifer Lopez was trying not to say too much. “I’m trying not to say too much,” she says, verbatim, as she sits on a leather chesterfield wearing a serene expression, a loose ponytail, and a white sweatsuit that exposes several inches of midriff. “I’m really happy. I don’t want to say anything else.” It wasn’t always thus. For a brief and beautiful moment in time, saying too much was kind of Lopez’s thing. Hearken back to the late Nineties, when she was married to some waiter no one had ever heard of and would meet reporters in a bikini top by her Beverly Hills pool and let loose with things like:…

MAREN MORRIS FINDS A NEW ROAD The eclectic Nashville star pushes against her own brand on her third album By JONATHAN BERNSTEIN Maren Morris Humble Quest COLUMBIA NASHVILLE WHEN MAREN Morris released her 2018 pop breakthrough, “The Middle,” the song introduced one of her guiding philosophies with a simple question: “Why don’t you just meet me in the middle?” Ever since debuting with 2015’s soulful singalong “My Church,” Morris has carved out her space as Nashville’s most thoughtful hitmaker, despite steering her career in seemingly unexpected directions: She’s the only pop singer who could just as credibly appear with Zedd at a Vegas nightclub and perform at the Newport Folk Festival alongside the Highwomen, her singer-songwriter supergroup. All the while, Morris has found a reliable home as a country-music…

THE TWO ATLANTA rappers in Earthgang know their music has a tendency to cover a lot of ground. So this year, Olu (a.k.a. Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (born Eian Parker) — the duo who have spent the past few years reinventing Southern rap at a pace as dizzying as it’s been dazzling — decided to give listeners a road map to their next project. It started with shooting a sequence of five music videos to get across the sounds and themes of their second major-label album, Ghetto Gods. “We’re so creative, and we have so many great ideas and so many great stories to tell,” Olu, 32, explains over Zoom. “We feel like it would be to our betterment that we put it in forms where people are able…

DANI MILLER, the Rainbow Brite singer of riotous punk group Surfbort, doesn’t skateboard much anymore. Growing up in California, she and her friends would swipe extra wood from construction sites to build ramps, but these days Miller, 27, mostly uses her board for transport. “I can’t really do any tricks,” she admits. Still, the singer and sometime Gucci Beauty model is reconnecting with the sport in a new video, “Lot Lizard 93” — directed by and co-starring Olympian skater Lizzie Armanto. “It was a song about finding myself,” says Miller. “She took that and she came up with little snippets of my life.” In the video, Armanto briefly takes on Miller’s persona so “Dani” can hit a half-pipe — ending in a fall that takes Miller back on her…

CHARLI XCX has long been one of pop’s most galaxy-brained writers and performers, but she’s ready for what she calls her “main pop-girl moment.” With her new album, Crash, she presents a brilliant case: It’s an airtight pop project full of top-notch hooks that also functions as a quick tour through the past couple of decades of the genre. Like everything the artist does, Crash is, first and foremost, fun. “I think the people who know me and my work know that 50 percent of the time I’m entirely serious, and the other 50 percent of the time I’m a troll,” she says, calling from the English countryside. Crash follows 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now, an album she made under a tight deadline in Covid lockdown. She’s immortalized that…

Petrona Martinez THE GUARDIAN BY JULYSSA LOPEZ Bullerengue — the percussive, female-led folk tradition developed in Black Caribbean communities — was passed down to the legendary Petrona Martinez like a sacred family heirloom. Growing up in Colombia in the 1940s, she’d sit with her grandmother and great-grandmother in a rueda, or circle, where the women would take turns singing call-and-response melodies. The sounds came to Martinez as naturally as breathing. “That’s where the artistic vein formed,” says her daughter, Joselina Llerena. Years later, Martinez settled in the region of Palenquito. She made a living by gathering and selling sand — intense, arduous work that she would lighten on the weekends by taking her children to a nearby river, where she would do the washing and sing the songs she…

Why do you think this latest Spider-Man movie has been so insanely popular? It’s a cathartic film because there’s so much about healing in it. And it’s caught this moment in time: How can we reweave ourselves? I guess that was a spider pun, not even intended [laughs]. But I guess that is the essence of it — taking those kinds of franchises from a mindset of “us and them” to a concept of healing. That’s all super subliminal, but I do think that’s resonating. The biggest secret in the lead-up to the movie was the return of Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield. How hard was it to keep quiet? It’s an exercise in boundaries, which I welcome. Because you really have to say to people, “I really can’t…

TUPAC SHAKUR WAS more than just one of the most influential rappers of the Nineties. He was also a poet and activist who became one of his era’s most revolutionary voices. The new exhibit Tupac Shakur: Wake Me When I’m Free showcases those aspects of his life in a stunning, immersive display of handwritten poems, song lyrics, previously unseen photographs, and more. “Hopefully, people are feeling that they have a one-on-one experience with Tupac as they go through this, and they walk away feeling a lot more inspired,” says Jeremy Hodges, the exhibit’s creative director. “But more importantly, I want them to love this man for who he was and what he was fighting for.” TUPAC SHAKUR: WAKE ME WHEN I’M FREE is open now at L.A. Live in…

Cher by Saweetie Superstar-in-the-making Saweetie met Cher while doing a campaign for MAC Cosmetics. But the two artists’ connection — and Cher’s influence on Saweetie — goes much deeper. What I love about Cher is that she doesn’t give a fuck! In a world where people are constantly trying to tell women how to look, what to eat, what to wear, and how smart they can be, what you see with Cher is what you get. The women who raised me have that same demeanor, and it’s infectious. My first encounter with Cher was as a toddler, cleaning with my lola [“grandmother” in the Filipino language]. “Believe” had just come out and my grandmother, who used to babysit me, would have Cher blasting through the speakers as she swept…

AMEENAH SAWWAN WAS up late on Aug. 21, 2013, scrolling through Facebook on her phone, when she saw the first report that a town not far from hers had been hit by a chemical attack. She watched footage from Eastern Ghouta, then saw another post that said that her hometown, Moadamiyat al-Sham, had been hit as well. She started tapping out a reply in the comments: “This is wrong. This is fake news. I’m in Moadamiyat and we were not hit by chemicals.” Then she started hearing screams. Sawwan and her family — 12 of them were living together at the time — ran outside, but shortly after they did, mortar shells began raining down. They didn’t know where to go next. “It felt like the sky was falling,”…