Table of contents for July 2020 in Rolling Stone

How has social distancing affected your mood? I’m always kind of positive, so that isn’t a struggle for me at all. I think that’s DNA, upbringing, humor, perspective. I had early losses in my life; I lost my brother when I was 12, my mother at 17, and my father at 20. You either go up or down from those. And if you go up, you’re empowered for the rest of your life. After spending so much time on the road with Steve Martin, on your joint comedy tours, what advice do you have for people in closer quarters than usual? Steve and I don’t get sick of each other. We’re very similar in many ways. We treat each performance as if this is our last. And remember, when…

“This didn’t feel like I was reading an article. It felt like I was actually talking to Bad Bunny. Fabulous job!”—Cristal, via Twitter Bad Bunny in Lockdown Reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, appears on our June cover from his rented home in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he has isolated himself during the pandemic. When assistant editor Suzy Exposito began reporting this story in early March, she could not have predicted that traditional interviews would be replaced by Zoom sessions, FaceTime calls, and playlist swaps. Despite the physical distance, the result [“Bad Bunny in Captivity,” RS 1340] is an intimate look at the personal and political influences shaping Bad Bunny’s career, which inspired impassioned responses from readers. ”This is a groundbreaking moment…

I was a Bernie supporter like you, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to vote for Biden. I live in a swing state, but I just disagree with him on too many issues, and I want to write in a candidate. Would I be wrong to do that? —Maureen Kadish, MI I voted for Bernie too. I think he would have been a much better candidate. That’s over. Ask Bernie. It’s done. We have to get this madman out of the office, and the guy who’s going to do it is Biden. He’s imperfect, and I understand that. But he’s 1,000 times better than this sick person who is screwing our country. So get a grip. Put your Bernie to bed. Not only is our country…

AS WITH THE rest of humanity, Alanis Morissette’s big plans for 2020 haven’t quite worked out. With the hit musical of Jagged Little Pill running strong on Broadway as the year began, she was going to release her first album in eight years, the wrenching Such Pretty Forks in the Road, in May and then tour for the 25th anniversary of her debut. The new album is still coming out — now on July 31st — but the rest of it has evaporated. “It’s the classic stages of grief,” says Morissette. As for the nearly decade-long wait between studio albums, there’s an all-too-simple explanation, she adds with a laugh: “I think it’s straight-up having three children.” The introspection of your new album feels well-suited to the times. What was…

MIDWAY THROUGH RUN THE JEWELS’ stellar new album, RTJ4, Atlanta’s own Killer Mike rhymes a verse that demands your attention: And every day on the evening news they feed you fear for free And you so numb you watch the cops choke out a man like me And ’til my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, “I can’t breathe,” And you sit there in house on couch and watch it on TV The most you give’s a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy Those lyrics, from “Walking in the Snow,” were recorded before George Floyd was killed, but they feel like a perfect encapsulation of the stakes of the moment — a warning to white people about how apathy to cops’ behavior and black plight will eventually…

ON THE SAME MAY DAY that the World Health Organization made the announcement that one of the many effects of the COVID-19 pandemic would be a worldwide crisis in mental health, I found my own mental stability challenged by a photo on Twitter. The picture heralded France’s return to school, and depicts a play yard covered with large, spaced-out, chalk-drawn squares in each of which is deposited one tiny French child. A girl sticks her toes out of her box. A cross-legged boy stares at the ground. In their pigtails and floral tops and Velcro sneakers, they are “playing” all alone, together. ¶ It’s a vision that is imponderably sad, for all the obvious reasons. And it’s a distillation of what, essentially, we’ve all been through. Though there are…

HOT RAPPER RICO NASTY Hip-Hop’s New Lady of Rage Rico Nasty is staying up for days at a time and trying to make her next album the new ‘Yeezus’ CONFINED TO her home during quarantine, Rico Nasty began playing a new game: seeing how long she can stay awake. Her record, as of late May, was six days. “On the third day, normally, you get really bitchy,” says the rapper, 23. “Once your mind is exhausted to that point, you actually get to your most creative point because you have no boundaries. Your mind isn’t telling you to stop.” In Rico’s short career, she’s made a habit of seeking out her creative boundaries, then dismantling them. Rico is from Maryland, but her music isn’t tied to any specific geographic…

‘I DON’T KNOW if I’m giving too much away right now, but fuck it,” says Este Haim. “We made puzzles out of our record!” Este, 34 — the eldest Haim sister and the only one who’s turned on her camera for this Zoom call — holds up a laptop-size jigsaw puzzle of the cover art of Women in Music Pt. III, the San Fernando Valley, California, trio’s third album. The image, shot by their friend Paul Thomas Anderson, shows off their cheeky sense of humor: The sisters stare blankly out from behind the counter at Canter’s, their childhood deli, unfazed by the comically large salami hanging behind them. Above their heads, the ticket dispenser reads NOW SERVING 69. (Nice.) Haim were set to promote Women in Music Pt. III…

BUDDY GUY I HAVEN’T PICKED up the guitar since they canceled me in Arizona. I was born on a farm down in Louisiana, and this is a flashback, because this time of year we were sharecropping in the fields all day. There wasn’t no one near you to talk to you, just mules and horses. So I grew up distancing. But this is the longest I’ve been home in 50 years, maybe a little longer — even before I got the chance to make a living playing music, I was driving a tow truck. I want to get back out there. People are so mad at the world, but when I play music, I see them smiling. My next birthday, I’ll be 84, so when you get up to…

THE PEOPLE PICTURED HERE are just a fraction of those killed over the past decade by officers who were sworn to protect them. Some are well-known names: Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy gunned down in Cleveland for playing with a toy gun at a park. Philando Castile, the school-lunch supervisor who was shot in the heart by a policeman who pulled him over because his “wide-set nose” resembled that of a robbery suspect. Other cases never made it into the national conversation, like Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother of four who was shot by Seattle police in 2017 after she reported a burglary in her home. In each case here, and in so many others, the officers were either not charged or never convicted of any crime.…

IN THE WEEK after the protests began, I rode my bike down to Harlem. This was a few days before the deranged commander in chief tweeted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” in response to the dissent that had come, like those roosting chickens, to his front door. After a day of incendiary communiqués, he retired to the White House bunker from which he sent still more tweets threatening to set dogs on black protesters, Bull Connor-style. In the early days of the unrest, I gorged myself on CNN, The New York Times, Twitter, TikTok. At first, the focus was the murder. Then, in the blink of an eye, the coverage wasn’t about George Floyd anymore. It was about America’s sinister perception of black people as looters and…

HE CAME DOWN at the same time every day. At 11 a.m., the elevator in the lobby of the Hilton in downtown Nashville would open to reveal Little Richard, looking stage-ready — bouffant wig, sunglasses, full makeup, sequined jacket, sparkling boots — and being pushed in a wheelchair by his son, Danny. As the pair made their way across the floor to their gold Cadillac Escalade waiting out front, tourists would approach Richard, and he would hand them a pocket-size religious book with his photo inside. Occasionally, he would ask Danny to wheel him over to the piano, where he would play a few notes of a blues song or one of his own. When the crowd started getting too big or the phones started coming out, he would…

RETURN TO DESOLATION ROW Dylan explores cosmic American mysteries on an album that feels stunningly timely Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways COLUMBIA ANOTHER APOCALYPSE — another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterpiece for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in eight years, and it’s an absolute classic — it has the bleak majesty of latter-day Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even deeper into cosmic American mysteries. You can hear all the rolling thunder in his 79-year-old voice as he sings…