Tabla de contenidos para July/August 2024 en Rolling Stone

RANDOM NOTES Sabrina Carpenter has lots more in store after getting “that’s that me espresso” lodged in our brains (p.11). Shaboozey tells us how he scored a summer hit with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and Baby Reindeer has the internet in shambles (p.13). Xavi talks about coming back from a near-fatal car crash (p.14). Questlove gives us a hip-hop history lesson (p.16). Ani DiFranco breaks down her most iconic songs (p.20). The Acolyte’s Leslye Headland taps into the Force (p.26).Normani is back and ready to bare her soul (p.28). “I’m such a girl’s girl. It’s why I always wanted to be in a group. I just love women so much.”NORMANI NATIONAL AFFAIRS Tim Dunn is the right wing’s Christian kingpin (p.31). Trump is ready to make Georgia into an…

On a warm day in July of last year, Sabrina Carpenter woke up in a tiny village south of Paris and headed to a crêperie, which happened to be the only restaurant in town. The singer had just finished some tour dates and was spending a bit of downtime exploring France. Like any self-respecting European cafe, this crêperie, Carpenter noticed, served espresso. Suddenly, an idea for a song hit her — one that would grow into this year’s likely song of the summer. Released in April, “Espresso” is a preposterously catchy pop jam full of cheeky quotables, including a chorus built around the unlikely phrase “that’s that me espresso.” Carpenter has had the song stuck in her head since France; these days, it’s probably stuck in yours. “I decided…

In 2022, right after he signed to Interscope, Mexican American singer Xavi was feeling on top of the world. He was 17 years old and his songs were getting some buzz, so to celebrate, he bought a Dodge SRT with his label advance. He’d been speeding down a local small road in California when he suddenly lost control of the wheel and crashed, fracturing his skull and falling into a coma for days. Xavi spent months in the hospital. “It’s a miracle to be here, man,” he says now, looking down at his hands. In addition to facial-reconstruction surgery, he had to heal from extensive injuries. A TikTok video he shared from that time shows him lying in a hospital bed, battered and struggling to sing with bandages all…

Leslye Headland is not a tentative person. She pauses before speaking, but not because she’s waffling about what to say. More because she’s a writer and how is almost as important as what she says, and also because we’re talking about The Acolyte, her upcoming TV show set in the Star Wars universe during the High Republic (for the non-saber-pilled among us, that’s about 100 years before The Phantom Menace, the beginning of what’s referred to as the Skywalker Saga, when Sith happens). She is the showrunner, director, and writer (not to mention a cast member’s wife) for the anticipated series, which is a sort of thriller-mystery tracking an ongoing Jedi murder spree. When she pauses, it’s with the understanding there may be imperial probe droids hidden nearby if…

As he took the stage at the BET Awards in June 2022 to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, Sean “Diddy” Combs was elated. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!” he bellowed, punctuating his words with triumphant jumps. The adoring crowd — who gave him a sustained standing ovation — included his mother and children, longtime friends, and industry peers Kanye West, Janelle Monáe, Babyface, and Lil Wayne. After three decades of relentless hustling that took him from hungry teen intern to producer, label impresario, respected fashion designer, and household name, Diddy had seemingly reached the apotheosis of his career. He closed his eyes and repeatedly thanked God. He got down on one knee and praised his mother. He name-checked a laundry list of people who’d mentored and…

Behind a heavy steel door, inside the Los Angeles headquarters of the sixth-largest company in the world, television’s most terrifying villain is wincing and shifting in his chair. His ass hurts. During a trip to Mexico last week, Antony Starr, the New Zealand-born actor who plays Homelander on Prime’s The Boys, sat on a box that turned out to be a thin piece of cardboard covering a portable generator. “The handle went flush up my backside onto my tailbone,” he says, adjusting his position again. “So I’m doing a lot of angled cheek sitting.” He laughs. “Way more than you needed to know.” Starr tends to get at least mildly offended when people assume he’s anything like his evil-Superman character, a smiling, volatile sadist with unlimited power, profound emotional…

WHO’S AFRAID OF ‘WHITE BOY SUMMER’? The hip-hop world is contending with a new generation of viral white rappers. A year after hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, and only a few weeks after Kendrick Lamar’s feud with Drake culminated in a chart-topping track where he calls Drake a “colonizer,” the hottest topic on the rap internet was a white kid from St. Louis rapping over vintage-sounding Atlanta rap beats. Ian, whose debut mixtape, Valedictorian, caps off a run of viral hits that has quickly caught the attention and ire of rap fans online, leans heavily into the dissonance between his look and his sound. In the video for his From the Block performance, he sits at a dinner table in a nice-looking suburban home, rapping into the mic as his quintessentially…

MARK LEEDS Creative Designer Something here feels a little different … right? That’s all thanks to the brains behind our new redesign. The forward-thinking creative studio FOOD helped transform the look, feel, and flow of these pages with the help of C-LL-CT-V-LY creative designer Mark Leeds. Giving the magazine a visual look that matched the words inside it was a priority. Together with the help of type designer Christian Schwartz, they aimed to “capture that enthusiasm, exuberance, and the depth of knowledge that exists in Rolling Stone,” Leeds says. With a fresh, exciting layout for our opening pages, an expanded lineup of long-form features, dynamic design choices throughout the issue, and a bold, stylish typeface, it’s a whole new read. Adds Leeds, “Everything’s a bit larger, a little bit…

When a publisher suggested that Questlove write a book about the history of hip-hop, he was reticent at first. Not because of any fear of writing — the Roots drummer is an accomplished author, with a back catalog that includes an acclaimed 2013 memoir, along with volumes like 2021’s Music Is History. The problem? He was unsure of where he fits into the landscape of hip-hop in his mid-fifties. “This was once my girlfriend,” he says of the genre he grew up loving. “I guess we’re still married, but I don’t know how I feel about her right now. I was a little worried to see if I had any real substantial opinions about hip-hop post-2015.” After wrestling with those doubts, he ended up writing Hip-Hop Is History, out…

Twitter lead client partner Alex Martinez had already gone on a handful of dates with Bobby Harr when, over drinks at a cute French restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Martinez found himself venting about Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform. Musk’s attitude toward disinformation concerned him. “People don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out correct things that are supposed to be out in the public,” he told Harr. And Martinez found Musk himself off-putting. “You’re literally special needs,” Martinez said to an imaginary Musk. The next week, Martinez was eating alone at a different restaurant when Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe slid into his booth and began to read those exact words back to him. It…

SHAKIRA We’re heading to Dunkin’ — and we’re taking Shakira’s purple Lamborghini.● It’s an airless, parched afternoon in Miami, and we’ve just left the Sony Music offices, where Shakira took a bunch of calls and meetings. Now, she’s got some free time before she has to pick up her kids at school, so we’re in the Lambo — easily the flashiest car Shakira’s ever owned: “There’s nothing subtle or chic about it,” she chirps happily. The interiors are tricked out in Hulk-bright neon green because it’s a color one of her sons liked. Sometimes, if she’s running errands with them, she relies on her modest Toyota Sienna. But often, she’s out in this unapologetic spectacle of a ride, zooming down the street like she’s doing now, her security guard…

Alex Neville was one of those boys who was always in costume, wearing his obsessions on his sleeve. At three, he went around dressed as a mummy, earnestly explaining the embalming process to children in Aliso Viejo, a town in Orange County, California. At seven, he was SoCal’s shortest Civil War junkie, dragging his father to local reenactments of the Battle of Gettysburg. It was at one of those events that he met his great hero: a tall, bearded schnook playing Abe Lincoln. “Alex was speechless when he shook ‘Abe’s’ hand,” says his father, Aaron Neville. “For him, it was like meeting Beyoncé!” But for all his little-professor chi, Alex was a boy’s boy through and through. He ran with his wolf pack of free-range kids from kindergarten on.…

EDITOR’S NOTE What are we trying to do here? Redesigning a print magazine in 2024 might seem like a strange endeavor with tens of millions of stories, videos, songs, and various other large and small distractions competing for your attention each day. But that’s precisely why we think it’s so vital to deliver our award-winning journalism, photography, and design in the form that best allows you to slow down and savor the experience of Rolling Stone. The magazine you hold in your hands got its name from the Muddy Waters song “Rollin’ Stone,” itself inspired by the old saying “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” This is as true now as it was in 1967, when RS was founded on the idea that the Beatles should be covered by…

Tim Dunn stands on the stage of his Midland, Texas, church with a wry smile on his face. He’s preparing to preach about his favorite subjects: Jesus and Peter Parker. Dunn is a fracking magnate who is also a member of the “pulpit team” at Midland Bible Church, a Rapture-forward congregation that worships in a modern building a stone’s throw from Dunn’s mansion on the north edge of town — where dense suburbs yield to a scrub desert of greasewood and mesquite, pockmarked by the seesawing derricks of the West Texas oil patch. Tall and box-shouldered with a swoop of silver hair, and a disarming drawl, Dunn is dressed in a blue gingham shirt, no tie, and slacks. He presents as a mild-mannered billionaire. But Dunn’s message is fierce.…

Over the past two decades, the Supreme Court has been captured by dark-money interests, and justices are reshaping our laws and society according to their reactionary, far-right vision. It’s a problem that would only be compounded with a second Trump administration pursuing an extreme, right-wing policy agenda. Donald Trump’s judicial adviser, Leonard Leo, who helped select three Supreme Court justices, can take pride in his work. His network, which received a historic $1.6 billion infusion, spent millions to confirm those justices, and works to influence both the justices’ caseload and their decisions. Leo recently marveled at his success — and the opportunity at hand. “They’re handpicking these cases to advance the program they’ve been implementing.”LISA GRAVES “We have a great Overton window in the next couple of decades to…

One afternoon in late April, Vice President Kamala Harris climbed into a large black car parked in the garage of the CBS Broadcast Center on New York’s West 57th Street and sat bolt-upright in the leather seat. She’d just finished taping an episode of The Drew Barrymore Show — remaining magnanimous as Barrymore had pawed at Harris’ burgundy blazer and pleaded with her to be the country’s “Momala” — and was shortly on her way to a dinner in the GM Building that software and investment executive Charles Phillips had arranged in order for Black finance leaders to share their advice for the campaign (“We’ve got a lot to fight, but this is a fight we can win,” she’d assured those assembled at one end of a sleek room…

Omar Apollo Is the Sad Alt-R&B Genius We Need His 2022 debut, Ivory, established the artist as a star on the rise. On his second album, he delivers another introspective gem At the midpoint of his second studio album, God Said No, Omar Apollo’s vocals tumble out in Spanish for the first and only time on the record. “Cantando en otro lenguaje pa que no me entiendes,” the Mexican American musician sings over featherlight harmonies and lulling violins on “Empty.” On his 2022 debut, Ivory, Apollo used the language as a nod to his heritage, a reflection of who he is and where he comes from. But here, it’s a shield, translating to: “[I’m] singing in another language so you don’t understand me.” In the safety of that space,…

“It’s harder to find the avant-garde.” What are the most important rules that you live by? Well, I can’t pin it down. Some of it is because I avoid them. I look at other people, and I enjoy watching other people dodge them. So I’m a dodger. But when you’re 80 years old, you have a ton of them. How about rules for songwriting? I’m always looking for something different from music that maybe doesn’t work. If you find a chord change that doesn’t work, you’re better off starting there. On your new album, POPtical Illusion, the song “Calling You Out” mixes a pretty melody with discordant background drones. Why blend beautiful with ugly? I’ve always done that. The oddness of 12-tone music is daunting to me still. I…