Issue 1270

September 22, 2016

$6.99

HOW
TRUMP
LOST HIS
MOJO

By Matt Taibbi
LAURA JANE
GRACES
TRANSGENDER
PUNK-ROCK
BLUES

GREEN
DAY
ou r,
Faster,
Angrier

FRANK
OCEAN
KANYE
WEST

UIDE
TO FALL'S
BIGGEST
ALBUMS

RS12

All the
News
That Fits

F E AT UR E S

Green Day

The trio hit the reset button

after an unplanned break.
By Brian Hiatt ............... 30

Building the Future

Inside the hyperactive life
of Bjarke Ingels, the worlds
hottest architect.
By Mark Binelli ............ 36

Laura Jane Grace

Four years ago, the Against
Me! singer came out as
a trans woman. Turns out,
that was the easy part.
By Alex Morris ...............42

How Trump Lost

His Mojo
On the campaign trail with
a candidate in free fall.
By Matt Taibbi ............... 46

RO CK & ROL L

Fall Album Preview

Inside new music from Beck,
Lady Gaga and more ............11

Kanye on the Road

How Yeezy is reinventing the
stage on his new tour .......... 17

DEPA R T MEN TS

DANNY CLINCH

Letters .........6
Playlist.........8

Records .....55
Movies .......59

ON THE COVER Green Day:

Mike Dirnt, Billie Joe Armstrong,
Tr Cool (from left), photographed
in Berkeley on August 14th, 2016,
by Mark Seliger. Styling by Candice
Lambert for TheOnly.Agency.
Grooming by Ashley Gomila for
TheOnly.Agency. Hair by Duke
Snyder. Dirnts shirt by Topman,
pants by Saint Laurent, shoes
by Alexander McQueen. Armstrongs
jacket by Levis, shirt by Otis Oakland,
jeans by H&M, shoes by Converse.
Cools shirt by Prada, tie by Vivienne
Westwood, pants by Topman, shoes
by TUK Footwear.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

HES ON FIRE
Bruce Springsteen
played the longest
American concert of his
50-year career, at New
Jerseys MetLife Stadium
on August 30th, a fourhour marathon. Thank
you, New Jersey!
he said. The E Street
Band loves you.

RollingStone.com

| R ol l i n g S t o n e |

ROLLINGSTONE.COM
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Jann S. Wenner

DMC and
Steven Tyler

VIDEO

RAP,
MEET ROCK
In the latest episode of
our Had to Be There
series, DMC narrates an
animated short lm on
performing Walk This
Way with Aerosmith
in 1986. Everybody
[in the audience] was
waiting for something
to go wrong with the
rappers and the rock
guys, says DMC.

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Notaro
(right)

PREMIERE

TV

CULTURE

INSIDE THE
FUN HOUSE

TIG NOTARO
GETS PERSONAL

VRS NEW
FRONTIER

The comedian talks about her

excellent new autobiographical
series on Amazon, One
Mississippi. Sharing my story
is never a bad idea, Notaro
says. It always pays off.

Get ready for football games

where it feels like you are
holding the pigskin and
commercials where you can
touch the soda can. Inside the
company bringing touch to VR.

POLITICS

MATT TAIBBI

THE STREAMING WARS

RollingStone.com/taibbi

Did Frank Ocean just kill the exclusive?

In our latest Rolling Stone Music Now
podcast, we get into the war between
Apple, Spotify, Tidal and, now, the record
labels, for exclusive streaming rights to
the hottest new albums. Are the real
losers the fans? Plus: what R O L LI N G STO N E
staffers are listening to around the office.

CULTURE

ROB SHEFFIELD
RollingStone.com/sheffield

MOVIES

Ocean

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S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

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HEAD OF DIGITAL: Gus Wenner

Iggy

See the new clip from Jim

Jarmuschs long-awaited
Stooges documentary, Gimme
Danger, featuring footage of
Iggy Pops legendary peanutbutter-smeared 1970 gig.

MANAGING EDITOR: Jason Fine

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Lose yourself in a sea

of like-minded strangers.

Vic Mensa

Correspondence
The Case for Clinton
In RS 1268, historian Sean Wilentz described a Hillary Clinton presidency as one that would extend the progressive
legacies of FDR and LBJ [Hillarys New Deal]. Readers
both for and against the Democratic nominee responded.
a fascinating look at
the mantle that Clinton will
assume when she takes the
White House in November.
The New Deal set the standard for what government
owes its citizens: opportunity, respect and a safety
net. That contract remains relevant today.

Sir Paul Speaks

Jim Harris
Via the Internet

the best sit-dow n w ith

Paul McCartney Ive read in
years [The Rolling Stone Interview, RS 1268]. David Fricke
spoke to a legend who respects
his past and is still learning.
Thank you, Paul you inspire.

lov ely deta ils th at i, a

lifelong McCartney fan, knew
nothing about. I was charmed
to read the anecdote where Paul
screws up the verses of Penny
Lane during a live show. Its OK
to make a mistake, especially if
youre a Beatle.

Brien Comerford
Glenview, IL

y et a nother mcc a rt n e y
interview where he goes out of
his way to declare that he was
on equal footing with John Lennon. It was Lennon who made
the Beatles great.
Diana Halvey
Via the Internet

6 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

HILLARYS
NEWDEAL

How a Clinton presidency would carry on the Democratic

Partys progressive traditions and transform America
By Sean Wilentz

a mer ic a ns r egu l a r ly
vote for hope, only to have
that hope dashed. In claim-

All Mobbed Up?

d av i d k u s h n e r s s t or y
about Joe Passalaqua was riveting and nuts [The Hit Man
Next Door, RS 1268]. Maybe
Passalaqua was a mob hit man,
or maybe all the steroids he
consumed tweaked his reality.
Whichever the case, it was an
unexpected and excellent read.
Yvette Santana
Via the Internet

M.I.A.s Moment
i wa s t h r i l l e d t o s e e
M.I.A. in the issue [M.I.A.s
Permanent Revolution, RS

RollingStone.com

Party-Boy Auteur
a gr e at prof i l e of t h e
Ha n g o v e r director [Todd
Phillips Chaos Theory, RS
1268]. Even his funniest movies
manage to be both humane and
misanthropic, and Erik Hedegaard perfectly captured the
method behind the madness
the bitchiness and humor of a
filmmaker in his prime.
Amanda Carpenter
Via the Internet

Soulful Survivor
ja son n e w m a ns sh a ron
Jone s s t or y i s i ncredible
[Sharon Jones Wont Stop,
RS 1268]. Her cancer diagnosis was earth-shattering, but
her response shows remarkable
strength and courage. She is
living life to the fullest, and her
work ethic is inspiring.

w il en tz sees cli n ton

as far more progressive than
I do. But to ensure that the
GOPs ugly contempt for ordinary Americans doesnt
become an accepted norm,
Ill be voting for her.

Ashley Paskill, Hateld, PA

New Green Day

w h at a pu f f piece on
Hillary. Im not buying what
Seans selling.

i t s f i t t i ng t h at gr ee n
Day, a product of the Nineties
punk scene, is back in a period of
intense social upheaval [Green
Days New Fury, RS 1268]. A
bit naive, though, that Billie Joe
Armstrong was so wide-eyed at
the sight of Ferguson protesters.

Brad Kirsch, via the Internet

Pete Williamson, via the Internet

Anne Sayles, via the Internet

Jim Corbin, Portland, ME

Steve Simpson
Via the Internet

for the past 40 years, mcCartneys been an incredible

humanitarian, suppor ting
human and animal rights and
environmentalism. Its wonderful to see such an astounding
musical talent, one with a generous and compassionate heart,
on the cover.

Tony Del Plato, Interlaken, NY

wilentzs piece for

the most part ignores
the biggest inf luence
on Hillarys sweeping
agenda: Bernie Sanders.
Shes a different candidate
today because so many voters chose a truly progressive
agenda. Lets acknowledge
how shes moved to the left
and spend the next eight
years keeping her there.

Don Morris
Terre Haute, IN

ing that Clinton will transform America, Wilentz has

surrendered to a con, one
where, in reality, capitalism
and permanent war will continue without end.

Love Letters
& Advice

1268]. A great artist, she should

be at the top of every chart, not
emerging periodically to record
or talk to the press. Her choice,
of course, but I miss her powerful voice and timeless message.
Caryn Cooper
Via the Internet

m.i. a . is a t r a i l bl a z e r ,
and I was so glad Lizzy Goodman put into context the undeniable ways that M.I.A.
influenced superstars like Beyonc and Nicki Minaj. Musically and politically, she has
always been ahead of the curve.
Roberto Ortiz
Via the Internet

AC/DC and GNR

a ngus you ngs de sc r i p tion of touring with Axl Rose
restored my long-lost faith in
the GNR frontman [Q&A, RS
1268]. Rose a professional?
Now thats a real miracle.
Eddie ODonnell, via the Internet

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S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

MY LIST
OUR FAVORITE SONGS, AL

D VIDEOS RIGHT NOW

2. Carly Rae
Jepsen

1. Metallica
Hardwired

Higher

Lars Ulrich recently

told us that mentally,
Metallica could keep
making music for
a hundred years.
Sure sounds like it.
The rst single from
their upcoming double
LP is a demonsteed blast of
wretched pain
la Eighties
classics like Kill
Em All the
sound of a band
raging against
the very idea of
slowing down.

I Cant Stop Thinking

About You
Sting gets his Police on with a skirtchasing rocker on which he sounds
like hes having way more fun than
hes had in many years.

3. Lvl Up

Brantley
Gilbert
Five Songs That
Inspired Me
The hard-rock-loving
country star, who is
releasing his next LP,
The Devil Dont Sleep, in
November, shares whats
helped him in hard times.

Hidden Driver
Brooklyns Lvl Up are
one of the most exciting
new guitar bands around,
and Hidden Driver
shows why, going from
low- strumming to
power-pop ecstasy.

Lynyrd Skynyrd
Simple Man
This sounds like my mom
talking to me. It reminds
me what kind of a
man to be, and at the
same time it has those
badass guitars.

Corey Smith

6. Young Thug
and Wyclef
Jean

As Angels Cry
Its about struggling and
talking to God, saying, Im going through
hard things. It speaks
volumes to me.

Kanye West
A kush-blowing horndog epic from the trippy
Atlanta yowler, with
Wyclef salivating all over
the smooth, rippling
groove. They keep it
rolling for six minutes
of sky-kissing bliss.

Eminem
Not Afraid
That dude is incredibly
talented. This song makes
you puff your chest out,
look addiction in the eye
and say, All right, lets
go to war.

Kris Kristofferson

7. Sleigh
Bells
Its Just Us
Now

5. Hamilton
Leithauser and
Rostam
A 1000 Times
Leithauser (of the Walkmen) and
Rostam (formerly of Vampire
Weekend) make vagabond soul
with a Sam Cooke-size heart.

8 | R ol l i n g S t o n e

Sleigh Bells got their

start as hip-hop-loving
junk-noise minimalists.
But this expansively
schizo banger shows
them pushing their
sound everywhere at
once its the best
bubblegum-punkmetal-R&B dance jam
youll hear all year.

Sunday Mornin
Coming Down
Denitely a song I feel
like Ive lived a little bit.
I got caught up in the life
I was living at the time
and was denitely close
to that scenario.

AC/DC
Back in Black
I love Eighties rock. When
it came to rock, I was
always drawn to guitars.
When it came to country,
I loved the stories.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: C FLANIGAN/FILMMAGIC; LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE EICHNER/NAMEFACE/SIPA USA; INFPHOTO.COM; CHELSEA LAUREN/REX SHUTTERSTOCK

4. Sting

Carly just released a

great surprise EP,
Emotion Side B, full of
cute-as-heck Eighties
dance pop. With its
disco-pipsqueak vocal
re and chewy electro
groove, Higher is
tailor-made to keep it
live at the roller rink.

EVERY BUBBLE, A TINY

AMBASSADOR OF QUALITY.

The Complete Issue.

Every Word. Every Photo.

Now Available on Mobile

Q&A SNOOP DOGG

P. 22

| TV PARANOID ANDROIDS: HBOS WESTWORLD

Roc

P. 24

ll
FALL
ALBUM

PREVIEW

Here Come
the Hits
Inside new music from Beck,
Lady Gaga, Bruce and more
Beck Title TBD october 21st

JOSHUA TIMMERMANS

When he hit the road behind 2014s Grammywinning Morning Phase, Beck started noticing a lot of younger faces in the crowd. It felt
like starting over, he says. That encouragement,
along with listening to the music of Kendrick
Lamar and Chance the Rapper, inspired Beck
to return to the beat-driven sound of his classic albums like Odelay and Midnite Vultures.
He teamed up with his former bandmate Greg

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

RollingStone.com

| R ol l i n g S t o n e |

11

FALL
ALBUM

R&R

PREVIEW
queen of the Lower East Side
during the early 2000s decided to take some time off to
become a mom. For a minute,
I didnt want to do anything
else, she says. But then the
feeling came back, and I could
hear what it sounded like.
That includes big orchestral arrangements, which take avantpop anthems like Obsolete
over the top. They were written during a lot of new emotions, says Spektor. And lots
of sleep deprivation.

Kurstin (whos worked with

Adele and Tegan and Sara),
shaping songs with big hooks
and hazy harmonies, including Seventh Heaven and
Wow. Wed go off on a Talking Heads kick, and then wed
come back six months later listening to something else, says
Beck. The record started to
nd an identity. My constant
overriding thing was to find
that affirming feeling energy
and joy.

Bruce Springsteen

Bob Weir

Chapter and Verse

september 23rd

Blue Mountain
september 30th

LADY GAGA
Title TBD Likely October
After two years singing standards with Tony Bennett, Gaga has
been quietly working with artists like Elton John, Nile Rodgers, Tame
Impalas Kevin Parker and RedOne on her fth LP, which her producer
BloodPop calls soul-rooted, [but] pop at heart. He describes writing
its upcoming single Perfect Illusion a big rock song that makes
you want to dance with Gaga, Mark Ronson and Parker in Malibu:
They started at noon and wrote into the night. Every few days, a lyric
would change and it would get better and better.

Shawn Mendes
Illuminate
september 23rd

Eighteen-year-old Mendes became a teen idol by posting

covers of Taylor Swift and One
Direction on Vine. Now, after
scoring a hit with 2015s strummy Stitches, hes aiming to
become a pop star as big as the
acts he used to cover. Throughout recording his second album,
Mendes bounced ideas off his
hero John Mayer, who inf luenced the breakup ballad
Three Empty Words and even
gave Mendes the guitar he plays
on the bluesy crooner Ruin.
John inspired the album more
than anybody, Mendes said.

Regina Spektor
Remember Us to Life
september 30th

A few years ago, Spektor who

became the gritty piano-ballad

12 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

PHISH
Big Boat October 7th
At the end of sessions for 2014s Fuego, Phishs producer Bob Ezrin
left them with a nal thought: He said, Id love to know more about
you guys, says singer-guitarist Trey Anastasio. Who are you?
What breaks your heart? Big Boat tries to answer those questions;
Miss You is a ballad Anastasio says he wrote about a personal
loss, and other members wrote about the twists and turns of life.
Theres denitely a point of view to this one, says Anastasio. Were
old enough to have a healthy respect for mortality.

Weir hasnt released a true solo

album since 1978, but jamming
with the National (who recently
released an extensive Grateful
Dead tribute album) at Weirs
TRI Studios made him want to
give his solo career another shot.
Members of the National back
him on Blue Mountain, which
revisits his obsession with cowboys (evident in classics like
Mexicali Blues). Highlights on
the album, co-written with Josh
Ritter, include Ki-Yi Bossie, a
campre singalong with Ramblin Jack Elliott. Weir, 68, impressed the younger musicians
with his energy, especially when
he brought a sledgehammer to
the studio to lift between takes.
Says the Nationals Scott Devendorf, He was showing us how to
work out!

Van Morrison
Keep Me Singing
september 30th

At 71, Morrison says he makes

records to please one person:
himself. If its not interesting,
then I dont do it, he says. His
rst LP of new songs in four
years includes a swing instrumental, a tribute to hero Bobby
Blue Bland, who died in 2013,
and Too Late, a doo-wop tune
about making the most of ones
limited time (Its too late to
start over again/Cant complain, Morrison howls). Its the
perfect mission statement of
a rock star in twilight, though
the song was written years ago.
I came across it in a notebook
and thought, What happened
to this one? he says.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM TOP: KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES; BRANTLEY GUTIERREZ

Before forming the E Street

Band, Springsteen ruled Jersey bars with the Castiles, Steel
Mill and the Bruce Springsteen
Band. Five never-released songs
by those bands will appear
on the audio companion to
Springsteens upcoming memoir, Born to Run. The highlight:
the Castiles Baby I, a jangly
garage-rock kiss-off howled by
a 16-year-old Springsteen, who
was already showing he had wit
to spare (I got someone new/
Someone better than you, he
shouts). The set also includes
13 other songs, from a 1972
demo of Growin Up to 2012s
Wrecking Ball.

FALL
ALBUM

R&R

PREVIEW

Looking Ahead to 2017

Currently in the works: The Stones rst album in a decade, Jay Zs
answer to Lemonade and Lordes long-awaited follow-up
Keith Richards conrms that
the Stones are deep into
making their rst album
since 2005s A Bigger Bang.
It was fun always is! he
says, describing a recent
London session where they
cut several songs in only
two days. Richards has
said the album will have
a lot of Chicago blues,
including material by Little
Walter and Howlin Wolf.
Eric Clapton even played
on a couple of songs, which
Richards said felt like old
times down in Richmond
[London], where both acts
played the Crawdaddy Club
in the Sixties.

Arcade Fire
Guitarist Win Butler recently
said to expect the bands
fth album next spring.
Arcade Fire have been
recording in Montreal and
Paris between summer festi-

ing Ryan Tedder, Danger

Mouse and Jacknife Lee. A
spokeswoman for the band
said the LP is denitely not
coming this year.

Jay Z
Butler
val dates, which multi-instrumentalist Tim Kingsbury
said the band booked to
put a little burst of energy
back into the process.

The Edge said the band is

busting our ass on Songs
of Experience, the follow-up
to 2014s Songs of Innocence. U2 have scrapped
many ideas left over from
previous sessions in favor of
new material that the Edge
has compared to Zooropa.
Theyve reportedly worked
with producers includ-

Lady Wood
october 28th

After writing alongside Max

Martin as part of his Wolf Cousins songwriting team, Tove Lo
broke through as the darkly
mysterious voice behind 2014s
moody pop banger Habits (Stay
High). Now, the Swedish singer is looking to take her career
over the top with her second
album, some of which she wrote
in Nicaragua while obsessed
with minimal techno. The result is a concept LP that tackles
heartbreak and deals with deep
identity issues: Theres me and
my relationship to my self-destructive side, she says. Ive
created a character who represents that side of me but who is
also my worst nightmare.

Ryan Adams
Title TBD
november 4th

Most people dont say, Hey,

were having a fucking party

lets put on a Ryan Adams

album! admits the singer.
Adams wanted to change that.
Drawing from his Eighties heroes from AC/DC to Jefferson Starship he recorded more
than 60 songs, playing every instrument except drums. Many
of the lyrics address a broken relationship possibly his recent
divorce from Mandy Moore.
Its about the big questions of
somebody my age whos been
through the things Ive been
through, he says. But I didnt
feel I needed to make something that was dark and heavy.

Sting
57th and 9th
november 11th

You should always pick up a

Sting record and never be sure
what its going to be, says the
singer. On 57th and 9th (named
after the Manhattan intersection he crossed to reach the studio), he returns to rock music
for the rst time in more than a
decade, with a new perspective.

Lorde
Earlier this summer, Lorde
said she took a helicopter

Lorde

LCD Soundsystem

U2

Tove Lo

14 | R ol l i n g S t o n e

Jay has been

largely
silent since
Beyoncs
heartbreak
opus
Lemonade.
That

may change soon: His friend

Jermaine Dupri recently
said Jays 13th album is
done and titled, and Roc
Nation rapper Vic Mensa
said, Ive heard a little bit
of some Hov shit, and its
fresh as fuck.

Jay Z

When James Murphy announced in January

that his band
would be
re-forming after
ve years, he added
that it was already
working on its rst
album since 2010s
This Is Happening. It
appears hes keeping
his promise. LCD
recently canceled a
November appearance
at a festival in Hong Kong
due to studio scheduling
conicts related to their
new album.

50,000 reects on the deaths

of David Bowie and Prince, and
One Fine Day takes climatechange deniers to task. He recorded with members of San
Antonio Tex-Mex group the
Last Bandoleros, who, Sting
says, brought energy, freshness
and a beautiful blend of backing vocals.

Conor Oberst
Ruminations
november 14th

Last fall, Oberst says, he

crashed and burned. In the
middle of a tour, he ended up
in the hospital for anxiety, exhaustion and laryngitis, and
returned home to Omaha, Nebraska, to rest. Out of the blue,
songs started to arrive, Oberst
says. The result is a spare, emotional set recorded in just two
days, Oberst accompanying
himself on piano, guitar and
harmonica. There was nothing to hide behind, he says.
The songs are forced to stand
on their own.

out into the wilderness,

spent three days alone
writing and made some
exciting breakthroughs. It
now appears shes close to
releasing her follow-up to
2013s Pure Heroine: Ive
worked like a dog for a year
making this thing great for
you guys, she wrote on
Instagram recently. The
record is written were in
the production stage now.
Rumored producers include
Flume and Jack Antonoff.

Metallica
Hardwired . . . to Self-Destruct
november 18th

Metallica played their 1983

debut, Kill Em All, in its entirety at 2013s Orion Festival, which drummer Lars Ulrich points to as the genesis of
the punky sound of their rst
album since 2008s Death Magnetic. The double LP is the result of more than 1,500 ideas
the band narrowed down at its
California studio over the past
year and a half. Thrashers include Murder One and Now
That Were Dead. Theres a
lot of dark stuff about relationships, says Ulrich. Not just
with other people, but the hidden personalities within.

Alicia Keys
Title TBD
likely late fall

Its for sure the best music Ive

done, says Keys. Her follow-up
to 2012s Girl on Fire will have a
political edge, inspired by Nina

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM LEFT: PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; MEDIAPUNCH/REX SHUTTERSTOCK; MATT BARON/BEI/SHUTTERSTOCK

The Rolling Stones

Steep Canyon Rangers

ExploreAshevilleMusic.com

FALL
ALBUM

R&R

PREVIEW
Best of
the Rest

NOR AH
JONES
day breaks

Drive-By Truckers

October 7th

American Band 9/30

Jones has ventured into

upbeat indie rock and
country on recent LPs, but
playing a 2014 concert
celebrating her label, Blue
Note, led her back to the
piano-based jazz that won
her eight Grammys in 2003.
A band, including sax legend Wayne Shorter, backs
her on several slow-burning
originals, in which she says
melodies oat over the
top. (She also covers Duke
Ellington and Neil Young.)
Im sure people who
dropped off after the rst
record would relate to this
more, she says. But thats
not why I made it.

The Southern band wrote its

most political LP yet, including What It Means, about
the shootings of Michael
Brown and Trayvon Martin.
A lot of our records are
set in another time, says
singer Patterson Hood. This
record is about right now.

Pixies
Head Carrier 9/30

The heavy set includes

All I Think About Now,
an apology song to former
bassist Kim Deal, who left
in 2013, sung by new bassist
Paz Lenchantin. Its about
regret and good memories,
says frontman Black Francis.

Melissa Etheridge
MEmphis Rock and Soul 10/7

Miranda Lambert
Title TBD
date tbd

After her divorce from Blake

Shelton, Lambert ducked the
public eye and told her record
label to give her some space.
The last year has been one of
heartache and healing, she said
recently. I got to know my gui-

tars. The rst single, Vice, is

a ballad about being stuck in a
tailspin of drinking and pain,
which proves the usually ery
Lambert is even better when
she turns down and opens up.

Bruno Mars
Title TBD
likely late fall

Mars is aware hes overdue for

the follow-up to 2012s Unorthodox Jukebox. Im on a mission . . . to make an album Im
genuinely proud of, he wrote
on Twitter recently. Stick

KINGS
OF LEON
walls
October 14th
Drummer Nathan Followill
admits the Kings overthought
2013s Mechanical Bull: We had
a shitty time trying to chase
a hit. For Walls, they headed
to L.A., bringing in producer
Markus Dravs (Florence + the
Machine), and aimed for a nopressure vibe. Arena-pounders
such as Find Me now share
space with moodier tracks like
Muchacho. And unlike the
old days, there were no studio
brawls. Were getting too old,
Followill says. Were out of the
physical game.

16 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

with me. Mark Ronson who

teamed up with Mars for their
2014 Number One hit Uptown
Funk has reportedly joined
him in the studio, and Missy
Elliott and Skrillex have also
dropped by. What were doing
is next-level, like nothing thats
happened before, Skrillex said.

David Crosby
Lighthouse 10/21

The Weeknd

Crosby wrote with bassist

Michael League of the jazz
group Snarky Puppy, who
Crosby says brought him
back to basics: acoustic
guitars and stacked vocal
harmonies.

Title TBD
likely late fall

CRX

Earlier this year, the singer

pulled out of a summer European tour with Rihanna so
he could focus on new music.
Creatively, some magic is happening, he said. I dont want
to lose it. Rumored guests for
his third album include Daft
Punk and Justin Timberlake
([Were] talking about doing
a collab soon I dont know
if I was supposed to say that,
Timberlake said recently). The
Weeknd also reunited with the
producers behind his fan-favorite 2011 mixtape House of Balloons. But its a new thing, he
said. Always a new thing.

New Skin 10/28

Strokes guitarist Nick Valensi was the last remaining

member of the group not to
form a solo band until now.
With producer Josh Homme,
he recorded a catchy powerpop set full of Strokes-y
twin-guitar breakdowns.
Thats my bread-andbutter, Valensi says.

Leonard Cohen
You Want It Darker
Late fall

The 82-year-old will release

his third album in just four
years, a nine-song set produced by his son Adam.

Alison Krauss
Windy City Late fall

Contributors: Jonathan
Bernstein, David Browne,
Patrick Doyle, Suzy Exposito,
Andy Greene, Steve Knopper,
Annie Licata and Brittany
Spanos

On her rst solo album

since 1999, Krauss tackles
songs by the artists she
grew up listening to, like
Willie Nelson and Brenda
Lee. I love to sing songs
older than I am, she says.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM TOP: DANNY CLINCH; JIMMY MARBLE

Simone, Bob Dylan and a world

thats lost its mind, she says. I
think were going to have a lot of
dialogue about the issues, adds
Keys. Its really, really dope.

Etheridge traveled to Memphis to record a set of Stax

Records classics, aiming to
bridge the gap between
rock, gospel and R&B.

ON THE ROAD

Kanye Gets Lifted

ABOVE IT ALL
West oating over
the crowd on his
Saint Pablo Tour

K
FROM TOP: SPLASH NEWS; THOMAS COOPER/GETTY IMAGES

anye west reinvented the stage itself for his

new Saint Pablo Tour, performing on a moving platform
suspended 15 feet above the crowd. Fans on the oor
(which is general admission) can follow West around
or dance in empty spots that open up. West said his goal was to
make it not be just about watching the artist but [to have] people
watching their friends and singing along with the lyrics.
West will be on the road for 39 shows, playing a two-hour set
that merges decade-old classics with bruising jams from 2013s Ye-

ADELE:
STAND-UP
COMIC
On her current world
tour, Adele has
proved that shes
the queen of stage
banter. We ran
the numbers
to see how she
compares to
her peers.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

ezus and current hits like Famous and Ultralight Beam. Opening night in Indianapolis wasnt without its shaky moments. West
stopped Blood on the Leaves because audience members crowding underneath him were at risk of being trampled. At the end of
the show, when a lift trying to carry him off the platform malfunctioned, he lowered himself onto the oor and high-ved his way
through a sea of fans the next night, in Buffalo, that improvised
bit was part of the act. The corny shit has to die, West said. InSTEVE KNOPPER
spiration has to rise.

Who Talks More?

ADELE
27%

Songs vs. Chatting: A Breakdown

Time spent
singing: 43:08

Time spent
talking: 31:15

Time spent taking pictures

with fans: 1:02

DRAKE
12%

BOB
DYLAN
0.08%

Percentage of stage banter compared to

songs, based on a sampling of 2016 shows

Taken from the Adele Live 2016 Tour, Stockholm, April 29th

Number
of laugh
lines:

43

Did you say I love

you or fuck you?
Maybe hes a dad who
got dragged here.

Interactions with
individual
fans

33

*Averaged from three recent shows

RollingStone.com

| R ol l i n g S t o n e |

17

R&R
MUSIC TECH

Perfect Sound on the Road

Its a golden age for car stereos: Here are three ways automakers are
using new tech for systems that rival the one in your living room
B Y J E S SE W I L L
The rock club on
wheels: Cadillacs CT6

WI-FI ON
WHEELS

For its new CT6 sedan, Cadillac asked

Bose to build the best sound system
it could, sparing no expense. Bose
took nearly ve years to design the
Panaray (a $3,700 add-on), borrowing ideas from the sound systems the
company builds for midsize music
venues. The Panaray features a staggering 34 speakers, all but one of
them smaller than four inches across.
Theres not a bad seat in the house:
The speakers are mounted in unexpected places like the headrests
and front pillars and direct sound
all over the cabin, ring straight at
the ears of all passengers. Meanwhile,
three microphones pick up (and
cancel out) reverb and engine drone.
The result is a precise, enveloping
soundstage that will lock you in at 80
miles per hour or at zero, parked in
the garage.

If youre after huge sound, step into

Volvos XC90, the Swedish brands luxury seven-seat SUV. Volvo and Bowers
& Wilkins engineers designed a 10-inch
subwoofer into the actual subframe of
the car for ultradeep low end. The 18
other speakers in the $2,650 system
include aluminum tweeters and Kevlar
midrange units; a 1,400-watt amplier
drives them all. You can also opt for
the system in Volvos S90 sedan and
upcoming V90 wagon.

Badass yet affordable:

VW partners with a
famous guitarmaker
To liven up its best sound system,
Volkswagen paired up with a guitar
god, Fender. It might seem like a
gimmick, until you hear one: The ninespeaker, 400-watt, 10-channel system
just thumps, simply put, and sounds
clear and precise at any volume. A
subwoofer hidden in the spare-tire
well deploys deep, undistorted bass.
Its part of the $1,700 Technology
Package on the Beetle Dune, shown
here, and comes standard on most
SEL trims of most VW models. An
upcoming three-row SUV should have
an even better Fender system.

18 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

34 speakers and
a sophisticated
noise-canceling
system create
true hi-

2016
VOLVO XC90

British hi-
stereomaker
B&W gives you
perfect bass on
the go

2016
VOLKSWAGEN
BEETLE DUNE

VWs Fender
system sounds
like a gimmick
until you listen

into a mobile hot

spot. Passengers
can stream Netix,
Spotify and more
through a connection that rivals most
home Wi-Fi for
speed and reliability. (Data charges
apply.)
Drive an older
car? Youre
still in luck:
Gadgets
like the
Zubie
+ In-Car
Wi-Fi ($100;
zubie.com) and
Samsung Connect
Auto (above; its
out later this year;
att.com) plug into
a port underneath
the steering wheel
of nearly every car
sold in the U.S. since
1996. Aside from
creating a hot spot,
they can track fuel
usage and alert you
to engine problems
via a phone app. J.W.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: CADILLAC; JIM FETS/CADILLAC;

AUDI; VOLVO, 2; SAMSUNG; JAMES HALFACRE/VW, 2

Surround-sound
perfection: Volvo
creates sparkling
acoustics with 19
speakers

2016
CADILLAC
CT6

Theres a new
frontier in car tech:
built-in Wi-Fi. Audi
(whose Connect
screen is shown
below) and GM are
leading the charge
by equipping most
2017 vehicles with
the option of a 4G
LTE connection, via
AT&Ts network.
Both use the
vehicles antenna
to turn your car

 2016. Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company. All Rights Reserved. 5, Life Happens in 5, Ascent, and all afliated designs are trademarks of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company or its afliates. Not actual product sold in stores.

R&R
1

MY STYLE

Seth Avetts
On-the-Road
Essentials

he av et t brot her s br e at he n e w life

into American roots music. So its no surprise
that singer-guitarist Seth Avett enjoys repurposing antique fashion from his Edwardian wedding ring to his World War I-era trench watch. I have a
quasi-belief that older things have more spirit in them,
Avett says. I like pieces that are built to last for decades.
On tour, Avett records songs onto a Sony digital recorder
hes used since the bands early days, and he often takes the
stage in a 10-year-old pair of Dr. Martens. The older I get,
ANNIE LICATA
he says, the more I appreciate that stuff.
5

20 | R ol l i n g S t o n e | Seth Avett photograph by Cole Bar ash

SCOTT STALLINGS (2, 5, 6, 7); COLE BARASH (3, 4, 8)

1. In Coney Island, New York, August. 2. Sony

PCM-D50 Linear Recorder: It was cutting-edge
10 years ago. 3. His trusty sewing kit: My mom
made that for me and taught me how to sew.
When I rip a hole in my jeans, I x it. 4.
Converse All Stars, detailed by Avett with the
cover of the bands 2016 LP, True Sadness. 5.
Schott leather jacket. 6. Beat-up Dr. Martens:
The go-to boots for me. 7. Sketch of brother
and bandmate Scott Avett. Since we were
ew funny pictures of each other.
y
or competition.

ts 2 p.m., but snoop dogg is

just waking up in Dallas. Hes in
the middle of his summer High
Road Tour with fellow MC and
weed enthusiast Wiz Khalifa. Its like
being on the road with a family member, Snoop says. Its a busy time in
Snoopworld: He just released his 14th
album, Coolaid, a return to his classic G-funk sound, and hes executiveproducing Mary + Jane, a stoner comedy for MTV. Hes also lming Martha
and Snoops Dinner Party, in which he
and Martha Stewart host various celebrity guests. The pair discovered a
unique chemistry during Snoops frequent guest appearances on Stewarts
show over the years. Ive never met
anyone like Martha Stewart, he says.
When we come together, its a natural combination of love, peace and
harmony.
Does the title of Coolaid have anything
to do with Beyoncs Lemonade?
I watched Lemonade and was like,
Damn. The music is dope, and the
visuals are f ly as fuck. But I dont
drink lemonade; I drink Kool-Aid.
So I decided to call my shit Coolaid,
since I brought so much avor to the
game, and Im what they consider one
of the coolest motherfuckers in hiphop and life in general. I made a visual album too.
Youre an investor in Merry Jane, which
calls itself the denitive cannabis resource.
We want it to be the Google of the
medical-marijuana sites, with anything you want to know about cannabis. Its a highway of information,
where its reliable and coming from me.
Smoking weed makes me too paranoid.
Any advice on how to deal with that?
There are strains that deal with
paranoia and schizophrenia. You gotta
nd the one to help you get through
what youre trying to get through.
Whats your go-to strain right now?
I like Kush. B-Real [of Cypress Hill]
just gave me some Jet Fuel. I dont
know what it consists of, but that shit
is special.
You became a grandfather last year at
43 years old. How did that feel?
Its the best feeling in the world,
man. Watching my grandson crawling, being what my son was to me, its
a chance to love my son all over again.
The biopic Straight Outta Compton
was a huge hit last year. Now, there are
rumors of a follow-up that tracks the
beginning of your career.
Im pretty sure there will be. But
right now Im not into it. To me, thats
bandwagon. You shouldnt do a movie

22 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

Q&A

Snoop
Dogg
The rapper on becoming
a grandfather, protesting
police violence, and whether
or not hes been getting
high with Martha Stewart
BY PAT R ICK D OY L E

about your life just because you saw the

success of Straight Outta Compton.
You and the Game recently led a march
to LAPD headquarters to protest police
violence. What made you get involved?
I never really had respect or understanding of the police until I got older
and realized that most police officers
are humans, too. But that day was
about saying, We arent going to be
done like this anymore by you. When
theres an incident with a civilian, we
need to make sure everyone makes it
home safely not just the officer.
Every day of our lives, this is what
weve been going through with the police. Getting beat, getting pulled over
for nothing, getting harassed, getting
killed. All that shit been going on for
years, but now theres cameras and
now theyre saying everybodys woke.
No, weve been woke.
You posted a video recently where you
called Donald Trump a punkass.
How could we have someone as
reckless as him running our country?
I been around for a long time. I seen
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bushes, Clintons. And I never seen a motherfucker like him.
Whats it like to be a y on the wall when
you and Dr. Dre hang out these days?
Thats my big bro. Were older now.
When we used to hang out, it used to
be about music, going to a party, girls,
clubbing. Now its about perfection,
because we have a legacy and a dynasty that we dont want to mess up.
We got a couple of things were cooking up.
Does that include a tour? People want
to see you two on the road.
I think that makes sense more than
anything. A Snoop-Dre album would
be amazing, but a tour even more, because we have legendary music the
world has yet to see us perform globally. Im pretty sure he wants to do it. He
just wants the team in place. Kendrick
Lamar, Eminem, Snoop Dogg and Dr.
Dre thats the dream team for him.
What can we expect from Martha and
Snoops Dinner Party?
A little bit of food, drinkin and
maybe some of that sticky-icky in the
air depends on the network!
So you got Martha Stewart stoned?
Ill tell you on the show.
Is there a danger of losing too much of
your early gangsta-rap reputation?
Nah, because I aint 19 no more. I
dont gangbang. Youre dealing with a
grandfather, the uncle to the hip-hop
game. Hes made a full 360 from where
he was to who he is and thats what
we love about him. Hes a great example of what you can be.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

ARIS JEROME

R&R

GET TOGETHER MINI

Portable Bluetooth Speaker

The Get Together Mini is crafted from mindfully sourced
materials including bamboo and organic cotton.

Available at:
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Television

R&R

A Stoned Web
Series Heads to
the Big Leagues
High Maintenance moves
to HBO and gets even
stranger in its new season

Paranoid Androids
Westworld updates a classic movie about evil robots
for the age of AI only this time, were the bad guys

hen he saw westworld as

a kid, Jonathan Nolan was fascinated and freaked out. It
scared the shit out of me, actually, the producer says of the 1973 movie, in
which tourists visit an Old West-themed resort
populated by robots and end up getting hunted
down by a malfunctioning android gunslinger.
WESTWORLD SUNDAYS, 9 P.M., HBO

When J.J. Abrams approached Nolan and his

wife, Lisa Joy Nolan, about adapting the lm
into a TV show, they readily agreed as long
as they could make one key change. Humans
are the heroes in the movie, Jonathan says.
We wondered, What if we ipped it? What if
we make the robots the good guys, and people
are the ones who are horrible and fucked up?
In the Nolans Westworld, which premieres
on HBO on October 2nd, theres still a futuristic theme park where people can live out
their Billy the Kid fantasies. But this time, the
character youre rooting for is a young fembot
(Evan Rachel Wood) who becomes self-aware
and develops a serious question-authority
glitch. Most of the humans are either morally
compromised or straight-up monsters, including the parks Promethean creative director (Anthony Hopkins), a programmer (Jeffrey
Wright) trying to avoid a paranoid-android
revolution, and Ed Harris mysterious man in

24 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

black, who may be the parks spurs-wearing

version of the devil.
The show is a bold attempt to blend deepthought sci- and Game of Thrones-style spectacle, with a look Nolan compares to Alien
meets Kubrick and Terrence Malick. Perhaps
it wasnt surprising, then, that a project this
ambitious ran into stumbling blocks. HBO
shut down production for months to get the
writing into shape, and the show was mired
in a minor scandal when news leaked of a contract requiring extras to sign up for genitalto-genital contact. Nolan admits there were
problems but says it was all part of making a
complex series. When youre doing a high-wire
act like this, with a cast like this, its going to
come under a lot of scrutiny, he says. For her
part, Wood says rumors of Roman-style robot
orgies were exaggerated. I kept reading those
stories, she says, and Im thinking, Why was
I not on set those days?
If this Westworld 2.0 doesnt erase visions
of Yul Brynner with a Seventies robot face, it
does leave viewers rethinking their relationship to technology, AI and what, if anything,
makes humankind the more soulful species.
There were days where I had existential-crisis moments and started to wonder, Wait,
am I a robot? Wood says. Then, after
I watched the pilot, I was genuinely
creeped out by myself. It fucked with
DAVID FEAR
all of our heads, I think.

HIGH MAINTENANCE
FRIDAYS, 11 P.M., HBO

dealer (played by Ben Sinclair)

and various oddball pot-smokers.
The show, created by Sinclair and
his wife, Katja Blichfeld, became
a cult hit as a Web series an
often surreal, oddly touching
stoner short-story collection unlike
anything on TV. Now, its moving
to HBO. We had a deal with
another network, says Blichfeld.
They essentially wanted us to
remake and recast the webisodes.
HBO said, No, we want to build
on what youve done. The new
season keeps the premise but ups
the ambition and the weirdness.
In one episode, Downton Abbeys
Dan Stevens shows up in a tunic;
in another, a dog falls in love with
its walker. Each episode has its
own thumbprint, Blichfeld says.
Or paw print, Sinclair adds. We
thought, What if we shot that one
from the POV of a dog? Yeah, that
D.F.
sounds fun.
Sinclair
as The
Guy

FROM TOP: JOHN P. JOHNSON/HBO;

CRAIG BLANKENHORN/HBO

GO WEST
Thandie
Newton and
Rodrigo
Santoro.

If youre a weed dealer who

delivers all over New York, you
meet a lot of folks: cross-dressers,
cancer patients, Method actors,
agoraphobes, maybe even a guy
organizing an orgy. Thats the
idea behind High Maintenance,
where each episode is devoted to
encounters between a bike-riding

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

Nobody knows eggs better than Bacon, Kevin and Michael Bacon.
They know one large egg is a nutritional powerhouse with 6 grams of
high-quality protein for 70 calories each. And they also know how
to sneak into your house to sing you a catchy egg song. Just yolking.
Visit IncredibleEgg.org for recipe ideas.

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dom

s
GIVE UP THE FUNK George Clinton
brought the thunder to New Yorks
Afropunk fest, which he calls
Mardi Gras in New York, just what
the witch doctor ordered!

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JAY BLAKESBERG, 2; DANA (DISTORTION) YAVIN; KCS PRESSE/SPLASH NEWS; RON COHN PH.D./
THE GORILLA FOUNDATION/KOKO.ORG; MATTHEW HEASLEY; FAMEFLYNET PICTURES; SAA/BORISIO/INFPHOTO.COM

Welcome
to Jam
Heaven
More than 30,000 jamheads descended on
Virginias Oak Ridge Farm for the Lockn
Festival, to camp and trip out to sets by
Phish, Umphreys McGee, and Phil Lesh and
Friends. Incredible weekend! says Trey
Anastasio, who also checked out My Morning
Jacket, Ween and the Wailers. Massive
good energy. I met so many cool people!

A CRACK
PERFORMER
Justin Bieber
gave a warm
hello to
paparazzi
from his hotel
in Mexico,
where he was
celebrating
friend Soa
Richies 18th
birthday.

Chris Robinson and Lesh

teamed up for a set. It
was cosmic vibes for the
magic masses, says
Robinson.

EVERY BREAKING WAVE

Bono enjoyed the seas off
St. Tropez before riding to
shore for a lunch meeting
with his buddy Bill Gates.

FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS Just a few weeks after

earning her drivers license, Lady Gaga took dad
Joe for a cruise in her Ford Bronco in Los Angeles.

TWO OF US Yoko
Ono joined son Seans
band, the Claypool
Lennon Delirium,
in New York. She
introduced herself as
Sean Ono Lennons
mother! says Sean.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

ANIMAL CONNECTION Flea fullled

what he says was a longtime dream:
visiting the Gorilla Foundation to meet
Koko. This is a day that I will never
forget in my life, he said.

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

27

STAY GOLD As a music fan, Im so

excited to be here, said a beaming
Michael Phelps, who got to hang
out with one of his favorite MCs,
Chance the Rapper.

RUN THE WORLD Beyoncs downtown

afterparty was a glittery scene, with
Jay Z, Kanye, Kim Kardashian, Alicia Keys,
Swizz Beatz and Puff Daddy holding court
till 4 a.m. Family Zone, said Swizz.

Britney returned, Kanye rambled and

Beyonc put everyone else to shame with
her middle-ngers-up Lemonade set as
the Video Music Awards headed back
east to Madison Square Garden. The big
honor, the Video Vanguard Award, went
to Rihanna, who got a heartfelt tribute
from Drake. Afterward, RiRi hosted a bash
including Jaden Smith, Halsey, and David
Blaine performing card tricks. Beyonc
kept it more low-key with a party at
Italian restaurant Pasquale Jones.

RIGHTEOUS BEY
Beyonc took home
the award for
Video of the Year
for Formation.
I dedicate this
award to the people
of New Orleans,
she said.

FUTURES PAST
Never mind all
those hits from the
past two years:
Future chose to
perform the song
that jumped
everything off,
2014s Fuck Up
Some Commas.

Drake and
Rihanna

PANDA DANCE
A stoked Desiigner
ruled the Republic
Records afterparty.
Im keeping
my blessings
to the top of the
sky, he said.

WORKING IT
Rihanna
performed
four times
before Drake
told the world
hes been
in love with
her since
he was 22.

A GRANDE TIME
The evenings love vibe
continued as Ariana Grande
showed off new boyfriend Mac
Miller. Hes the best, she said.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JAMES DEVANEY/GC IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES; JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC, 4; DOUG PETERS/PA
IMAGES/STARTRAKSPHOTO.COM; KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE; DOUG PETERS/PA IMAGES/STARTRAKSPHOTO.COM

VMAs 2016:
Beyonc Slays,
Everybody
Else OK

THAT JUST
BRUSHED
CLEAN
FEELING

after an innocent
lets grab coffee
got you more
than just coffee.

After an
unplanned
four-year
break, the Hall
of Fame punk
trio had to
gure out how
to rock again

BY BRIAN HIATT
Photograph by

MARK SELIGER

Senior writer Bria n Hiatt wrote about

Jared Leto in August.
32 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

AFTER 2004S
AMERICAN IDIOT,
EVERYTHING
BECAME SO
APOCALYPTIC, SAYS
ARMSTRONG. WE
LOST A LITTLE BIT
OF OUR GOOFINESS.

h e n h e wa l k e d on stage blackout-drunk at
the iHeartRadio festival
on September 21st, 2012,
the week Uno! came out,
Armstrong brought it all
crashing down. Confronted with a blinking sign
warning the band its allotted time was
ending, he ipped out, treating the crowd
to a rant that wouldve been hilarious if
he werent so far gone. Fuck this shit! he
snarled. Ive been around since 19-fucking-88. And youre gonna give me one fucking minute? Im not fucking Justin Bieber,
you motherfuckers. You gotta be fuckin
joking. He proceeded to smash his guitar, and Dirnt, in solidarity, trashed his
bass too.
Armstrongs dire state aside, the bandmates agree they probably shouldnt have
been at the pop-dominated fest in the rst
place. Once a punk, always a punk, is really what it comes down to, Armstrong
says. Hes dressed like the rock dad he is:
black jeans, black Converse, black buttondown with a loosely knotted polka-dot tie
and a not-quite-matching brown cardigan. He has some grayish stubble going,
rendering his gelled nest of black hair and
never-xed chipped front teeth incongruously boyish. He always seems slightly agitated, as if a truant officer might be around
the corner.
Sometimes you feel like that dirthead
kid who for some reason is running for
homecoming king, he adds. But we have
to blame ourselves for putting ourselves in
that situation. We have the ability to say
no. He pauses. Honestly, dude, I cant
remember a word that came out of my
mouth.
Dirnt agreed with everything Armstrong said onstage. But what I couldnt
agree with, the bassist says, was seeing
the degradation of my friend. The fucking
path had gone too far. And he didnt even
see it yet. It was, Were done. Recognize it.
I cant think about playing with you right
now. You got to get right. Armstrong entered rehab, and while he was away, Dirnt
wrote him letters of encouragement tempered with blunt realism. If we make
it through this and we get back together, he told him, were either going to be
stronger than ever or were going to not be
doing this.
Over the years, Armstrong had made
periodic attempts to get sober on his own,
but even after a well-publicized DUI bust
in 2003, few around him guessed he had
a real problem. During a literally beersoaked New York club show with the Green
Day side project Foxboro Hot Tubs in 2010,
musician Jesse Malin, a longtime friend,
watched as Armstrong just whipped it
out and peed all over the stage. I always
thought it was just the spirit of it. Ive done
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PRODUCED BY COCO KNUDSON. ARMSTRONGS BLAZER BY VINTAGE. COOLS TIE BY VINTAGE, PANTS BY FRAME DENIM.

ot long
ago, before he pushed his band to record
three albums all at once and landed himself in rehab, before a Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame induction left him with little to
prove, Billie Joe Armstrong had some
strict rules for Green Day. Most important, each album and tour had to lead right
into the next. Bands that took breaks were
never the same when they returned, Armstrong would say, comparing his trio to a
vintage sports car: Youve got to keep it
tuned up, or its gonna sit there and rust.
They would practice up to six times a week,
like a garage band prepping for its rst gig.
It was ridiculous, says bassist Mike Dirnt,
and great. We put our heads down for 20
years, and never really looked up.
It all had to keep getting bigger and more
ambitious. With 2004s American Idiot,
they recorded one of the most consequential rock albums of a guitar-starved century, and a once-irreverent trio of workingclass stoners Armstrong, his childhood
friend Dirnt, drummer Tr Cool started playing Queen-size stadium shows and
developing an eyeliner habit. They labored
over an even more audacious follow-up,
2009s 21st Century Breakdown, packing
it full of strong songs, but self-seriousness
and bombast crept in e.g., American Eulogy (Mass Hysteria/ Modern World). Everything became so apocalyptic, says Armstrong. We lost a little bit of our gooness,
the part of Green Day that I always liked.
By 2012, Armstrong, long an on-andoff heavy drinker, had lost all control, and
most of his perspective. Even as he compulsively wrote and recorded songs for the
bands ill-fated near-simultaneous albums,
Uno! Dos! Tr! (this relentless thing, try-

ing too hard), he was combining pills and

alcohol to a point where I was surprised
I would wake up in the morning, he says.
And even though he had a wife and two
teenagers at home, his thinking was fuzzy
enough that the prospect of death didnt
much bother him: I was being very selsh.
Now, Armstrong is in his fourth year of
sobriety, and hes trying to ditch his worst
career tendencies as well. Green Day have
just nished Revolution Radio, their rst
album in four years, due October 7th. With
the band fresh from the longest break of its
28-year run, Armstrong no longer thinks
of it as a delicate car that might break
down after a couple of days in the garage.
Its totally not true, he says, twice, nearly doubling over with laughter in a plush
gray chair in the clubhouselike upstairs
lounge of his newly built Oakland studio. I
learned that the hard way. You cant be enthusiastic for the sake of enthusiasm. You
have to get out of trying to outdo and oneup yourself all the time. We had to break
that habit, because suddenly we werent
really being ourselves anymore. . . . I was a
little burnt out on being in Green Day. We
needed to stop.
For the rst time in more than 15 years,
Green Day have an album thats just an
album: 12 songs, no gimmick. This was
me, Billie and Tr ring off each other,
says Dirnt, in the same way as if we were
practicing for Kerplunk the groups second album, from 1992 without thinking about it like that. The band sees it as
a back-to-basics move, its version of U2s
2000 reboot, All That You Cant Leave Behind. There was a thing where it was like,
What should we be today? Armstrong
says. And the answer: Lets be Green Day.
Green Day is awesome!

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES; CHRIS DUGAN; JOHN POPPLEWELL/RETNA LTD.

stuff like that sober! But it mightve been

a sign of where things were going. There
were plenty of other drunken nights that
seemed harmless, where Malin and Armstrong stayed up all night geeking out on
music: Wed just be yakking away about
songs, like, did the Replacements steal
that one part of Little Mascara from the
Clashs Death or Glory?
Michael Mayer, who grew close to Armstrong as the director of the Broadway
version of American Idiot, calls him the
most functioning addict Ive ever seen in
my life. It seemed to go in phases as opposed to being a constant thing. It was
not like he was drunk or on drugs all the
time. But hed go into these meltdowns occasionally, and it became harder for him
to recover.
After a while, Armstrong didnt feel
high-functioning at all. Thats just on
the outside, he says. Thats not the reality of what was going on. The other part of
my life was falling apart slowly. My foundation was cracked. If he hadnt quit, he
says, honestly, I dont know if I would
be around. And hes pretty glad he is. I
want to be an empty-nester, he says
his younger son, Jakob, will soon graduS e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

PERMANENT REVOLUTION
(1) Performing the week of their
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction
in April. (2) Dirnt and Armstrong in
the bands new studio in Oakland,
working on Revolution Radio.
(3) Green Day in 1993.

ate from high school. I want to watch my

kids go through their experiences. I dont
want them to have to deal with that kind
of darkness ever in their lives.
Armstrong says sobriety has come pretty naturally. He doesnt mind if his bandmates drink in front of him. Hes even
learning to enjoy days when not much
happens, when he can wake up; walk his
four dogs (Mojo, Mickey, Rocky and Cleo
they kind of sound like a band); hang
out at his recently opened Oakland guitar shop, Broken Guitars; check in at the
studio; head home for dinner and watch
Game of Thrones like everyone else.
Two years ago, he and his wife, Adrienne, celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary, renewing their vows in a Las Vegas
ceremony. Later that night, he formed
an impromptu supergroup with guests

Rancids Tim Armstrong, Malin, Duff McKagan and Tr Cool and blasted through
a bunch of covers at a local club. The anniversary party served as the real wedding he and Adrienne never had; back in
94, they had a BYOB backyard party (We
had friends bringing in 40-ouncers, Armstrong recalls). Me and Adrienne grew
up together, lets face it, says Armstrong.
My sons practically grew up with us too.
Which is cool. Weve always been younger than most of the other parents. (Sometimes they play music together as well: One
year, Armstrong recorded a single with his
wife and kids and sent it out to friends in
lieu of a Christmas card.)
Armstrongs home studio has been commandeered by his sons, who have both embarked on music careers: Joey as the drummer in the indie band SWMRS, Jakob as
the frontman of his own Strokes-inf luenced band, Jakob Danger, whove already
released an EP on the hip label Burger Records. Its a beautiful thing to watch with
Jakob, says Armstrong. Hes a quiet guy,
and one day he and Joe were like, Dad,
lets go record something. Jakob had these
songs. I was like, Where the fuck did this
come from?
RollingStone.com |

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

33

34 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

in July, and the equipment is still crammed

in there. To get a drum sound worthy of
songs destined for arenas, Green Day stuck
microphones out in the hall and in the tiny
bathroom attached to the live room. It
captured what youd hear if youre in there
taking a shit while Im playing, Cool notes.
Assuming you left the door open and the
fan off. Which we dont recommend.
recording the album was painless
enough, but getting there was tough. Dirnt
spent much of the time off facing one of the
most painful challenges of his life, after

ARMSTRONG & SONS

Armstrong with Joe (left) and Jakob;
Joe plays drums in the band SWMRS,
and Jakob has his own group,
Jakob Danger. Its a beautiful thing
to watch, says Billie Joe.

his wife of seven years, Brittney, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Shes now in remission after nine surgeries and chemo
and all that shit. Dirnt shaved his head in
solidarity, and the family moved south for
eight months to focus on her treatment.
Having two kids under the age of 10 made
it all the more harrowing. The last thing
you want to do is lose the better parent,
says Dirnt with a small chuckle. But shes
also the stronger person of the two of us. I
probably would have crawled up in a ball
and said, Im fucking done. Dirnt has a
classically sturdy bass-player personality youd want him by your side in crisis.
His wifes treatment did leave Dirnt
with enough spare time to do some serious work on his bass playing: He learned
Stevie Wonders Sir Duke note for note,

then dug deeper, hooking up with a jazz

teacher. But when Armstrong first suggested starting a new album, Dirnt said he
needed more time. The one thing cancer
gives you is the gift of perspective, he says.
With that said, you cant come right out of
that bubble and then jump back on a pirate ship. Its like, No, man, Im not ready.
I wanted to feel like I had a minute to absorb some other emotion.
Tr Cool wasnt eager to get back to work
either. He was on an extended honeymoon
with his new wife, Sara Rose, a thirtysomething musician who had purple hair
at their wedding thanks to her,
theres a drum set right in his living room at the moment. We did
a little traveling around Europe
and Mexico and Belize and Jamaica, he says. Being a newlywed and just doing whatever we
felt like that day. It was a treat.
Cool grew up in a rural hippie
enclave in Mendocino County,
and he still seems psyched just
to be in civilization. At 43, he
manages to pull off spiky hair
the color of a blueberry Popsicle, not to mention calling
himself Tr Cool. And hes settling in for the long haul, working out hard to prepare for life
as a buff 60-year-old playing
Green Day songs he even once
asked Charlie Watts for advice
on drumming longevity, though
the suggestions (a caloric energy
drink, hitting less hard) werent
superhelpful.
As for Armstrong, his idea of a
break could easily be mistaken for
frantic productivity. He remade the
Everly Brothers Songs Our Daddy
Taught Us with Norah Jones on a collaborative album called Foreverly; wrote a set of
dead-on faux-Beatles songs for the Shakespeare-inspired musical These Paper Bullets! for the Yale Repertory Theatre; and
played guitar on several dates for one of his
all-time favorite bands, the Replacements.
Armstrong wasnt the same after making his Broadway debut as the decadent
rock-god character St. Jimmy in the American Idiot musical. The experience could
have exacerbated his substance abuse at
the time (He was Method acting, says
Malin), but it also left him hungry to try
new things. He began to cautiously seek
out acting gigs, and after turning down
many scripts, he eventually signed on to
play a former-musician-turned-midlifecrisis-afflicted-dad in a sweet indie dramedy called Geezer, making a debut as a leading man at age 44. The lm, now titled
Ordinary World after a ballad Armstrong
wrote for it, will come out the week after
Revolution Radio. Armstrong is in nearly every scene, delivering an impressively
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

JOEY ARMSTRONG/INSTAGRAM

y m i ddl e-age d -m i l l ionaire Hall of Famer standards,

at least, Green Day still keep it
pretty DIY. They like to build
stuff. Dirnt served as his own
contractor on a big house in
Berkeley years back, constructing it with enough skill and care
that when he recently stopped by, the current owners offered profuse thanks. Armstrong recently reconstructed the engine of
an old Ford Falcon, adding a Joey Ramone
stencil to the hood as a nishing touch. I
just got greasy every day, he says.
Revolution Radio was equally
handmade. The band members
served as their own producers, recording the whole thing in neartotal privacy: It was just them
and longtime engineer Chris
Dugan in the studio every day.
They didnt tell their label, Warner Bros., about the albums existence until it was almost nished. When nobody knows
youre working, sometimes
thats the easiest time to work,
says Dirnt. Nobody is going,
Did you nish that thing up yet?
You did it because you wanted
to, not because you had to.
A rmstrong scof fs at rock
bands that seek out cutting-edge
producers and pop-star guests.
We were rejecting the thought
of having to work with other people to get a hit, he says, with a
94-worthy sneer. We dont need
to do that. And most other bands
dont either. They just do it because theyre pussies!
They recorded the album at
Armstrongs new studio, Otis, in
a gentrifying neighborhood in the
bands native Oakland. Theres a
Chuck Berry LP cover on the front door,
a vintage jukebox upstairs stocked with
Armstrongs formidably curated collection of 45s (from Little Richards Keep
on Knockin to the Whos Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere to the Buzzcocks Orgasm Addict), an old issue of Zap Comix
on a side table. A huge California state ag
is stretched across one wall in the lounge,
near a framed poster for a 1955 Alan Freed
Rock N Roll Halloween Party at Harlems Apollo Theater. In the hallway is a
locker from Armstrongs old high school,
retrieved by his brother, who was a custodian there, during a remodeling. Inside is
a sticker advertising a March 16th, 1990,
Green Day concert. (Isnt that crazy?
Armstrong says, pointing it out.)
The actual studio space, a rectangular
room with hardwood oors and a string of
lightbulbs on the ceiling, is almost absurdly small some pro studios have bigger
kitchens. The band just nished recording

naturalistic performance alongside Fred

Armisen and Selma Blair. Writer-director
Lee Kirk encouraged Armstrong to think
of it as an alternate timeline: The guy in the
movie also released his major-label debut
around the same time as Armstrong, but
in his case, it didnt work out. We talked
about it as This is a story of what if Dookie didnt sell 10 million records, says Kirk.
Maybe this is a life he could have led.
The movie left Armstrong anxious to try
more stuff: Fuck, man, I want to try acting more. I want to try doing musicals and
I want to try just mixing it up. Theres no
pressure to be perfect. There were times
doing Ordinary World where I didnt know
what I was doing at all. It was one of the
best experiences Ive ever had in my life.
Ordinary Worlds midlife-crisis theme
also pops up on Revolution Radio
through Armstrongs pen, its a close cousin to that teenage feeling of dislocation hes
always captured so well. Sometimes when
youre home by yourself, he says, theres
that feeling that youre kind of spiritually unemployed, and youre trying to gure
out who you are. Its about going, Whats
the most honest thing I can say about myself right now? The album begins with
the Who-ish anthem Somewhere Now,
which nds Armstrong feeling spiritually
broken. Its just that gloom and trying to
rise above it, he says. Thats sort of what
the record is about.
The album also grapples with what
Armstrong sees as a troubled America.
The world looks like an old Dead Kennedys album cover now, he says. Theres
more than one reference to police brutality (an issue he was talking about in the
Nineties) and Black Lives Matter protests.
I think my role is to shut up and listen,
he says. A lot of white people should shut
up and listen. They really dont know what
the African-American experience truly is.
When you have people getting shot in their
cars for no reason and being put in fucking
jail cells and its for prot, we have a serious problem, and the rst thing you need
to do is get educated. Dont try to do this,
like, Blue lives matter. Dont try to do the
All lives matter. Just shut up and listen to
the experience. And then move forward
after that.
he day a f t er gr e e n day
surprise-release Bang Bang,
the rst single from Revolution
Radio, Tr Cool is driving his
1963 Volvo down Gilman Street
in Berkeley, toward the club
where it all began. What were
once abandoned warehouses,
he points out, are now Trader Joes, Whole
Foods and condos. About half a mile from
the club, his engine light turns on, and the
car starts sputtering. Im breaking down,
he says, somewhat amused. We pull over,
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

INSIDE GREEN DAYS

REVOLUTION
Revolution Radio is their rst LP in 15
years with no extra twist no high
concept, no triple album but its full of
ery politics and big emotions. Billie Joe
Armstrong breaks down some key tracks.

REVOLUTION RADIO
Give me cherry bombs and gasoline! sings
Armstrong on this hard-charging anthem.
He says he got the idea for it in New York two
years ago when he came across a Black Lives
Matter protest; before he knew it, Armstrong
had gotten out of his car and was walking up
Eighth Avenue with the throng. I was screaming, Hands up, dont shoot, he says.
I felt like I was on the right side of history.

BANG BANG
The fastest, most aggressive song on the
album is also the rst single. Armstrong sings
from the perspective of a psychotic mass
shooter (I am a semiautomatic lonely boy/
Youre dead/Im well fed). The scary thing
was when I went into the characters head,
says Armstrong. I started getting dizzy.

STILL BREATHING
A junkie on the verge of death, a gambler about
to lose everything and a wounded soldier on
the front lines are all characters in this raggedbut-right ode to survival. Sometimes I run
away from being too heavy, says Armstrong.
But sometimes it just comes out that way.

TROUBLED TIMES
An ominous rocker that surveys an America
on the brink of disaster, full of racial unrest and
economic inequality. I wish saying we live in
troubled times was a clich, but its not, says
Armstrong. Trump is preying on peoples fears,
anger and desperation.

SAY GOODBYE
Armstrong was reacting to images of armored
military-style vehicles in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, when he wrote this loping track:
I was like, What country do I live in? How is
this different from the Arab Spring?

OUTLAWS
A swelling tune that looks back at the trios
teenage punk days. I was feeling nostalgic,
says Armstrong. Me and Mike would break
into cars and steal tapes and lighters.

YOUNGBLOOD
This romantic midtempo track is dedicated
to Armstrongs wife of 22 years, Adrienne.
Shes easy to write about because shes so
awesome, says Armstrong. Shes the cedar
in the trees in Minnesota.

and we end up pushing the car together

around the corner, into a parking spot on
a quieter street.
Maybe it was a sign from the punk-rock
gods, a belated punishment for signing to
a major all those years ago, but we ignore
it and walk over to the empty club. 924
Gilman is still communally run, the way it
was when Green Day started playing there
in the late Eighties, before Cool joined. Its
a little brick building that you could easily
walk right past but then again, so is Sun
Studios in Memphis. It doesnt look like
much, says Cool fondly. The window is full
of iers for young bands that have played
there recently, with Jakob Danger prominent among them. (Its like a movie, Armstrong says later of this full-circle turn.)
Cool and his bandmates have embraced
the fact that Dookie is now older than, say,
The Dark Side of the Moon was in 94. I
remember joking when Dookie and Insomniac were new, says Cool, that we
were gonna be on classic-rock stations
next to fucking Led Zeppelin and shit.
Like, wouldnt that be funny? Now I literally hear our music next to Led Zeppelin
on rock radio.
With their deceptive power-chord simplicity, Green Day have inspired more
young bands to start than any act this side
of Kiss, and that doesnt seem to be changing. When Armstrong saw Jakob play recently, he connected with a cherubic teenage garage-rock trio named Destroy Boys,
who, like Green Day, have released their
debut LP while still in high school. As we
hung out at Armstrongs Broken Guitars
store one day, the band knocked at the gate:
Hey, were Destroy Boys! They handed
over a band T-shirt, and he promptly posed
with it on for his Instagram.
Green Day have never stopped making young fans, so unlike many veteran
bands, they still see plenty of fresh faces
in the audience. But last year, a month
after their Hall of Fame induction, Green
Day returned to 924 Gilman to play a secret show for the oldest crowd theyve ever
seen: It was a class reunion for their earlyNineties scene, a club packed with grownup punks. That was so emotional, Armstrong says. Looking out in the crowd,
you see familiar faces that once had piercings and dyed purple hair, and now its covered in gray. Some of those punk kids are
now educators, theyre artists, theyre authors, who used punk as Armstrong did,
as a door into the idea of being able to express yourself.
Its like running into an old friend, he
says, and youre playing catch-up on all the
things that happen in a 40-year life span
you think of how much has changed in your
own life. Its a trip. Fuck! But here we are.
Armstrong sighs. If that was the last gig I
ever played for the rest of my life, he says,
I could walk away happy.
RollingStone.com |

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

35

OUTSIDE
THE BOX
Ingels
rst major
project, the
VM Houses,
is a public
residential
complex in
Denmark.

Mo n t h x x , 2 016

BY MARK BINELLI

Inside the hyperactive life and

controversial success of Bjarke
Ingels, the worlds hottest architect

PORTRAIT BY
PARI DUKOVIC

BJARKE
INGELS

he con voy of
buses depar ted from the
Pa la z zo on a
cloudless spring
morning, rolling
onto a muted
Las Vegas Strip
and toward the
Nevada desert.
The buses carried a group of
tech journalists, venture capitalists, curious engineers and startup-culture hype
merchants along with, not incidentally,
one of the worlds most celebrated architects, Bjarke Ingels passing sere mountain ranges and spiky yucca trees and a
shimmering field of solar panels before
nally arriving, after nearly an hour, at
their destination: a compound of trailers
and shipping containers surrounded by a
barbed-wire fence. Someone made a nuclear-test-site joke.
Wed come to witness the rst-ever public demonstration of a new supersonic
transportation venture called Hyperloop One. Tech billionaire Elon Musk had
roughed out the concept in 2013 and given
his blessing to the founders, though he
wasnt directly involved himself. Essentially, the plan was for Hyperloop to revolutionize freight and passenger travel by
shooting pods through pressurized tubes
at speeds of more than 700 mph faster
than a commercial airplane! using a zeroemission electric-propulsion system. This
could mean half-hour trips from Los Angeles to the Bay Area.
The test run, an early trial of the propulsion system, occurred without a hitch.
After a Cape Canaveral-style countdown,
a railed sled blasted off from a resting state
to 116 mph in just over one second, sending
up a roostertail of sand on the back end.
The crowd cheered, despite the somewhat
anticlimactic brevity of the spectacle. Amid
the excitement in the grandstand, very few
people took notice of the handsome, stocky
Dane in the sleek black windbreaker, a
boxy, retro camera hanging from a strap
around his neck.
At 41, Bjarke Ingels could be fairly described as architect-famous, meaning people outside of his profession might be able
to nger one of the buildings hes designed,
but not the man himself. In person, he exudes a boyish charisma that one minute
suggests a Silicon Valley wunderkind and
the next a president of a frat house. He
speaks basically awless English and often
seems amused by the world around him,
especially if theres a hurried or chaotic element to the scene a mood hell signal
with a roguish grin, as if hes reveling in evContributing editor Mark Binelli
proled Lin-Manuel Miranda in June.
38 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

eryone else sweating it. His most distinc- ian assignments into dazzling, visionary
tive features are his eyes, which are such structures. His rst major buildings were
dark pools you can practically see your own affordable-housing complexes in Copentwin reections in them. Though not today: hagen, one of which wrapped around its
Here in the desert, hes wearing a pair of twin courtyards in the shape of a gigantic
aviator sunglasses with lenses so at that gure eight. (A sloping bike path traced
to look upon them feels disorienting, like the perimeter, allowing residents to cycle
staring at the surface of a glass office tower all the way up the buildings 10 stories.)
designed to repel birds and bullets and Later, he was tapped by the city of Copenbuilding-scaling human ies.
hagen to design a waste-to-energy plant
Ingels has come to Las Vegas because a trash incinerator. For that project, curhis rm, the Bjarke Ingels Group, a.k.a. rently under construction and set to fully
BIG he possesses a fatal weakness for open in 2018, Ingels decided to transform
lame puns has partnered with Hy- the slanted roof into a seven-and-a-halfperloop to design its pods and stations. acre ski slope. To remind citizens of their
Noting that the Danish word for design, carbon footprint, the plant will also feature
formgivning, translates literally as form- a towering chimney that will emit enorgiving, Ingels is particularly excited about mous, perfectly circular smoke rings (acthe Hyperloop project because, he tells me, tually made of steam) each time the plant
This is the rst time weve really been able pumps a ton of carbon dioxide into the atto do it to give a form to something com- mosphere.
pletely new.
When Ingels started out, he had a single
The ecstatic, futuristic sensibility pres- partner; they worked and lived together in
ent in all of Ingels work makes him a the same apartment. Today, BIG has 100
perfect t with Hyperloop. The render- employees in Copenhagen and 150 in New
ings in BIGs two monoYork, with 40 different
graphs, Yes Is More see
projects in the works
what I mean about the
worldwide, all showcasIngels rejects
puns? and Hot to Cold,
ing BIGs overriding aescould easily adorn a City
thetic, a blend of an inthe puritan
of Tomorrow pavilion at
clusive, at times madcap
concept of
a worlds fair. But Hyperplayfulness with a serisacrice
for
loop is just one of a dizous devotion to sustainsustainability.
zying number of highability and innovation.
Instead of
profile, extraordinarily
A new stadium for
ambitious commissions
the Washington Redtrying to
BIG is presently juggling.
skins will be surroundchange
The list also includes the
ed by a moat instead
people,
he
new Googleplex, a full
of a fence, where tailsays, change
redesign of the compagaters will be able to
the world.
nys 60-acre Mountain
kayak or hang out on a
View, California, headman-made beach. The
quarters; the Big U, a
Google headquarters,
sea wall girding Lower
a joint project with the
Manhattan as ood proBritish architect Thomtection from sea-levas Heatherwick, will be
el rise, for which Ingels
composed of a series of
was awarded $335 milglass-canopied microlion to design; a $2 billion reworking of climates; inside, modular office spaces
the Southern Campus of the Smithson- will be stacked and shuffled on-demand by
ian Institution in Washington, D.C.; and crabots. (Yes, robot cranes.) A pavilion de2 World Trade Center, the nal of the new signed by Ingels for Londons Serpentine
towers scheduled to rise from Ground Galleries, unveiled this summer, is made
Zero, a 3 million-square-foot building that of open-ended berglass boxes that Ingels
looks like a stack of seven childrens blocks himself, in an Instagram post, compared
in prole, a staircase, with each of the to the building blocks from Minecraft; his
steps sporting a rooftop garden inspired Lego museum, currently under construcby a different climate.
tion in Denmark, looks as if its made out
Because of the prohibitive costs in- of gargantuan Lego bricks.
volved, its highly unusual for an archiThe 35-oor VIA 57 West in New York,
tect as young as Ingels to be snagging such Ingels rst completed residential buildcoveted assignments; most of the worlds ing in North America and his rst comnoted starchitects Frank Gehry, Dan- pleted skyscraper anywhere is a gleamiel Libeskind, Richard Meier, Jean Nou- ing pyramid overlooking the Hudson
vel are at least a generation or two older. River. From across the river in New JerIn fact, Ingels international fame is a rel- sey, it could almost pass for the sail of an
atively recent development, having come enormous ship. Between VIA 57 West,
after he turned a series of rather quotid- the Big U and 2 WTC (along with proposS e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

BUILDING
MASTER
As a child in
Denmark, Ingels
and his dad built
Fort Bjarke in the
backyard (right).
Hes now heading
40 designs
worldwide. Below:
Ingels sketching
ideas for the
Hyperloop, a
high-speed
transport system,
with then-project
CTO BamBrogan.

PREVIOUS SPREAD, LEFT: PETER BOEL/BIG. THIS PAGE: BIG, 2

thats why we can also explain it. The fact

that something is actually understandable
and relatable doesnt mean that its unsophisticated or banal. It just means that its
crystal-clear. And if you cant explain it,
that doesnt necessarily mean its so brilliant that ordinary mortals cant fathom it.
It might just mean that it makes no sense.
als for a skyscraper at the north end of the
High Line and a reinvented building exterior near Penn Station), Ingels could be
poised to reshape the look of Manhattan
like no other architect in recent memory.
Writing in Vanity Fair, the venerable architecture critic Paul Goldberger described
Ingels proposed 2 World Trade Center as
one of the more provocative and notable
towers of the last generation. And Aaron
Betsky, the dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright
School of Architecture, has written for the
blog Dezeen that Ingels is the architect my
students love more than any other designer
working today.
That said, theres often a slightly patronizing quality to the praise Ingels receives,
a skepticism of a messenger so adept at
popularizing a profession as theory-bound
as architecture. I met Ingels for the rst
time the day after hed been the subject of
a largely laudatory 60 Minutes segment,
and he felt the piece portrayed him as a
salesman. Later, he elaborated, I think
the biggest backhanded criticism-compliment I get is that Im good at communicating. Which implies that youre bad at
doing. To me, its a strength that theres
clarity. We know what were doing, and
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

he day before the desert test, Hyperloop made its

initial presentation in a Gehry-designed event center in
downtown Las Vegas. Ingels,
whod only just own in from
New York, where he now lives, arrived late,
sliding into his seat in time to hear Brogan
BamBrogan, the co-founder of Hyperloop,
describe him as fucking rad from the
stage. As a product of Silicon Valley, Hyperloop, which has raised $100 million in
startup capital, was selling itself to potential investors by using the language of both
utopian science ction and P.T. Barnum.
To that end, we werent being introduced
to some mundane tweak on an old concept
like high-speed rail; no, Hyperloop, per its
website, was reinventing transportation
to eliminate barriers of time and distance.
BIGs own sensibility, drawing as it does
from startup cultures tech-friendly optimism and careful eye for storytelling,
feels thoroughly compatible with BamBrogans pitch. Our cities are not polluted or congested because they have to be,
Ingels writes in Yes Is More. They are
what they are because thats how we made
them. Later in the book, he makes the case

for what he calls hedonistic sustainability a sustainability that, through smarter design and technology, rejects the old
puritan concept where youre not supposed to take long warm showers or take
long-distance ights for holidays, and essentially allows people to get exactly what
they want without making any sacrices
in aesthetics or comfort. Instead of trying
to change people, Ingels insists, we could
change the world.
After the presentation, Ingels makes his
way to the open bar and orders a vodka and
soda. Ive been an architect for 20 years,
and its been annoying to me that the engine of the economy has been immaterial, he says. Hes referring to the Internet,
and says he sees ventures like Hyperloop
as a happy development for his profession.
Someone asks Ingels about other projects
hes working on. He mentions a smaller
one: a panda habitat for the Copenhagen
Zoo. Pandas have very specic needs, Ingels says. Theyre a demanding client! My
job is much more interesting when the client is demanding. And you cant be more
demanding than being a different species.
Ingels orders another vodka-soda. BamBrogan wanders over to say hello. He is a
fascinating character: A former engineer at
SpaceX, Musks spaceight startup, BamBrogan was born Kevin Brogan, but then
he married a woman named Bambi and
they decided to merge their names into a
new surname, BamBrogan. And then he
changed his rst name from Kevin to Brogan. BamBrogan is tall and lanky, with a
amboyant, porn-y mustache; this afternoon, hes wearing torn jeans, sneakers
and a white dress shirt unbuttoned to the
middle of his chest, and, like a villain in a
Bond movie set entirely in Southern California, hes carrying and petting his Chihuahua, Toby.
Ingels points at BamBrogan and
says, Dont take this the wrong way,
but . . . Nicolas Cage! BamBrogan seems
confused. Ingels explains that he has a
habit of seeing peoples celebrity doubles.
I dont mean Nicolas Cage now, he clarifies. I mean Nicolas Cage in Wild at
Heart. Did I ever tell you that this here
jacket represents a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom?
BamBrogan chuckles. Ingels turns to a
young venture capitalist and shouts, Edward Snowden! The venture capitalist
does not seem amused.
Theres another round of drinks. BamBrogan is becoming more animated. Im
big into This is the 21st century, yo! he
declaims loudly. The gear-and-grease
age is over. We have to change the future.
These other pussies wont do it! Who else
will? Ingels nods and recommends a book
about speed by the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Later, BamBrogan says,
Im trying to think of a travel experience
RollingStone.com |

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39

BJARKE
INGELS
that I have where its like, God, thats awesome. Ubers probably the closest example,
because its convenient. Like, thats the best
I can say about travel.
Ingels gives a slight smile and says, I disagree. Go to the lobby of one of these buildings and take the stairs up to the top oor.
BamBrogan nods. OK, OK. I can see
that, he says. An elevator is a pretty good
experience.
Someone asks Colin Rhys, Hyperloops
Director of Experience Design, about the
beads adorning the nails of his pinky ngers, and he explains the look dates back to
his days playing in a band. I have the same

s w i t h m a n y br i l liant people who have a

fondness for speaking
aphoristically, its hard to
know when to take Ingels
seriously. His spiels ow
with such uidity, but whats the precise
ratio of sincerity to cynicism? Of eloquence
to sophistry? Of uninhibited imagination
to TED Talks bullshit?
Or maybe these questions are cynical,
and the surface enthusiasm of Ingels the
guileless futurist is a true expression of his
inner self. Ingels grew up in a small, singlestory house in a suburb north of Copen-

obsessed with, the work of the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and decided to put his
drawing skills to different use. After graduating, he landed a job in the Rotterdam ofce of Koolhaas rm, OMA where he had
interned during college to work on one of
its biggest projects, a $165 million redesign
of the central branch of the Seattle Public
Library. In 2001, he left OMA with another
young colleague, Julien De Smedt, and returned to Copenhagen, where they started
their own rm, PLOT; ve years later, the
pair had split up and Ingels formed BIG.
From the beginning, Ingels acknowledges, he had a knack for generating buzz.

thing, Ingels mutters, deadpan, except its

on my dickhead.
While waiting for a taxi, Ingels wanders
off to pee in the bushes. A security guard
catches him and points out the surveillance
camera hes urinating in front of, but otherwise leaves him to it. In the cab, Ingels nods
at his favorite building in Las Vegas, the
Luxor pyramid. Its such a pure idea, he
says. Though its quite nasty inside.
Later, I ask Ingels if theres a city hes
drawn the most inspiration from. He considers the question, but then, instead,
brings up a recent camping trip he took in
Iceland. When youre in a city, everything
is so proscribed, he says. You walk on the
sidewalk, and you stop at the red lights, and
you walk into a lobby and take an elevator.
You can only do what youre supposed to
do. Whereas, what I like about being in the
wild is, you can climb a hill, you can cross a
creek with your bare feet. Its a world of possibility, like a playground for grown-ups.
And you can still remember how to play.
In most of our projects, we try to make the
city a little bit more like that. We try to create more possibilities than just the things
youre supposed to do.
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hagen, the middle of three siblings, both

parents professionals (father an engineer,
mother a dentist), the spectacular Danish
coast just minutes away. It all sounds fairly idyllic, especially considering the off-thecharts ways in which Scandinavian countries tend to score on various quality-of-life
and personal-happiness indexes. But Ingels
found himself chang at what he saw as the
constraints of Danish socialism. Theres
a Danish word for elevating the collective
over the individual, janteloven, which Ingels says basically means everyone is the
same. Kaspar Astrup Schrder, a Danish documentary lmmaker who has spent
the past several years working on a feature
lm about Ingels, tells me, Bjarke felt like
he wasnt getting recognition in Denmark,
because they dont like people standing out.
So he left.
As a kid, Ingels spent hours in his own
head, compulsively lling notebooks with
drawings. When he enrolled at the Royal
Academy of Arts in Copenhagen, he had
dreams of becoming a graphic novelist (Yes
Is More, BIGs first monograph, is actually written in the form of a comic), but Ingels eventually discovered, and became

His rms were some of the rst, he says, to

put everything on their websites contest
entries, rejected proposals, whatever fantastical designs they might showcase because at that point, with very few completed buildings in their portfolios, they had
nothing else to upload. There was the zeroemission island resort designed for Azerbaijan, shaped like the peaks of the countrys seven most famous mountains, with its
own self-contained ecosystem powered by
wind and solar; the majestic, star-shaped
Superharbour, an articial island port in
the Baltic Sea meant to free up prime waterfront real estate throughout Denmark;
and the 3,000 terraced affordable-housing
units built into an undulating Great Wall
that would surround a plot of untouchable
parkland in the center of Copenhagen.
None of these projects were ultimately
built. But that hardly mattered in the end,
because the boldness and ingenuity of BIGs
designs even for budget-conscious and
decidedly unsexy projects like trash incinerators and affordable-housing complexes had made potential clients take notice. In 2006, Douglas Durst, one of the
largest real-estate developers in New York,
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM LEFT: IWAN BAAN/BIG, 2; BIG; DBOX/BIG

NEW WAVE (1) VIA 57 West in New York, Ingels rst completed high-rise; (2) the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London; and renderings of the
Washington Redskins stadium (3) in D.C. and 2 World Trade Center (4) in Lower Manhattan, both of which are in progress.

gave a lecture in Copenhagen, after which

Ingels introduced himself by asking, Why
do all your buildings look like buildings?
Intrigued, Durst continued to follow Ingels career; in 2010, he hired BIG to design
VIA 57 West, the residential skyscraper in
an underdeveloped section of Hells Kitchen, which has become Ingels largest and
most expensive completed project to date.
Durst had been trying to develop that
plot of land for more than a decade, originally as a data-storage site. (That plan was
scrapped after 9/11.) We saw a wonderful waterfront location, with views of the
river, says Ingels, but it was also right on
the West Side Highway and next to a sanitation garage and a power plant. So we
came up with this idea of a courtyard an
oasis that would be a shelter from the surrounding noise of the city. But how to build
a courtyard within the density of a skyscraper? In Europe, Ingels notes, courtyards work because the buildings are ve
stories tall. When they become 40 stories
tall, it suddenly becomes not so nice to be
in this dark pit.
Which is how the buildings asymmetrical pyramid shape developed, the sloping sides maximizing the amount of sunlight and the number of choice Hudson
River views. You try to make a virtue out of
necessity, Ingels says. So rather than trying to impose our will, its more like trying
to really see whats there, and then the will
that we insert is in the editing and the articulation of the things that want to happen
anyway. Traditionally, you would say that
all of those constraints are something that
paralyzes the creativity of the artist. But I
actually think some of our wildest projects
have been conceived not for a competition
when you are theoretically free to propose
whatever you want but in direct collaborations with clients.
Thus, for example, the proposed Redskins stadium, for which BIG had to take
into account a variety of factors, some of
them existential like how to make live
football appealing to fans when the televised experience is getting better and better and so much of the stadium experience
is already dominated by screens of its own.
Stadiums are just a total dinosaur, Ingels
says. Its the same three or four global offices that have designed all the stadiums. And
then it becomes this self-fullling prophecy,
where you have to be a stadium designer to
design a stadium. And that means theyre
all the same.
Ingels decided to focus on the part of
the live football experience thats not replicable at home the communal aspect of
attending a game, in particular the tailgating. Rather than a at ocean of concrete,
the parking lot would be tiered and seeded
with grass thats grown in fiberglassreinforced soil, making it more pleasant for
picnics but also able to withstand heavy veS e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

hicles; replacing the security fence with a its Danish Web address is big.dk. Who
moat, the worlds simplest invention, en- doesnt like a big dick? he asked over dinhanced with beaches, kayaks and a perpet- ner in Las Vegas. Men like it, women like
ual surf wave, would make the stadium an it! (This was right around the time of the
off-season summer destination as well; and evening when he began to refer to me exmodifying the shape of the stadiums bowl clusively as Captain.)
from an oval pill to a rather nice Pringle
One afternoon in New York, we meet
doubled the number of 50-yard-line seats.
in the lobby of VIA 57 West. The building
Once described by the design magazine had been voted the 2016 Best Tall BuildSurface as architectures swinging bach- ing in the Americas by the Council on Tall
elor-prince, Ingels now has a serious girl- Buildings and Urban Habitat, which is
friend, Ruth Otero, a Spanish architect the skyscraper equivalent of being nomhe met at Burning Man, and bought an inated for Best Picture. Tenants had alapartment in Brooklyns Dumbo neigh- ready started moving in, but Ingels, spotborhood last year (he believes the high lev- ting a few missing panels in the lobby
els of taxation in Denceiling, grimaces, mutmark stie innovation).
tering, Its always just
As a sort of raspberry
superannoying to show
Our critics
at janteloven, one of the
something that is still
rst things he did when
not, like, fully nished.
dismiss what
he moved to New York
And yet, despite Inwe do as
was buy a Porsche, paygels complaints, the
cartoonish,
ing, he told me, a ridicbuilding is a stunner, a
because
ulous price by Danish
pyramid built by space
literally we
standards. Over there,
aliens. The lush courttaxes and gas prices are
yard does, indeed, feel
made a
so high, no one would
like an oasis, completecartoon. But,
buy one. But he couldnt
ly muting the noise of
you know, the
quite shake his inner
the highway traffic just
haters will
Northern European sobelow. One-third of the
hate, right?
cialist: After his first
units have recessed balfrustrating commute to
conies, making parts of
Harvard, where he was
the facade look like some
teaching a class at the
kind of circuit board.
time, he almost ditched
You end up getting all
the car in Boston. After
these little textures, a vathat, he took the train.
riety of light and shadow
and ref lections, Ingels
ngels sav v y communication says. He chose bead-blasted stainless steel
skills, his ability to sell potential- for the roof panels, both because its essenly transformative design concepts tially the most indestructible material you
like hes pitching a roomful of rst- can nd and, rather than reecting direct
round investors on a new app thats light, it actually glows a little bit. Whergoing to totally disrupt going to the ever youre standing on the sidewalk, in
dentist, has cut both ways when it comes to the courtyard, three blocks away its diffiBIGs reputation. Bjarke is the undisputed cult to stop your eyes from being drawn up.
king of the architectural one-liner, says
Seeing the building so beautifully realOliver Wainwright, the architecture critic ized makes you want to believe all of Inof The Guardian, but it sometimes leaves gels loftier talk about hedonistic sustainyou wanting more to chew on. Most archi- ability is possible, that the secular faith
tects will reach for much more profound in technology and design embodied by the
metaphors. Theyre reluctant, I think, to cult of Steve Jobs might be a worthy one.
spell out their process in such a direct and Who knows, maybe Hyperloop will reintransparent and, yeah, childish way.
vent transportation to eliminate barriers
Looking back at Yes Is More, Ingels says, of time and distance?
I think we did ourselves a little bit of a disUnfortunately, since the desert test, Hyservice. I mean, it was actually quite well- perloop has hit a few bumps in the road, or
received, but I think it made it a little bit whatever the pneumatic-tube version of
easy for our critics to dismiss what we do that would be. BamBrogan left the comas cartoonish, because literally we made pany after a very public and ugly split with
a cartoon. But, you know, the haters will his co-founder, Shervin Pishevar, a venhate, right?
ture capitalist who had previously invested
If the comic came off as a bit goofy and in companies like Uber. Along with three
unserious, Ingels own habit of behaving other former executives, BamBrogan led
as if hes auditioning for an architecture- suit against the company, alleging, among
themed show on Viceland has done little other things, nancial impropriety by Pito help his cause. It wasnt enough to name shevar and threatening behavior by Pihis company BIG; he revels in the fact that shevars brother (who was [Cont. on 60]
RollingStone.com |

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

41

Laura
Jane
Grace
Against
L

the
World

Four years
ago, the
Against Me!
singer
announced
she was a
trans woman.
Turns out,
that was the
easy part
By ALEX MORRIS
Photograph by
JAMES MINCHIN III

au r a ja n e gr ace
is lying on a plasticcovered bed in the
back room of Mohans tattoo parlor in
Queens. Outside, the No. 7 train
rumbles overhead and tipsy drag
queens in perilous heels totter
past all-night taco stands. Inside,
an artist named Kenji bends over
Graces calf with the focus of a
surgeon, inking an intricate geometric pattern around both legs.
Its well past one in the morning.
Theyve been at this for more than
13 hours.
Grace keeps dozing off despite
the pain. She was up at 6 a.m. with
a panic attack, which has not been

42 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

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S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

Mo n t h x x , 2 016

Laura
Jane
Grace
uncommon since she came out as a trans
woman rst drunkenly to a friend, then
to her wife, Heather, then publicly in an article in this magazine four years ago and
began the process of physically transforming herself from a guy named Tom Gabel
into the woman she knows herself to be.
Today, her panic has something to do with
the stress of being in New York to plug
two projects a new album from her punk
band, Against Me!, and a memoir, Tranny:
Confessions of Punk Rocks Most Infamous
Anarchist Sellout and all the talking and
explaining and answering shell have to
do over the next few days. But its mainly
that now, all of a sudden, Grace thinks she
might, just might, be able to rekindle her
relationship with Heather, someone she
thought transitioning had cost her.
And its cost her plenty. The day the
Rolling Stone article came out, Grace
hid, terried, in Against Me!s studio outside St. Augustine, Florida. When she emailed the story to her father, a West Point
graduate, he tersely wrote back to say that
her presentation left much to be desired.
They havent spoken since. Her mom and
her brother have been supportive, but other
family members havent. As far as friends,
Grace says, it shed people from my life.
Then things got worse. Against Me! had
long been one of the most exciting and politically outspoken punk bands around
Florida kids who tore up stages with
lefty anthems like Baby Im an Anarchist
and had enough punk cred to get shit for
signing with a major label (they did anyway) and enough charisma to count Bruce
Springsteen a fan. But within a year or so
after Grace came out, they were hanging on
by a thread. Theyd been dropped by their
label. Their ex-manager was suing them.
Half the band had quit. These problems
werent all related to transitioning, Grace
says, but it seemed inevitable that everything would end up in ux: Coming out
started a lot of change in my life in general.
Then, in a hotel room in Georgia, near
where Against Me! were trying to record
the album that would become 2014s Transgender Dysphoria Blues, Grace had a bad
reaction to hormones she was taking, waking up with her body half-frozen, dripping in sweat. She quit the hormones cold
turkey, which, she says, is not something
you want to do. It fucks you up. Its like my
brain was not even functioning. The only
way I got through was Valium. I would take
handfuls and fucking drink vodka every
night just hoping I wouldnt wake up.
But nothing not the hormone withdrawal, the rejection from her dad, or even
the tree that fell and destroyed Against
Me!s studio in 2013 was as bad as what
happened with Heather. Ive never had
Contributing editor Alex Morris
wrote about Halsey in August.
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RollingStone.com

anything fuck me up more than the dissolution of my marriage, Grace says. Im

not over it. Ill never be over it at this point.
Grace had kept her feeling that she was
born in the wrong body a secret when the
two married in 2007. But when she announced her transition, the couple who
have a daughter, Evelyn, now six thought
theyd be able to work through it. At the beginning, Heather was in many ways Graces
cheerleader, championing her honesty and
gently correcting people who called her
him. I had her back so hard it was like
us against the world in a way, says Heather
when I talk to her a few weeks later. But
it also sort of highlighted problems. With
band stuff, all the press, everything, she
was even less present. It was overwhelming
for both of us. It didnt help that the hormones Grace was taking dampened her sex
drive and caused physical changes. Or that
Heather was attracted to men, not women.
That discussion, she says, didnt go well.
Grace eventually found a stash of letters

Grace hasnt
spoken to her dad
in four years.
Transitioning
shed people from
my life, she says.
under the bed in their house in St. Augustine, addressed to Heather in her maiden
name. She wasnt sure her wife was having an affair It wasnt what she thinks it
was, says Heather but when Heather insisted they move to Chicago, where the guy
whod sent the letters lived, Grace agreed.
She couldnt entirely blame Heather for
wanting to move on. Nor was she willing
to let go.
Once in Chicago, the situation devolved. We would be at dinner, just crying, says Heather. Our therapist was
like, You cant live together anymore. Its
bad for your daughter. Grace moved out.
She was terried that Evelyn would stop
calling her Dad, even though the term
was painful. And she was afraid of losing Heather for good. I was socialized
male, she points out. The idea of your
wife starting a relationship with another
man is hard enough, she says, but it was
made worse by the fact that she thought
her jealousy, her anger, only underscored
her male socialization. Of course, you
cant own somebody, and the idea of owning somebody in that way seemed like a
very male thing. Wheres the line between
anger and misogyny?

Such were the questions Grace was asking herself when Transgender Dysphoria Blues hit the Billboard charts at Number 23 in early 2014, the highest debut an
Against Me! album had ever had. Suddenly, she found herself a transgender role
model with a fan base that included an
overwhelmingly supportive queer community and a revamped career to go along with
her decimated personal life. I had gone
from being married with a kid, two cars,
garage, nice house in a nice neighborhood
to all of it gone, she says. But from an artistic standpoint, it broke down this fucking wall where theres no lter. Im feeling
stuff emotionally and just processing it.
Her Web series, True Trans, earned her an
Emmy nomination in 2015. She says the
new Against Me! album, Shape Shift With
Me, was the easiest to write of her career.
It was hard to know how to process it
all: the success versus the destruction, the
media celebration of trans-ness versus the
day-to-day reality of living as a trans person out in the world. I was touring, and
people would come up to me afterward
and be like, I just started hormones! and
Im just thinking, Youre going to ruin your
fucking life. Dont do it. She sighs. I felt
like I ruined my life totally.

r ace doesnt feel that

way any longer. Its the morning of her day at Mohans, and
weve met up for brunch at a
coffee shop a block away from
the tattoo parlor (Eatings really important
before getting tattooed. You need energy).
Our interview was supposed to have ended
two days ago, after a round of gin-and-tonics at the hotel where Grace was staying
with Evelyn and her nanny. But a six-yearold even a cool, precocious one with partially blue hair isnt keen to sit and ponder
lifes intricacies in a bar, and somehow one
drink had turned into two, and two into
three (Least amount of calories in any alcohol but hardest on the liver = gin, Grace
later informed me by text. Dont fact-check
that, just go along), and suddenly Grace
was the one asking the questions. Are you
married? What does dating mean now?
Is someone she dates now attracted to the
fading masculinity? Or the emerging femininity? Will she continue to be attracted to
me as I continue to change?
Grace, all six feet two inches of her, with
her neck tattoos and her punk-rock clothes,
now hovers like a vampiress over a cluster
of strollers by the door. Despite the mornings panic attacks, shes fresh-faced and
talkative. No, transitioning has not been
easy. Yes, its cost her a lot. But she recognizes now that transitioning was never
going to x all her problems Taking hormones isnt going to solve whatever emotional issues you have; theyre two separate
things and that the problems it created
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

Shape Shift With Her

(1) Grace with her daughter, Evelyn,
now six. At first, Grace was terrified
Evelyn would stop calling her Dad.
(2) Grace with her wife, Heather. The
couple separated after Grace came
out. (3) As a young punk rocker with
Against Me! in 2001.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: STYLING BY LULU BERNARD. THIS PAGE, CLOCKWISE FROM

TOP: JOE LEONARD; COURTESY OF AGAINST ME!; GILLIAN LAUB

2
may have been a necessary part of blowing
up her life so she could create a new one.
Trying to cause chaos I think thats the
way I create change, she says. Do you realize how crazy I sounded going into a psychotherapist and being like, Im coming
out in Rolling Stone magazine? shed
asked before. At rst they just thought I
was out of my mind.
Sometimes today, for example she
wonders the same thing. For the past six
months, shes been in a satisfying relationship with a Quebecoise singer named Batrice Martin, better known as Coeur de
Pirate. But since sending an early copy of
her memoir to Heather two weeks ago, the
lines of communication have been open in a
way they havent been for years. She called
me a narcissist, but its cool, says Grace.
Writing your memoir is inherently narcissistic. Now, Grace wonders if she should
S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

3
end things with Martin and try to piece
things back together with Heather, however improbable that may be. She wonders if she should break up the band as a
way of forcing some sort of change. And
she wonders if she should leave Chicago,
though shes not sure where shed go. The
only thing xed in her life seems to be her
relationship with Evelyn, who once, heartbreakingly, asked her not to become a girl,
but has come around to the idea (and does
still call her Dad). You realize that kids
just want to know you love them, Grace
says. After that, theyre just like, I want to
watch cartoons.
The new Against Me! album is ostensibly
about love, but its often really about longing, about experiences not had and memories not made. I keep feeling like, OK, nished a book, nished a record, she says.
Thats a monumental closing of a chapter.

Something has to change. Life has to be different going forward, and I have to gure it
out. What am I going to do for the fucking
rest of my life? You know?
Punk had always been a refuge for Grace,
rst as a military brat secretly trying on
her moms pantyhose and aching to be Madonna and then, after her parents divorce, when she nally settled in Naples,
Florida, the poor kid in a rich town. The
majority of kids rst cars were, like, Mercedes, she tells me scornfully. Her ride was
sometimes the back of a police car. She got
beaten up constantly. That was what was
attractive about punk rock youre wearing
a leather jacket with huge metal spikes on
it thats fucking literally armor, you know?
Like, studded bracelets that you could easily slip over your knuckles. She still thinks
of punk that way. The way I carry myself
through the world is, Im going to look like
the type of person you shouldnt fuck with.
Not that the pressure to pass as feminine
hasnt been over-fucking-whelming. She
stopped wearing makeup after someone referred to her as a young Alice Cooper. Shes
never sure whether to open a door or have
it opened for her. She titled one of her new
songs Delicate, Petite & Other Things Ill
Never Be. Ive had those moments in Starbucks where I place my order and theyre
like, OK, sir, I mean maam, I mean sir, I
mean maam, and youre like, Just give me
the fucking coffee. I dont fucking care.
Grace isnt sure where shell end up. She
used to have a step-by-step plan for her
transition, but now that seems naive and
too focused on physical aspects as opposed
to emotional ones. Still, shes back on hormones the most powerful drug and
has found that the injections she sticks in
her thigh every week or so work much better than the pills she was taking before.
Shell continue electrolysis to remove remaining traces of her beard. Shes pleased
the hormones have given her softer skin and
a noticeable bust (They say you end up X
number of sizes smaller than your mother,
she says with a laugh. My moms got the
goods). She wouldnt mind a brow reduction or a tracheal shave. Shes denitely nishing her suit of tattoos, covering her body
in images she nds beautiful. She still feels
like shes in process, and imagines that she
always will. This idea of what youre going
to transition into or who youre going to be,
she had said, thats not how youre going
to end up. You dont know who that person
youre going to transition into is. You just
have to see. For today, shell settle for getting inked and texting with Heather, trying
to see where that leads.
Around 2 a.m., Kenji puts down the gun
and calls it quits for the night, or rather, the
morning. The tattoo is slowly taking shape,
painfully becoming what its meant to be.
Like Grace, its not quite there yet. Tomorrow is another day.
RollingStone.com |

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

45

How
Trump Lost
His Mojo
Flailing on race and immigration, his campaign
in chaos, the candidate who made a brilliant farce
of the election is now nding the joke is on him

By Matt Taibbi
I L L US T R AT ION BY V IC TOR J U H A SZ

t first, it looks like the same old act. what

could be more natural than a coiffed and bellicose
Donald Trump, addressing a raucous crowd on a Friday afternoon in Manchester, New Hampshire, that
great white-frustration campaign Mecca he blew
through like a hurricane nine months ago during
primary season? It is terrific to be back in New
Hampshire! he begins. TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP! shouts the virtually all-white, mostly male crowd of fty- and sixty- and seventysomethings. Trumps speeches increasingly look like VFW raff le nights.
Its really a very special place for me, Trump goes on. This is where I
won my rst victory! The prepared remarks handed out by the campaign indicate that Trumps next line will begin with the antiseptic phrase
Over the next 74 days, we are all going to work very hard to win this
state. . . . But this is Donald Trump, sworn enemy of the prepared remark.

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He immediately jumps off-script to stay

on his favorite subject: himself.
If I didnt win here, who knows where
Id be, he says, mugging and humblebragging for the crowd. Maybe Id be
building buildings or something.
The audience roars. This is the Trump
they fell in love with. Its the same berconfident, self-congratulating gasbag
who bulldozed to the Republican nomination on the strength of long, unscripted
rants that were glorious tributes to every
teenager everywhere who has ever taken
a test without studying. Now the scriptless wonder is back. Or is he?
Hillary Clinton believes only in government of, by and for the powerful! he
booms, beginning a long rant on Crooked
Hillary. He speaks in harsh bursts of in-

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

vective that sound at first like the same

stream-of-consciousness turd clouds
Trump spat out in great volumes during
primary season.
But within a minute or two, hes muddling through a list of Clinton controversies
in suspiciously grammatical language, and
the air starts to leave the room.
He rails against the speaking fees paid to
Bill Clinton by companies like the Swedish
telecom giant Ericsson while it had business before Hillarys State Department,
even using the phrase the exemption of
telecom giant Ericsson.
He denounces moves to give foundation
donors suspicious reconstruction contracts
in Haiti and a seat on an intelligence advisory board. Then, saying Clinton ran the
State Department like a personal hedge
fund (a phrase that makes no sense, even
to people who hate hedge-fund managers),
Trump mentions another controversy involving a Russian uranium company. Then, still another, involving
the Swiss bank UBS.
Its a dead giveaway. The primary-season Donald Trump would
never have been able to remember ve things. Even more revealing is his rhetorical dismount: But
these examples, he shouts, are only
the tip of the Clinton-corruption
iceberg!
The real Donald Trump does not
speak in metaphors, let alone unmixed ones. The man who once famously pronounced I know words,
I have the best words scorched
through the primaries using the vocabulary of a signing gorilla (China
money bad!).
Last October, when Trump was an ascendant circus act whose every move
mesmerized the global media, the Boston Globe did a linguistic analysis of the
GOP field. The paper discovered that
loseric hopefuls like Jim Gilmore and
Mike Huckabee were speaking above the
10th-grade level. But Trump was crushing the competition using the language of
a fourth-grader, below all of his competitors, including Ben Carson (sixth grade)
and Ted Cruz (ninth grade).
It was a key to his success. In an era
when the public above all hates professional politicians, Trump came off as unrehearsed and genuine. He was a lout and
a monster, but at least he was ad-libbed.
All thats gone now. And its not just the
language thats different.
When he was in New Hampshire for the
primaries, he acted like a drunken stockbroker who fell off the end of a bar into a
presidential race. He made a mockery of
the most overcovered and self-serious political pageant on Earth. There was no comeon, no calculation, no ground game, nothing, just one unhinged rich person making

it all up as he went along, crapping on the

Jeb Bushes and Little Marcos for the
sheer scatological joy of it. Forget about
poll-tested speeches, it was a miracle he
wore pants on the stump.
That this tasteless rampage lifted him to
the Republican nomination was a perfect
farce predictable to anyone whos ever seen
The Producers. He acted like a man trying
to lose, and won. But now . . .
Now hes trying to win, and hes in freefall. Polls show he will lose to one of the
most unpopular Democratic nominees
ever. And Trump, whose very name is supposed to be synonymous with hedonism
and hoggish excess, looks in person like a
picture of misery.
Its obvious that reading someone elses
words depresses Trump to no end, which
is why hes never really done it. His fathers
eulogy in 1999 is reportedly the one ex-

The crowd whoops and hollers at rst as

Trump repeats the tried-and-true Republican trope that minorities are the victims
of patronizing Democratic Party politics.
Every policy Hillary Clinton supports is
a policy that has failed and betrayed communities of color! he begins, to cheers.
But the crowd grows more and more
quiet as Trump lingers on the theme of
black and Hispanic suffering.
Nearly four in 10 African-American
children live in poverty! he says. Fiftyeight percent of African-American youth
are not working! More than 2,700 people
have been shot in Chicago this year alone!
And he just keeps going. Theres no
punchline about the failure of personal responsibility in inner-city homes,
no lecture about the breakdown of twoparent families, no tirades against free
stuff. The crowd waits for a dog whistle
that never blows. Instead, Trump
just reads off one line after another
about suffering in minority communities, almost like thats the point or
something.
Trumps old stump speech was
a blunt appeal to the frustrations
of yover America. It was a promise from a would-be strongman to
clear out corrupt elites who, Trump
said, had fattened themselves with
donor cash as they shipped the regular workingmans job abroad, or
handed them to minorities climbing the walls.
In places like Manchester, a
moonscape of closed mills and industrial ruins, his furious throw the
bums out speeches used to bullseye every audience.
But general-election Trumps new
speech is like a bizarre Mad Libs exercise in which someone mass-inserted references to African-Americans where the
old white-misery applause lines used to be.
In the crowd, theres slow clapping, and
confusion. Finally, Trump wraps up by
making a bold promise about the future
under a Trump presidency.
African-American citizens and Latino
citizens, he promises, will have the time
of their life!
What is this, the musical climax to
Dirty Dancing? Has a stranger civil-rights
speech ever been delivered?
Shortly afterward, a mumbling and bewildered crowd les out of the Radisson
ballroom where the event had predictably been held (the Manchester Radisson will someday be preserved as a monument to presidential-campaign tedium).
Nobody complains or anything, but a
sense of letdown hangs over the whole
building.
What the hell just happened? What was
that speech about? Who was it for? And
who kidnapped the old Donald Trump?

Trump won the

primary acting like a
drunken stockbroker
who fell off the bar
into a presidential race.
Now, hes trying to
win, and in free-fall.

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ception. Those are the only prepared remarks hes ever delivered before now, to
my knowledge, says his biographer Wayne
Barrett. He talks all the time about how
he doesnt want to bore his audience. Hes
more worried about boring himself.
But hes boring himself a lot now, and
its hard not to wonder why. The man
whose primary season slogan might as
well have been Trump 16: I Dont Give
a F--k is not only carefully choosing his
words now but appears panicked and indecisive, overwhelmed by his seemingly
inevitable defeat.
Worse, hes sunk to the level of strategy
to try to revive his agging campaign, probably on the advice of some genius in the new
rogues gallery of crackpots and alt-right
psychopaths (led by bullfroggish Breitbart
chief Steve Bannon) he calls his inner circle.
And what strategy!
The Manchester crowd of sunburned
white guys in jean shorts and Celtics gear
looks on, mute and mystied, as Trump
moves from the Clinton Foundation rant
into his new theme: Donald Trump as civil-rights champion!

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

EVAN VUCCI/AP IMAGES

or most of the past year,

its been difficult to get a read on
what the Trump campaign was
thinking at any given moment,
because the Trump campaign
per se didnt exist. The campaign was basically a few overheated ganglia somewhere
behind Trumps eyes.
His process was random enough that
he himself often seemed surprised by
the amazing things that came out of his
mouth, sort of the way Eddie Van Halen
used to raise an eyebrow when he thought
he hit a particularly awesome note in a
solo. Trumps head tilted one way, and a tirade against Macys credit cards came out.
It tilted the other way, and Trump compared El Chapo to a vacuum cleaner.
Nobody had access to the inner workings of that, not reporters, not his staff, and
probably not even Trump himself. And yet
his poll numbers kept soaring. It was the
cheapest, most lightweight campaign organization ever. That he ended up securing
the Republican nomination in this manner
is an unsurpassable accomplishment in the
history of winging it.
But eventually he reached a stage of
the race where the whole enterprise simply got too big to manage entirely by
whim, and thats when he got into trouble.
Seat-of-pants Trump was an elusive, highenergy monstrosity, but doing-his-homework Trump was a disaster, to use one of
his favorite words.
He made terrible decision after terrible decision. After spending all primary
season savaging the Republican establish-

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

GREAT WHITE HOPE

If elected, Trump told a mostly white crowd
in August, African-American citizens and
Latino citizens will have the time of their life!

ment, he spent the months after he sewed

up the nomination alternately courting
and denouncing the likes of Paul Ryan,
John McCain and Kelly Ayotte.
Then, after bragging all year that he
didnt need anyones money, he suddenly
started sucking up to party bigwigs and
reportedly even red his thuggish campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, at
the behest of donors as well as his own
children.
He replaced Lewandowski with the similarly goonish political lifer Paul Manafort
Lewandowski and Manafort both look like
the kind of people youd nd smoking Pall
Malls in the trailer office of a repossessedcar lot. But Trump immediately began
straining against Manaforts efforts to get
him to stick to scripted speeches and stop
bashing other Republicans, the parents of
war dead, Mexican judges and other such
unsuitable targets for general-electionseason abuse.
Before long, the internal tensions leaked
to The New York Times, which in an August 13th article (Inside the Failing Effort
to Tame Donald Trumps Tongue) detailed
Manaforts fruitless efforts to get Trump to
focus and stop shooting himself in the face.
The article naturally infuriated the candidate, who then essentially ousted Manafort
and replaced him with Bannon, chief of
the far-right Breitbart media empire and

perhaps the only person in America with a worse reputation than

Trump for hotheadedness and choleric racism.
Trump would have been better
off just conceding the loss from
the outset and spending the general-election season going up in
ames, showing up at debates guzzling martinis and wearing a lampshade on his head, directing daily
tirades at cancer kids and nuns,
playing the election like an Andy
Kaufman prank.
Instead, he vacillated wildly, trying in one moment to look
presidential before reversing
course seconds later to purge his
staff and go on politically destructive rampages.
These manic-depressive episodes caused him to plummet in
the polls and ultimately left him
on the maximally absurd strategic track: trying to right the ship
and win back the political middle
under the direction of Bannon, an
infamous idiot, extremist and Internet conspiracy theorist whose
ex-wife claimed in court lings that
he didnt want [his kids] to go to school
with Jews. Trump as Eliza Doolittle and
Bannon as Professor Higgins is surely the
dumbest casting of Pygmalion ever tried.
By late August, the Trump-Bannon rebrand was well underway. The most obvious efforts were in the area of walking back
Trumps reputation as a racist, a word the
campaigns internal polls showed too many
people associated with the candidate.
Two days before the Manchester speech,
for instance, Trump surprised everyone by
telling his buddy Sean Hannity in a Foxtelevised town hall that he was open to
a softening on the immigration issue.
Everybody agrees we get the bad ones
out, Trump said. But when I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject . . . theyve said, Mr. Trump, I love you,
but to take a person that has been here
for 15 or 20 years and throw them and the
family out, its so tough, Mr. Trump.
TV audiences and journalists alike reacted in shock. Was this the same guy who
plugged a return to Eisenhowers lurid Operation Wetback mass-deportation program last year?
The next morning, long-suf fering
Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina
Pierson was on TV, trying to explain. Pierson is a puzzling choice for a lead mouthpiece. She would lose at Boggle to Rob
Gronkowski. She now had to reframe her
candidates apparent complete turnabout
on his signature issue. To a CNN panel,
Pierson said, He hasnt changed his position on immigration. He has changed the
words that he is saying.
RollingStone.com |

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

49

THREA

lyanne Conway were also at the meeting.

When it was over, members of the group
leaked details of the discussion to the
media, in particular to BuzzFeed, which in
a headline said that Trump was indicating
an openness to legalization.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven
Cheung coldly dismissed the report as
clickbait journalism. But then Trump
himself delivered his bizarre softening riff
at the Hannity event, seeming to conrm
BuzzFeeds report in every respect. What
the hell was going on?
Nobody had a clue. Among the reporters following Trump around the country,
there were only guesses. Trumps traveling press contingent is full of smart, hardworking folks but is tiny relative to campaigns past, between six and 12 reporters
on a given day. This is a symbol of another missed opportunity by the Trump campaign, which not only sidelined journalists
but banned some major outlets altogether.
Reporters traditionally traveled in huge
numbers with the candidate and the candidates staff, all on the same plane. Journalists drank with staffers at night and candidates periodically snuck into the press
section to show a little leg. Whether it was
John Kerry slinging footballs to hacks on
the tarmac, George Bush giving nicknames
to favored beat writers or Barack Obama
posing for photos with press-section rookies, past presidential candidates made an
effort to charm the media, no matter how
much they secretly despised it.
If Trump were smart, hed not only invite the press onto his plane, hed regularly
set up camp in the cheap seats with them,
plying them with booze and Cuban cigars while stuffing C-notes into their shirt
pockets, la Rodney Dangerelds Al Czervik character in Caddyshack. Trump is an
expert schmoozer, and its not like it costs
a lot to inuence the media. You can get
most reporters to chill out with a beer and
a box of cookies.

Charming the press was one of the few

cards Trump had to play in a race that was
always going to be an uphill climb. This
is particularly true since the media covering Hillary Clinton have been similarly shut out.
Instead, the press not only ies in a separate plane from Trump, but ies with logistical staff only. Youre well taken care of, but
you see no aides, no spokespeople. There
are virtually no avails with the candidate,
and if you want a comment or a clarication, you cant just walk up the aisle. Youve
got to e-mail a spokesperson halfway across
the country, who may or may not answer,
likely because he or she doesnt know the
answer either.
Thus when the immigration f lip-f lop
blew up, the Trump press corps had no
way to know what was happening. They
were told that a major address on immigration was coming in the next week or
so, but no one told them when that would
be. The situation was so absurd that when
Trump gave a speech at one stop that happened to mention E-Verify and an exitentry tracking system, some on the bus
ride wondered if that was the big unveil.
Hey, shouted one reporter, was that
the immigration speech?
Shrugs all around. Who the hell knew?

a t u r da y a f t e r no on, august 27th, the Iowa State Fairgrounds, outside Des Moines.
Trump is scheduled to make an
appearance here with a host of
Iowa politicians, including the states popculture heroine, and noted pig castrator,
Sen. Joni Ernst.
The small traveling press corps following the candidate glumly les out of a shuttle van into Jonis Roast n Ride, which
turns out to be a mud-oored barn packed
with yet another whooping-and-hollering
all-white crowd dressed in biker regalia,
mesh hats and ag-themed shirts.

THE GOOD,

WITH US
ISIS spokesman
reportedly killed
in northern Syria.

Potentially habitable
planet discovered...
just four light-years
away.

50 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

FARC, Colombia Cocks, not Glocks

cease-re takes protest of students
effect.
packing heat at
University of Texas.

U.S. government
to wind down use
of federal for-prot
prisons.

French
suspend ban
on burkinis.

Mark David
Chapman
denied parole
a ninth time.

Colin
Kaepernick

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM LEFT: YOUTUBE; M. KORNMESSER/ESO; RODRIGO ABD/AP IMAGES; SANDY CARSON/ZUMAPRESS.COM; JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES;
SAEED KHAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; NEW YORK STATE DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS; MICHAEL ZAGARIS/SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS/GETTY IMAGES

The panel burst out laughing. Pierson

tried to stay composed and brave her way
through the rest of the segment, but it was
like watching a kitten try to crawl out of a
wood-chipper. Within moments, Piersons
tortured Orwellian construction was rocketing around the Internet, among other
things inspiring thousands of Twitter jokes.
Famed swimsuit model Chrissy Teigen, for instance, acidly tweeted, Not
many of us could wake up and do what
@KatrinaPierson does every day with a
straight face. What an inspiration.
In a perfect mini set piece of the Trump
campaign, Pierson retweeted this sarcastic tribute, thinking it a compliment. Even
Trumps media expert is in a slump.
As for Trumps apparent ip-op on immigration, it technically wasnt much of a
change. As multiple observers have pointed out, Trump has all along occasionally
thrown out tidbits such as well keep the
good ones. From the start, on this and on
virtually every other issue, Trump has always tried to have it both ways.
Moreover, as Alex Nowrasteh of the
Cato Institute points out, Trumps written platform doesnt draw a hard line on
the issue. Not that Trump is the kind of
guy who cares what his position paper
says, Nowrasteh says, but theres nothing in it that insists that all undocumented immigrants have to go. Nowrastehs
theory is that the softening story was
prompted by wishful thinking on the part
of mainstream Republicans who are trying to make Trump more palatable. The
idea of Trump changing positions is being
pushed, he says, by groups of Republicans
who want to support him but are turned
off by his rhetoric.
Indeed, just days before Trumps town
hall with Hannity, the candidate held a
Saturday meeting at Trump Tower in New
York with his newly created Hispanic Advisory Council of Latino Trump supporters. Bannon and campaign manager Kel-

Trumps Suicide Squad

TOP, FROM LEFT: CAROLYN KASTER/AP IMAGES; CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS/ALAMY, 2. BOTTOM, FROM LEFT: GABRIEL BOUYS/AFP/GETTY
IMAGES; EVERETT COLLECTION; SANTA CLARA COUNTY SHERIFFS OFFICE/AP IMAGES; MARK ZALESKI/AP IMAGES; ANTHONY WEINER;
HVARD KJNTVEDT/MILJDIREKTORATET/SNO; ROBERT F. BUKATY/AP IMAGES; WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN/GETTY IMAGES

To boost his appeal, the GOP nominee has assembled a team of alt-right extremists

Katrina Pierson

Steve Bannon

Kellyanne Conway

The PR pro: Trump hasnt

changed his position on
immigration. He has changed
the words that he is saying.

The Breitbart exec, who did

not want [his kids] to go to
school with Jews, is cleaning up Trumps racist image.

Trumps female-voter expert

is opposed to women serving
in the military and to abortion even in cases of rape.

Its a hardcore audience. Imagine the set

of Hee Haw mixed with a Strom Thurmond
rally, and you get the idea. If Colin Kaepernick walked in here by mistake, he would
probably be skeletonized in seconds.
As the press les in, there is some bemused speculation as to whether or not
Trump would have the stones to pull his
minority outreach speech in this particular setting. No way, whispers one reporter, looking around. Not here.
When the candidate is finally introduced, hes late he seems always to be
late and is alone. Trump rarely travels
with his wife or children anymore. Stories that have surfaced about inconsistencies in Melania Trumps own immigration
history have raised the specter of possible
legal problems for the candidates wife.
Perhaps because of this, shes been less at
his side lately.
Whatever the reason, the man who in
primary season was often introduced as a
beaming patriarch surrounded by adoring

heir-spawn now seems sullen and diminished when he takes the stage.
In Iowa, he seems particularly off.
Dressed in a blue blazer, a white buttondown shirt with a high open collar, and a
white make america great again ballcap pulled down practically to his eyeballs,
he looks stiff and lifeless from a distance,
like a Pez-dispenser version of himself.
He also looks old. Its an impression enhanced by the terrible echoing acoustics
in the barn, which make him sound like a
man calling out Bingo numbers at a retirement home.
Nothing means more to me-me-me . . .,
he begins, than working to make our party
the home of the African-American votevote-vote . . . once again-again-again. . . .
He goes on to give the same bizarre
speech about the troubles of African-Americans hes been giving for a week already,
adding a line about the shooting death in
Chicago of Nykea Aldridge, the 32-year-old
cousin of NBA star Dwyane Wade.

In classic Trump-like fashion, hes already in the soup on this issue. Misspelling Wades rst name, Trump had earlier
tweeted, Dwayne Wades cousin was just
shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. AfricanAmericans will VOTE TRUMP!
Only Donald Trump can pivot from the
murder of a beloved sports stars relative
into a Vote for me! slogan in less than 24
hours. Not that it was a surprise: This is the
same candidate who tweeted, Appreciate
the congrats for being right on Islamic terrorism, while the bodies of mass-murder
victims in Orlando were still warm.
Back in the barn, Trump mentions
Dwyane Wades cousin again and then
plunges into an even more protracted and
detailed plea for the black vote. If Bernie Sanders had won the nomination and
had made an attempt to change his antibusiness image through a series of bankerfriendly speeches delivered to undergrads
at Oberlin and UC-Berkeley, it would feel
something like this.
Here, Trump lays out two policy arguments for that theoretical poor inner-city
African-American voter who would somehow be listening to this speech, delivered
to a crowd of white bikers and farmers in
an Iowa barn.
Argument one: If your life sucks already,
and as a white billionaire I can only assume it does, why not try something new?
To those suffering, I say, vote for Donald
Trump and I will x it, he says. What do
you have to lose?
Argument two is the stunner, a breathtaking attempt to pull all the irreconcilable rhetorical threads of his campaign
together. There is another civil-rights
issue we need to talk about, and thats the
issue of immigration enforcement, he
says. Every time an African-American
citizen . . . loses their job to an illegal immigrant, the rights of that American citizen have been violated.

AGAINST US
Ryan Lochte
joins Dancing
With the
Stars.

Fear of Zorro
impersonator,
loud doors cause
LAX panic.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

Stanford rapist
Brock Turner
released from jail.

EpiPen
price hike

Anthony
Weiner
sexting redux

Lightning strike
kills 323 reindeer
in Norway.

Maine Gov. Paul LePage:

People of color are the
enemy.

RollingStone.com |

Alt-right

R ol l i n g S t o n e |

51

Yes, lets build a wall, but lets do it to help

African-Americans! Its alt-right meets
civil rights! The best crossover hit since
Walk This Way!
Theres muted applause, but also lots
of glazed eyes staring up at the stage, not
knowing how to respond. Still, after the
speech, a local real estate developer named
Don Whitham gives Trumps AfricanAmerican outreach the thumbs-up. The
Republicans took them out of slavery. And
were trying to do it again, he says. Were
trying to take em out of enserfment.
He adds, voice breaking with emotion,
Theyre just being used by the damn politicians, thats all it amounts to!
Apart perhaps from his most hardcore
fans (and the occasional Wall Street Journal columnist), nobody seriously believes
Trump has been trying to reach out to African-American voters. If he had, he might
have spoken to some actual black
people, and taken a position on an
issue black audiences care about.
That he ended a week of minority outreach speeches pulling a crisp
zero percent approval rating among
black voters zero percent! speaks
to the absurdity of taking his outreach campaign at face value.
Instead, the consensus is that
Trumps whole effort was geared toward reassuring moderate Republicans that he isnt a racist. Bedrock
level for a Republican is 45 percent
Trump is at 40 percent, says Simon
Rosenberg, a longtime Democratic
strategist and president of the New
Democrat Network. I can imagine
Kellyanne Conway going through
the numbers with him and just saying, Look, if you dont do something, youre
looking at the biggest loss in party history. Basically, at this stage, Rosenberg concludes, hes playing to avoid a blowout.
The only problem with this is, well, everything. If Trump was going to think strategically, the time to do it was from the very
beginning, before he insulted menstruating women, the pope, Muslims, Mexicans,
Whoopi Goldberg, Ronda Rousey, Carly
Fiorinas face, Germany, and hundreds of
other groups and individuals.
You do it before you do schlock impersonations of Chinese businesspeople (We
want deal!), before you retweet a bogus
meme claiming 81 percent of white homicide victims were killed by blacks (the real
number is 15 percent), before you mimic
people with neurological disorders, and before you suggest that gun enthusiasts might
take a shot at your opponent.
And you denitely do it before you destroy the modern Republican Party by
birthing into the mainstream an aggressive white-nationalist movement, whose
entire identity is centered around walling
itself off from Americas future multicultur-

al majority. In other words, you do it before

you tear down a 162-year-old political organization to replace it with a smaller, more
radicalized, more automatically-losing coalition not after.

t the end of august, the

campaign made a surprise announcement of a trip to Mexico, and following a year of unrestrained abuse of Mexicans,
Trump shockingly ended up meeting with
Mexican President Enrique Pea Nieto.
Trump spent that meeting meekly tiptoeing back a greatest-hits list of blustery
primary-season remarks. Having spent
all of last year promising that he would
build a wall and make Mexico pay for it,
he let Nieto tell him to his face that Mexico would not in fact pay for the wall. When
asked about the wall, Trump said, We dis-

He added a new plan to create safe

zones in the Middle East (to be paid for by
Persian Gulf countries, of course) for relocating Muslims turned back by extreme
vetting. The rollout was an immediate hit
with former Klan leader David Duke, who
called it an excellent speech.
The Bannon-Trump plan appears to be
to run simultaneously as a statesman and
a nationalist lunatic. Either theyre trying
to drive their numbers down to zero as part
of a kinky performance-art scheme, or the
campaign is in complete chaos.
The thing is, virtually every politician
who runs for office for the rst time loses,
says Rosenberg. These rich guys dont realize how nuanced a game it is. In their business, you get 10 percent margins, youre a
huge success. In our business, you need 51
percent margins. Its tough. And they dont
get it until its too late.
The presidential campaign is the
ultimate exploration of self. If you
make it as far as the general election,
you become one of the most analyzed
personalities on Earth. Merciless reporters track down every relative,
business partner, love interest and
enemy you ever had, and pundits and
armchair psychiatrists alike scrutinize every sentence you utter.
Making it to victory requires an
unshakeable inner confidence beyond the capacity of most people.
Most politicians get around this by
being walking sales pitches instead
of people, appearing as two-dimensional cardboard cutouts representing slates of party positions, their
personalities merely serving as idiosyncratic background to the corporate presentation. In times of crisis, they
can cling to the party line.
Trump is different. He ran as a partysmasher, a man among elitist mice, a traitor
to the establishment who came down from
corrupt Olympus to save the common people. I know the game better than anyone,
he told crowds. Ive been on the other side.
As a salacious high-velocity burn on a
corrupted campaign process, he was initially a brilliant, if repulsive, success. He
charged through the primary season like
a pig on strychnine and won the nomination not because of who he was, but what
he wasnt: a politician.
Therefore, uniquely perhaps in the history of presidential candidates, Trumps
success hinged on his ability to stay true to
himself. The promise of his campaign was
Trump the man, all day, every day. If his
voters wanted a politician, or even a nonpolitician who thought before he spoke, theyd
have chosen one. Who could have foreseen
wed end up with the one thing more ridiculous than Donald Trump running for president: Donald Trump running for president
and trying to be smart about it.

Trump, the oncebeaming patriarch

surrounded by adoring
heir-spawn, now looks
old, stiff and lifeless,
like a Pez-dispenser
version of himself.

52 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

cussed the wall, we didnt discuss payment.

On NAFTA, which he promised to scrap in
an effort to restore American jobs, Trump
now promised only to keep jobs in our
hemisphere. Then the man who said Mexico was sending killers and rapists over the
border on purpose called it a great honor
to be invited to the presidential residence
by Nieto, whom he described as a friend.
Trump won the nomination by being the
cruelest, most balls-out build-a-wall hardliner. Now he was talking like Jeb Bush on
immigration and Bill Clinton on NAFTA.
What was the point of all that craziness
and rancor and destruction? Who needs
Donald Trump playing Jeb Bush, especially since the actual Jeb Bush might have
had a chance of beating Hillary Clinton?
Then Trump zoomed up to Arizona and
nally gave his big immigration speech,
doubling down on his most extreme rhetoric as if he hadnt just been south of the
border, prostrating himself before the
Mexican president. Mexico will pay for
the wall, he boomed. A hundred percent.
They dont know it yet, but theyre going
to pay for it.

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

The Pros
Theyve covered the stories, explained the complicated issues and been a reassuring
voice during tough times. They are the Pros. The newsroom is their home.
They guide us through the events of our lives. We feel like we know them.
And after all weve been through together . . . we do.

Reviews

Eat some shrooms,

Maybe have a good cry, about you.
See some colors.
Light hang-glide off the moon.
Fr a nk Oce a n, Seig fried

Frank
Oceans
Dreamy
R&B
Odyssey
The singer takes pop
to an altered state on
a long-awaited LP that
lives up to the hype

Frank Ocean
Blonde Boys Dont Cry

HHHH

BY JONAH WEINER

Even before Frank Ocean fell

quiet for the better part of
four years, leaving us to wonder when if? hed ever muster a follow-up to his stunning
2012 debut, Channel Orange,
the New Orleans-born, L.A.based avant-R&B savant was
one of musics most elusive gures. He made his name, after
all, by defying prevailing rules
of genre and sexuality. So its
tting that the rollout for his
new album unfolded as a series of riddles and winks. In
late August, after several blown
release dates, a bare-bones
video stream of Ocean building a staircase appeared on his
website. That was followed by a
dreamlike visual album (Endless) and a pop-up shop where
fans could buy a zine bearing a
CD with the follow-up to Channel Orange, titled Blonde.
Amazingly, it was all worth
the wait. On the appropriately
trippy Blonde (spelled blond

Illustration by Nigel Bucha na n

RollingStone.com

| R ol l i n g S t o n e |

55

Reviews

LISTEN NOW!
Hear key tracks from
these albums at
RollingStone.com/albums.

56

M.I.A.

AIM Interscope HHH

The global pop diva keeps
kicking her radical gospel

Alabama
shakes:
Janeway

The Broken
Bones VintageSoul Adventure

A decade-plus into Maya Arulpragasams run as globalist

pops top lefty renegade, her
radical patter is sounding a bit
ho-hum (Borders: Whats up
with that? she wonders on her
fth album). But M.I.A.s skill
as a buoyant beat-rider remains
intact (the glassily thumping
Visa turns border crossing
into a party), and there are moments on AIM when the political and personal blur evocatively: Humming higher than a
drone/Doves cry/Are you going
home alone? she sings against
the South Asian-avored hiphop skitter of Bird Song, ipping a Prince quote into a comeon perfect for an era when war
can be as darkly ambiguous as
JON DOLAN
desire itself.

Southern R&B revivalists second LP proves

the modern power of a classic sound
St. Paul and the Broken Bones Sea of Noise

Dawes

Records LLC

Were All Gonna Die

HUB HHH

HHH

From Frank Ocean to Blood Orange, were

in a golden age of expansive R&B meaning the bar is high, even for old-school revivalists like Alabamas St. Paul and the Broken
Bones. So its gratifying to hear them step
up their vision on their second LP. Were just crumbling
light . . . in a sea of noise, pleads leader Paul Janeway in the
albums opening moments, cryptically riffing off Winston
Churchill over electronic swirls, hallucinated harp arpeggios and heavenly choirs. The song Crumbling Light Posts
functions as a recurring theme throughout a record that
otherwise sticks to more traditional rock & soul territory. It
makes a convincing pitch for the enduring power of a classic sound, which the band delivers with startling authority.
The settings are studied and potent: Midnight on the
Earth conjures Sly Stone funk with a soaring brass nale.
Ill Be Your Woman nods to Princes If I Was Your Girlfriend via Al Green, with strings arranged by Stax session vet Lester Snell. All I Ever Wonder matches Beatles
vocal ourishes with vintage Memphis Horns punch, and
Burning Rome gets all Ouija with Otis Redding re. On
every track, Janeway is a History Channel of R&B vocalizing, thrilling and powerful. Hell be one worth watching
WILL HERMES
as he moves through the present.

HHHHH Classic | HHHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor

Country-rock nice guys go after

a slicked-up Seventies ideal

On their four previous albums,

Dawes were SoCal country-rock
aesthetes. Now, theyve slicked
up their Seventies ideal, with
a big FM-radio sound built on
string sections, processed vocals, glockenspiels and vintage
synths. Singer-guitarist Taylor Goldsmith is too nice a guy
to play the role of mirror-shade
cynic; he calls L.A. an air-conditioned town where your life
is lived out hunched over your
phone. But the bands breezy
harmonies (aided by pals from
Jim James to Alabama Shakes
Brittany Howard) on songs like
Picture of a Man and For No
Good Reason are a perfect complement to his gentle malaise.
JONATHAN BERNSTEIN

Ratings are supervised by the editors of R OLLING S TONE .

GRIFFIN LOTZ

on the albums cover), dizziness

is a common sensation. The
album is oblique, smolderingly
direct, forlorn, funny, dissonant
and gorgeous: a vertiginous
marvel of digital-age psychedelic pop. On the lead single,
Nikes, Ocean wraps his voice
in woozy distortion and pivots
in the space of just two lines
from blunt loverman braggadocio (If you need dick, I got you)
to mournfulness over Trayvon
Martins killing (That nigga
look just like me). The mood
oscillates in this way from light
to dark, exultant to somber, following a weird logic available
only to Ocean, yet achieving a
grand sweep nonetheless.
References to altered states
recur, and off beat love songs
abound; see Pink + White, in
which Ocean safeguards private memories within inscrutable abstractions: In the wake of
a hurricane/Dark skin of a summer shade/Nosedive in the ood
lines/Tall tower, milk crate.
The music is sparer than it was
on Channel Orange more mature, jammed less feverishly
with ideas but adventurous all
the same. Songs change shape
subtly, rarely ending up in the
same place they began. On the
standout Nights, a sunny rock
lick segues into shimmering
keyboards that morph in turn
into a smoky piano section, at
which point Ocean breaks into
a rapperly singsong that evokes
Drake in its deft amphibiousness. Ocean works in a black
pop idiom, but this is R&B a
label hes chafed under only in
the most elastic sense.
Channel Orange made history with palpably personal love
songs addressed to men. Here,
Ocean leaves the range of his
desires provocatively ambiguous. I dont cut bitches no more,
but your bitch my exception, he
sings on Futura Free. Theres
something radical about that,
and it reaffirms Oceans greatest strength: He refuses to be
pinned down.

Vince Staples

Prima Donna ARTium/Def Jam HHH

Reluctant hip-hop hero vents his survivors
guilt on a bleepy, banging EP

Midway through this seven-song EP, Vince

Staples sits in a hotel room looking at a
loaded .44 and thinking about making
Van Gogh patterns on the wall with his
brains. Then housekeeping knocks on the
door. Tryin to get my head straight, he
raps with lazy breathlessness. She tryin
to get the bed straight. Staples is a thirdgeneration gangbanger from Long Beach
who turned to hip-hop as safe space. A series of mixtapes led to last years Summertime 06, two CDs of explosive rap minimalism that weighed the consequences of
gangsta life. On Prima Donna, he stares
down his survivors guilt with black humor
and black rage. The music is as bleepy as it
is banging (James Blake produces on two
tracks), and touchstones include Andre
3000, James Joyce and Jay Gatsby. I dont
need a shrink, I need a hit song, Staples
raps in Loco. Hes playing thats the last
JOE LEVY
thing this reluctant hero needs.

The Head and the Heart

Signs of Light Warner Bros. HHH

Folky Seattle band hulks up its sound
and tries to hold on to its musical identity

Seattle folk-rock artisans the Head and the

Heart have always been admirably honest about their rustic notions of musicality, celebrating uncluttered craft, homey detail and vrit revelation. You can still hear
it on their third LP drawn to that sorta
library magic, they sing beautifully over
an acoustic weave. Yet Signs of Light also
sees them beef up their sound with sweeping rock guitars and radio-aware production that can sometimes feel overblown
(see the Mumford-size stomp of the title
track). Things work better when they balance the impulse to hulk things up with
their natural traditionalist intimacy; on
Take a Walk, stately jangle backs vocalist
Jon Russells lyrics about processing relationship stress in real time, and the drolly
sweet False Alarm could be a mountainscented lost track from Fleetwood Macs
Mirage a throwback that feels cozy and
JON DOLAN
stylish at the same time.

57

Reviews
Update: From the Vaults

Britney Spears
Glory RCA HHH

Britney revives her robo-perv

best self on a zzy return to form

The Raw Early Days

of Three Rock Giants

hese new collections revolve (in different ways) around the

world-altering frenzy of early rock
& roll, a moment when screams and
guitars crossed boundaries of race and gender, and the Earth shook. Certainly thats the
way it feels as the Beatles segue from She
Loves You to a cover of Little Richards Long
Tall Sally in the newly restored and expanded version of the long-out-of-print Live at the
Hollywood Bowl, recorded across
The Beatles,
nights in 1964 and 1965 and splic
1964
into a seamless rush of manic lov
The roar of the 17,000 assembled
The Beatles
swells and ebbs for nearly a minLive at the Hollywood Bowl
ute as Paul McCartney thanks
HHHHH
the crowd. Can you hear me?
Led Zeppelin The Complete
he asks over the screams before
BC Sessions HHHH
playing Ticket to Ride. In retur
White
ck White Acoustic Recordings
comes the pure sound of power c
-2016 HHHH
necting to pleasure.
Power and pleasure seesaw for more t an
Black Flag are about the only thing missing
three hours in Led Zeppelins Complete BBC
Sessions. This is Zeppelin from 1969 to 1971,
from Jack Whites Acoustic Recordings 19982016, a compilation of tracks from the White
working through the core material of their
Stripes and Whites solo work that dials down
rst four albums (and taking swaggering side
the punk guitar but otherwise makes history
trips through blues and rockabilly classics).
a playground. These tunes slip from blues to
Eight newly unearthed songs nearly a full
country to gospel to Sixties rock and back in
CD, including the never-before-issued boogie
a blink. Gems abound: An unreleased White
romp Sunshine Woman have been added
Stripes track, City Lights, revolves around
to the 1997 release. The songs are familiar,
an impossibly fragile acoustic-guitar gure;
but the protean variations of these renditions
a remix of the solo song Just One Drink
provide fresh jolts of Zeppelins blend of brucomes on like a country-honk take on Buddy
tality and delicacy. A March 1969 CommuHolly. Youll miss the electric buzz blowing
nication Breakdown starts off with ringing
the melancholy away, but this foot-stomping
chords like the Who; in April 1971, the same
JOE LEVY
music does the job.
song rages like Black Flag.

58 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

Bastille

Wild World Virgin HHH

New Brit-pop heroes swing for
the fences on second LP

Its no shock that Brit pops new

crown princes are named for a
Parisian fortress: Since 2013s
international hit Pompeii,
Bastilles sights have clearly
been set beyond the U.K. Their
second proper LP marries
20th-century rock songcraft
and EDM-pop vernacular with
an eye on stadium rocking and
dance-oor remixes. The band
can feel hampered by its populist ambition, though, which
means the best stuff here moves
toward the intimate. On Two
Evils, frontman Dan Smith
and bandmate Will Farquarson strip down to just voice and
plucked guitar, with arresting
results. Its the most humanscale moment on an album that
could use a few more. WILL HERMES

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

FROM TOP: RON RAFAELI; DAILY EXPRESS/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES; JO MCCAUGHEY

Led
Zeppelin

Glory is a welcome comeback

from a pop visionary nobody
expected to stick around for a
third album, let alone a ninth.
Last time out, on 2013s Britney Jean, our girl was way outside her comfort zone, focusing
on breakup ballads. Here, she
goes back to the zzy electrostomp she does best. Clumsy
is a minimal dance-pop throb,
lavished with digital hand claps,
in-the-red synth fuzz and Britneys robo-perv moans. And
even when shes turning herself into a human mirror ball on
gems like Invitation and Coupure lectrique, that signature
droid-soul glitch-twang in her
voice speaks to the bored, readyto-explode disaster queen in all
ROB SHEFFIELD
of us.

Movies
By Peter Travers

An Oscar for Hanks?

Sully

The Light
Between Oceans

Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart

Directed by Clint Eastwood

FROM TOP: KEITH BERNSTEIN/WARNER BROS. PICTURES; DAVI RUSSO/DISNEY; APPLE CORPS LTD.

Love on
the Rocks

HHH

Michael Fassbender,
Alicia Vikander

its e asy to get the

wrong idea about Sully, with
Tom Hanks starring as Capt.
Chesley Sully Sullenberger,
the hero pilot who ditched his
disabled plane on the icy waters of the Hudson River on
January 15th, 2009, and saved
the lives of all 155 passengers.
If youre thinking award-chasing biopic crapola, dont. Clint
Eastwood doesnt direct that
shit (did you see American
Sniper?). And Hanks is too
blisteringly true as an actor to
play a one-dimensional headline. Sully earns your respect
by finding the fear and doubt
inside a man whod never accept being defined as a hero.
About three minutes after
US Airways Flight 1549 took
off from New Yorks LaGuardia Airport, a strike by Canada geese caused both engines
to fail. Sully turned to co-pilot Jeffrey Skiles (the excellent
Aaron Eckhart): Could they
return to LaGuardia or go to
nearby Teterboro Airport without crashing? With 208 sec-

Directed by Derek Cianfrance

HH

Hanks relives
a pilots
nightmare.

onds to decide, Sully picked the

Hudson, near a spot where rescue units could move in quickly. They did, in 24 minutes.
Eastwood, using IMA X
cameras, pins you to your seat.
But its the aftermath of the
Miracle on the Hudson that
interests screenwriter Todd
Komarnicki. The public adores
Sully. But unnerving visions
of what might have been keep
him up nights. His wife, Lorrie
(Laura Linney), phones in her
assurances. But the National
Transportation Safety Board
questions him relentlessly. The

actual hearings took place 18

months after the script says
they did. Why the rejiggering?
It goes to the heart of the lms
(and Eastwoods) sympathy
for the value of Sullys 40-year
pilot experience over computer guesswork.
Sully is a personal lm for
Eastwood and Hanks, who
should be up for a third Oscar.
With no ashbacks or showoff
speeches, Hanks creates a
moving portrait of a man in
full. Heres a movie that deserves the three words Sully
prizes most: job well done.

When the Beatles Ruled the World

Eight Days a Week
Directed by Ron Howard

HHH
nothi ng r ev el atory
here. But director Ron Howard
catches the exhilarating kick
of Beatlemania as the band
toured 15 countries from 1963
to 1966. By the end, it became
quite complicated, but at the
beginning, things were really
simple, says Paul McCartney.
True, that. In fresh interviews,
McCartney and Ringo Starr
offer comments that Howard
joins to archival observations

S e p t e m b e r 22 , 2 016

from John Lennon and George

Harrison. There are hints at
what soured the Beatles on
live performance (crowd frenzy, crappy amplif ication)
and pushed them toward in-

studio experimentation. The Fab

Four claim their
bond got them
through, wondering how Elvis did
it a lone. Sweet
The
trumps bitter as
Beatles
we revel in the
reect.
youthful sights and
sounds that peaked
at Shea Stadium in 1965. Howard backgrounds the doc in an
era of civil rights, but he keeps
coming back to the music, and
the bands delight in making it.
Good move. Its a joy forever.

HHHH Classic | HHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor

derek cianfr ance makes

emotionally naked films (see
Blue Valentine and The Place
Beyond the Pines). The Light
Between Oceans feels different
and less spontaneous, owing to
the sappy source material, the
2012 bestseller by M.L. Stedman. In his first major-studio
film, Cianfrance tells the postWorld War I love story of a lighthouse keeper, Tom (Michael

Fassbender,
Vikander

Fassbender), and his wife, Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who live

in romantic isolation. After
two miscarriages, Isabel is inconsolable. Then a small boat
washes in with a dead man and
a live baby girl. Isabel begs Tom
to bury the presumed father
and take the child. Tom simmers with guilt. Isabel glows,
until a widow (Rachel Weisz)
claims the baby and accuses
Tom of offing her husband.
Whew! As storms batter the
lighthouse (the lm was shot in
a remote stretch of New Zealand), Tom and Isabel are pummeled by emotions life mirroring wild nature. Too much?
You bet. But Fassbender (Magneto in X-Men) and Vikander
(an Oscar winner for The Danish Girl), who fell in love during the making of the lm, give
the roles their considerable all
and hold us in their grip. The
movie, sad to say, cant keep its
head above water.

59

BJARKE INGELS
[Cont. from 41] caught by surveillance
cameras apparently leaving a noose on
BamBrogans office chair); Hyperloop responded with a countersuit alleging BamBrogan and his co-litigants had been conspiring to form a rival company. Both suits
are still pending.
I thought those Hyperloop boys seemed
a bit unstable, Ingels says with a chuckle
when we meet at VIA 57 West. Still, BIG remains contracted as the projects architect.
In Vegas, Ingels had been xated on how
the stations might look, using New Yorks
Penn Station as a benchmark of the exact
thing that we dont want a claustrophobic,
labyrinthine shopping mall. Its so bad that
one of Americas greatest architects, Louis
Kahn, died on the toilet there!
Another of the main design challenges is
psychological: How do you make the passenger experience of being shot through
a tube at incredibly high speeds not completely terrifying? Windows, to make the
pods less claustrophobic and coffinlike,
would be the obvious solution, if not for the
problem of the tube itself. Jakob Lange, a
BIG partner, had come up with an elegant
solution: If you cut 10-centimeter holes in
the tube every 10 meters, and if you also

cut windows in the pod, and if the pod was

moving at 300 meters per second, the images from the outside world would register
with the passenger at 30 frames per second
the speed of a lm. It would be seamless,
Ingels said. Like peeking through a keyhole in your door.
Whatever happens with Hyperloop, Ingels remains perpetually on the move. Between our meetings in Las Vegas and New
York, hed spent much of his summer in Europe: Venice, for the Architectural Biennale; London, for the opening of his Serpentine Galleries pavilion; Copenhagen,
visiting his family (and also, impulsively,
buying a houseboat). Though he ed Copenhagen because it felt stiing, he nds
comfort in returning to a place where your
entire gene pool is within 10 kilometers.
In the courtyard of VIA 57 West, Ingels looks around at the sloping garden
paths and says, I think this is going to take
hold quite well. Two months ago, there was
nothing here. Over the next couple of years,
coming back is going to be more and more
fun. Pulling out his smartphone, he calls
up the trailer for Marvels upcoming Doctor
Strange movie, in which his building is featured prominently in the opening shot. He
smiles, and then he talks about various little tweaks hed been forced to make over the

course of the design and construction process, how as soon as you change one little
ingredient, you have this cascade of consequences that you have to deal with, like the
buttery effect, but for Ingels also a means
to escape the status quo.
Do you know Philip K. Dicks denition
of science ction? he asks. He says science ction is not a space opera, although it
often happens in space, and its not a story
from the future, although it often happens
in the future. He says science ction is a
story where the plot is triggered by some
form of innovation. Often its technological innovation, but it can be political, social, whatever. And the story is a narrative
exploration of the potential of that innovation, of that idea. And not only the writer
but the reader can actually think along and
imagine how would our world be different
if this one thing is different.
So you can say that science ction is the
medium where you do that in a narrative
way, Ingels continues. But architecture is
a discipline where you have the possibility
to actually do it. All of Hells Kitchen is the
way it is. The whole world is the way it is.
And we do this one thing different. Ingels
raises his hand with a conductors ourish.
And what are the consequences for everything around us?

60

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THE
LAST
WORD

Noel Gallagher
The singer-guitarist on keeping his kids humble, why his
mom is his hero, and being unafraid to piss off fans
Whats your favorite city?
I have four. London, because Ive lived there for 23 years. Then
New York. I think the terrorist attacks in 2001 shook the world so
much because everybody whos been there falls in love with it. Buenos Aires, because the people are unbelievable, and my best shows
have happened there. And then Manchester, because its where Im
from, and it still feels like home plus, Ill get my throat cut next
time Im back there if I dont mention it.
Whats the most Manchester thing about you?
My accent. It was the rst thing that Americans ever noticed
about me when I came to the U.S. I was subtitled on MTV, which
I found highly amusing. Im so proud to be a Mancunian.
If I was from Buckinghamshire, I dont even think
Id be in a band. Manchester gave me a great musical education: New Order, the Smiths, Happy
Mondays, Joy Division and the Stone Roses
were all from there great bands that gave
me something to aspire to.
What are the most important rules that you
live by?
Know who you are. Be proud of who you
are and fucking own it. A happy wife is a
happy house, and a happy house equals a
happy life. Always tell your children, and I
do this regularly, You know youre a fucking
young guy, youre great and handsome, but youll
never be as fucking cool as me, ever. So get out on
your fucking skateboard or go play fucking football with your brother.
What do they say when you say that?
They go, We fucking know, Oasis, blah-blah whatever. So just be yourself, never take any of the good
parts about what you do for granted, and stay focused
on your work. If your work is good, then you dont
have to be. I dont have to be nice to people because they dig my music thats where the relationship ends.
So what do you tell people when they ask you
for seles?
I just tell them to go fuck themselves.
Im not beholden to anybody with a
camera phone. I dont give a fuck if
they think Im an asshole, either. I say,
Im fucking busy here buying underwear. Some people get offended, but
I dont live my life to have my picture
taken by fans. Im not asking them
to buy records. They buy them because they like them.
What do you do to relax?
My life is wrapped up in touring, writing, watching football and my family. To
relax, I play guitar. But the older Ive got, Ive
realized its great to go away on a holiday with
my family to some far-ung place and not bring a
guitar, and lie on a beach and just listen to the
fucking waves crashing.

62 | R ol l i n g S t o n e |

RollingStone.com

Whats the most indulgent purchase youve ever made?

I had a car made once, a custom 1967 Jaguar convertible. It cost
me 110,000. I got it built to my specications. The fucking drivers seat only ts me. At the time, I couldnt drive, but I thought,
By the time they nish this fucking car, I will easily have learned
to drive. Its going to take two years.
Two years after I paid for it, the car turns up at my house and
I had completely forgotten about the driving lessons, and to this
day I cannot drive. If anybody would like to buy it, I will gladly
sell it to them.
What are your favorite books?
On the Road. The speed and the rhythm of the writing
is unbelievable. Its got that slightly hipster, rappy thing
Bob Dylan did on Subterranean Homesick Blues.
I rst read it because Dylan was going on about
it. The last book I read was about the British spy
Kim Philby, who defected to the Russians during the Cold War. I love all the Second World
War and Cold War stuff. I nd that period of the
then-superpowers maneuvering for world domination fascinating and how close the world
came to somebody pushing the button.
Who are your heroes?
Musically, the Beatles. You can still be in the
bathroom and Strawberry Fields will come
on, and something will hit you like youre listening to it for the rst time. Theres Paul Weller [of
the Jam], whos become a really good friend and
a neighbor. U2 have also become friends and
neighbors of mine. Growing up, The Joshua
Tree was really inspiring because it was
such simple songwriting.
My personal heroes are my wife, because shes fucking gorgeous. Through
some mad trick of fate I ended up marrying her after meeting in a nightclub, and we have two kids. My teenage
daughter is a hero because shes overcome adversity and shes cool as fuck. My
mum, because she brought Liam Gallagher
up. I mean, fuck me.
How often do you get asked about an Oasis
reunion?
Every day of the week. People say, Youll denitely
re-form you will, and Im just like, Thats so fucking
rude. They try to Jedi-mind-trick me.
There are rumors that Liam is trying to re-form the band
without you.
Id fucking pay to see that. Thatd be fucking interesting. We
should start a rumor that Im going to do it without Liam and Im
gonna use a hologram like they did with Tupac
at Coachella. Look, to be honest, I dont need
the money.
Lets say they come to you in 10 years and offer
you $50 million.
Oh, Im in. Im fucking in.
INTERVIEW BY ANDY GREENE

Illustration by Mark Summers

Its the beauty of a well-made choice.