rollingstone13422020 by baranovmir2

AUGUST 2020 ISSUE 1342

Lil Baby’s Uprising A Rap Superstar and the Sound of Rebellion

Trump’s Plot Against America Will the GOP Rig the Vote?

The 40 Greatest Protest Songs AYANNA PRESSLEY MARGO PRICE JIMMY BUFFETT

Contents C 42

Lil Baby’s Uprising

ISSUE 1342 ‘ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS’

Four years ago, Dominique Jones got out of prison and learned to rap. Now, he’s a superstar helping to shape a new vision for America. By Charles Holmes

50 Fight the Power Forty of the greatest protest songs of all time, from Woody Guthrie and Nina Simone up to Kendrick Lamar, YG, and H.E.R.

54 Battleground Michigan All roads to the White House lead through the state that has seen some of the fiercest fights over lockdowns. By Stephen Rodrick

60 The Faces of Deportation One year. Six families. Dozens of lives disrupted by Trump’s punitive, unpredictable policies. By Tessa Stuart and Reed Dunlea

PHOTOGRAPH BY Philip Keith

“You believe black lives matter? So legislate like it. Invest like it,” says Rep. Ayanna Pressley. “This is the moment.”

PAVIELLE GARCIA photographer

Contents

20 For Love and ‘Country’ Acting gave Jonathan Majors a way out of trouble and a new kind of courage.

National Affairs 34

BY MARIA FONTOURA

The cult-favorite franchise is back for one last timetraveling adventure.

The Mix

29 Q&A 13

How she tapped into classic rock and real-life drama for her new LP.

On his new album of love songs, Black Lives Matter, and why he’s hopeful. BY BRIAN HIATT

BY JAMIL SMITH

BY PATRICK DOYLE

Hard-Rock Hangover Mark Weiss’ photographs of Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, and more bring the Eighties roaring back.

BY JON DOLAN

74 ALBUM GUIDE

Yacht Rock The smooth Seventies sound that’s enjoyed a sweet second life. BY DAVID BROWNE

Ayanna Pressley Looks Forward The Massachusetts congresswoman wants to transform the protest movement of today into lasting changes.

John Legend

Margo Price’s New Fire

The Plot Against America

BY ANDY KROLL

71 Reviews

TV 76 Nightmare on Main Street HBO’s Lovecraft Country is a no-punches-pulled treatise on race in America. BY ALAN SEPINWALL

Music 71 The Chicks Jump Into a New Battle The country trio’s first record in 14 years, Gaslighter, is their poppiest and most personal LP ever. BY CLAIRE SHAFFER

BY KORY GROW

Katy Perry Gets Back to Basics The singer has a good time for the first time in a while on her fifth album.

Blocking ballots, intimidating voters: How the Trump campaign plans to steal the election.

Bill and Ted’s Long, Strange Trip

BY ANDY GREENE

Movies 78 Smells Like Teen Spirit A brilliant new doc offers a sobering, exhilarating look at the state of our nation. BY PETER TRAVERS

Departments Letter From the Editor Correspondence RS Recommends The Last Word

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August 2020

On the Cover Lil Baby photographed in Atlanta on June 28th, by Diwang Valdez. Grooming by Nate Piston. Styling by Jason Rembert. Jacket by Celine. T-shirt by Moncler. Jeans by Ksubi. Belt by Louis Vuitton. Shoes by Nike. Glasses by Givenchy.

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: STAMMTISCH.604; ALYSSE GAFKJEN; ROBIN HARPER; © MARK WEISS/”THE DECADE THAT ROCKED”/INSIGHT EDITIONS 2020

20 PROFILE

Trademarks owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A., Vevey, Switzerland.

What’s new and what you might have missed — from the latest original podcasts and videos to reviews of music, movies, and more

PHOTOS

Surfers Against Police Brutality The Black Surfing Association drew more than 100 surfers to Rockaway, New York, in June to paddle out in support of Black Lives Matter. See our exclusive photos of the protest on the waves, where surfers of all ages came together to demand justice.

INTERVIEW

MUSIC

Happy Birthday, Ringo!

Lady Gaga’s Greatest Videos

Ringo Starr dropped by the Rolling Stone Interview: Special Edition video series to celebrate his 80th birthday by looking back on his life in music — from the Beatles’ deep debt to black music to the beginnings of his solo career to playing “Helter Skelter” with Paul McCartney last year. “Man, I’m only 24 in [my mind],” Starr says. “And I’m still doing what I love.”

It’s been 10 years since Lady Gaga blew our minds with her action-packed “Telephone” video. We toast her by looking back at her most revolutionary music videos, from “Just Dance” and “Edge of Glory” up through “Rain on Me,” from her new album, Chromatica.

The Best Bassists of All Time From funk masters to prog prodigies and beyond, we count down the 50 players who have shaped our idea of the low-end theory. Groove out with the sweet bass lines of Bootsy Collins (pictured), Geddy Lee, and Jaco Pastorious.

‘THE FIRST TIME’

How Elisabeth Moss Became ‘Shirley’ Moss, who’s starring in the Shirley Jackson biopic Shirley (below), remembers reading the horror novelist’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” as a teenager (“I was so shocked by the fearlessness of the story and how modern it was”) and more on The First Time.

Boy George, Live and Acoustic

Moss (left) and Odessa Young

Visit RollingStone.com or find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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August 2020

The Best New Bikes From casual beach cruisers to road-tested city bikes, see the best ways to get around on two wheels for a safe and socially distant commute.

Boy George brings his spectacular, soulful energy to an intimate performance in London on a new episode of In My Room, featuring two new songs and a cover of Mary Gauthier’s “Mercy Now.” And don’t miss other recent performances from Rufus Wainwright, Indigo Girls, Haim, and Charlie Puth.

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: RYAN STRUCK; ANDRE CSILLAG/ SHUTTERSTOCK; THATCHER KEATS/NEON FILMS

‘IN MY ROOM’

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August 2020

Rolling Stone

Editor’s Letter

“When people say, ‘You’re not going to be the Dixie Chicks’ — I hate the analogy. I never was trying to be the Dixie Chicks. I’m trying to be Neil Young, motherfuckers.” —M A RG O PR IC E

INSIDE THE STORY

WHEN CHARLES HOLMES traveled to Atlanta on June 27th to interview Lil Baby for this month’s cover story, the city was still raging over the police killing of Rayshard Brooks outside a local Wendy’s and reeling from a new escalation in coronavirus cases, with a record 10,284 reported across Georgia that week. “It was an intense time to be there,” says Holmes. “But it also felt like the right time to visit Lil Baby.” The Atlanta rapper’s latest song, “The Bigger Picture,” describes in urgent, personal rhymes the fear, pain, and “wicked” system of police brutality that led to this moment. The song, which has been streamed more than 100 million times, has become a defining commentary on the Black Lives Matter movement, and catapulted Baby to a new level of fame. The track gets its power from real-life experience: Baby started out as a local drug dealer, experienced horrific police violence, and spent roughly two years in prison before turning to music in 2017. “I just rap about my life,” he tells Holmes. “All my songs are basically about me. And it was at a point where I felt I needed to say something.” Holmes has worked as a staff writer since 2018, covering everything from Megan Thee Stallion (in his first cover story, earlier this year) to George Floyd’s Houston rap career, in our July issue. He brings natural charm and easy humor (check out the RS video series he hosts, Birding With Charles) as well as deep music knowledge. Holmes was early to recognize Lil Baby’s potential and places him in a lineage of iconoclastic Atlanta rappers that started with Outkast and includes T.I., Young Jeezy, and Future. “A bunch of rappers like DaBaby and J. Cole had been trying to sum up the moment, but Lil Baby really hit it,” says Holmes. “ ‘The Bigger Picture’ is when everybody caught on to the fact that he has a consciousness people weren’t sure of before. It’s when people realized, ‘This guy has something to say.’” For the cover image, photographer Diwang Valdez shot Lil Baby at locations across Atlanta, including on the street outside the Wendy’s in Peoplestown where Brooks was killed. The spot has become a locus of grief and rage. When Baby showed up in his all-white Rolls-Royce, he was reticent, but he ended up taking photos and even making a cameo in an amateur rap video. “It was a surreal feeling of being somewhere that felt like heavy, hallowed ground,” says Catriona Ni Aolain, ROLLING STONE’s director of creative content. “It meant a lot for people to see him there. I kept hearing people say, ‘He’s a real one,’ ” she says. “You got the feeling that Lil Baby is loved across this city.”

JA S ON F I N E EDITOR

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August 2020

Alfredo, trying to keep his family together

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Email us, confidentially, at Tips@ RollingStone .com

The Faces of Deportation Photographer Federica Valabrega documents life under the threat of ICE OV E R A Y E A R AG O , ROLLING STONE set out to tell the stories of undocumented migrants whose lives have been upended by the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies. “There was a moment when we were in a church in Mississippi for the celebration of a quinceañera, entirely filled with Guatemalans dressed in their traditional clothing. All I could hear was their Mayan dialect, and I remember getting chills,” says photographer Federica Valabrega. “I felt so included and close to all the immigrants there.” Along with producer Reed Dunlea and writer Tessa Stuart, Valabrega documented people who’ve lived and worked in the U.S. for years — some with little memory of their birth country — who now face removal.

The Battle for Michigan O N A T WO -W E E K ROA D T R I P through Michigan, senior writer Stephen Rodrick, who grew up in Flint, witnessed the conflicts that define this moment in America. “It was important to write about, because it is one of the few states devastated by the first wave of the pandemic that is also a swing state that could determine the election,” he says. “The reporting was eerie.” Michigan, rocked by COVID-19, floods, armed right-wing Armed protester militias occupying resisting a staythe state capitol, at-home order and the uprising of the policebrutality protests, is a microcosm of the divisions splintering the nation, and Rodrick spoke to Michiganders on every side. “The fact that the distance between mask wearers and let’s-open-everything-up proponents isn’t hundreds of miles, but from town to town, blew my mind,” he says.

FROM TOP: FEDERICA VALABREGA; MATTHEW HATCHER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

How Lil Baby Became a Superstar

Correspondence

+ L OV E L E T T E R S & A DV IC E

“Historically, black women aren’t given due credit for their work or leadership. I’m grateful that both Jamil Smith and Kadir Nelson didn’t shy away from a full portrayal.”

Broken Policing Police are overfunded, undertrained, and understaffed. Part of the issue [“Why Policing Is Broken,” RS 1341] is that they are doing things that they were never meant to do. Another is never being held accountable for mistakes, overreach, and straight-up criminal behavior.

—Kim Legg-Spencer, via Facebook If good cops outnumber the bad, as is often said, they need to band together and make it impossible for bad cops to act out their racist, bully behaviors. Turn it around, or defund them and start from scratch. Force their unions to stand up for goodness, not just blind loyalty.

—Lisa Ruffin Schauf, via Twitter

—Leslie Weiner, via Facebook

Black Lives Matter For our July issue, ROLLING STONE approached artist Kadir Nelson to commission a painting to stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. The result, “American Uprising,” accompanied senior writer Jamil Smith’s cover story [“The Power of Black Lives Matter,” RS 1341], which featured Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors: the women who founded — and continue to grow — the movement. The package moved readers to respond and call for change. “Thank you for this article,” wrote Kathleen Hill. “The actions and words of these three amazing women, along with the millions of people globally,

are making a difference. A change is gonna come; we just need to keep the pressure on.” Kristin Novotny tweeted: “I’m going to use this article in my course on resistance this fall.” Tatiana Rodriguez wrote, “The cover is stunning. I’d like to get a print. Thank you for your work and longtime writing on this vital topic.” Others had emotional reactions to the artwork itself, including Jamil Smith: “I had no words when I saw Kadir Nelson’s artwork for our cover for the first time. Partly because I had written the story. But also, I knew instantly that it was a classic piece of protest art in and of itself.”

@Defeat TheHeat: I knew that beautiful cover had to be Kadir Nelson. My 2nd- and 3rd-graders love his books. Would love to add this print to our classroom.

TRIBUTE

ROBERT WRIGHT/REDUX

Milton Glaser: 1929-2020

Glaser’s covers: Dylan (1972) and Wonder (1975)

Milton Glaser, an icon of 20th-century graphic design and National Medal of Arts recipient famous for his “I New York” logo, died on June 26th, his 91st birthday. Over seven decades, Glaser designed posters, book covers, and album sleeves with striking and colorful imagery. Two years before co-founding New York Magazine in 1968, he designed the iconic Bob Dylan poster that featured the songwriter’s silhouette with his accentuated, curly hair. Glaser also designed an illustration of Stevie Wonder for the January 19th, 1975, cover of ROLLING STONE (left). “I decided to step away from a more accurate portrait and make it expressionistic and psychedelic,” he told RS in 2015. “I wanted to convey the intensity of his music.

of Loneliness “The Price of Isolation” [RS 1341] was really interesting, but it assumes we’re all connected via technology, without considering low-income families that might not have access to anything that helps keep them connected to peers. For some — especially black folks — isolation may be the least traumatizing part of 2020.

—Lydia Babcock, via Facebook We’re not programmed to be in isolation, so this is an adaptation period. It should be interesting to see how social interactions resume in the next year or so and if the new norms are permanently fixed.

—Alejandro Vasquez, via Facebook

CONTACT US Letters to ROLLING STONE, 475 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10017-0298. Letters become the property of ROLLING STONE and may be edited for publication. Email: letters@rollingstone.com Subscriber Services: Call 800-283-1549.

August 2020

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The WHAT’S NEW, WHAT’S NEXT, WHAT’S NUTS

Margo Price’s New Fire A fearless country voice taps into classic rock and real-life drama for her killer new album

PHOTOGRAPH BY Alysse Gafkjen

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The Mix PHOTOS

Hard-Rock Hangover AS A TEENAGER, photographer Mark Weiss used to sneak his camera into concerts and later sell the pictures he took to fans. He stopped in the late Seventies after spending a night in jail for hawking shots of Kiss; once out, he brought his portfolio to Circus magazine, which bought one of his photos of Aerosmith. Before long, he was on the front lines of the Eighties’ hard-rock revolution. Now he’s looking back on the big-hair era in The Decade That Rocked, which includes a foreword by Judas Priest’s Rob Halford. “The people who listened to this music are still listening to it as religiously as they were back then,” Weiss says. “That’s why bands like Mötley Crüe, Poison, and Bon Jovi can still play stadiums. No other decade has that excitement anymore.” KORY GROW

LOOKS THAT KILL

Weiss doesn’t remember what Joan Jett was playing on her Walkman in this 1980 shot, and that’s kind of the point. “There’s that expression,” he says. “You want to know what she’s listening to.”

MARGO PRICE

OT TOO LONG AGO, Margo Price was offered the chance to collaborate with a more famous artist. Some people around her thought it was a good idea, but Price wasn’t sure. “I love collaborating with people, but I’m not going to do it just because somebody’s famous,” she says. “I really have to admire their art.” For Price, it was one of many decisions she faced after the success of her first two albums. On those LPs, she combined the sounds of classic country with harrowing stories from

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her life, which included growing up in poverty and the loss of her infant son, as well as songs about pressing issues like the pay gap. That led her to what she calls “a fork in the road” that coincided with the end of her contract with Jack White’s Third Man Records. “There were a lot of people telling me that I needed to make these moves to get to the next level or whatever,” she says. “And I wasn’t willing to do that. It burned some bridges, for sure.” Price, who ended up signing with another indie label, Loma Vista, wrote a song, “That’s How Rumors Get Started,” about that uncertainty in her career. A bittersweet, Fleetwood Mac-like ballad, it became the title track of her

FAST FACTS TO RAMONA Price pushed back the album’s release in 2019 so she could give birth to her daughter, Ramona. METAMODERN SOUNDS Price has known Sturgill Simpson since he and her husband worked together at a Nashville grocery a decade ago.

new album, which has a new sound, drawing on Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. “There’s no one occupying that space right now, and so many people that are trying to do the return-to-the-roots thing, going for the authenticity card,” she says. “It’s hard to write as great as [Petty and Springsteen] did.” Relationship turmoil is a big theme. On “Stone Me,” she sings about standing her ground in an argument (“Call me a bitch, then call me baby/You don’t own me”). She says it’s partly about her husband and collaborator, Jeremy Ivey: “We’d been in a fight. I was on the road, I wrote the words and texted them to him. Without asking, he wrote a melody

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS © MARK WEISS/”THE DECADE THAT ROCKED”/INSIGHT EDITIONS 2020

JOAN LOVES ROCK & ROLL

On the road with Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, Weiss spotted some lingerie in what he calls Crüe’s “trophy trunk.” Ozzy CAPTION HERE put it on, posed with Tommy Lee Jagger Dummy and Mick — then “went backstage, 1969. “Here we have onstageGeneration and [rock’s] One talking ripped off his to Generation Two,” Russell says. clothes and wig.” “It’s a pretty historic moment.”

WE WANNA ROCK Dee Snider came to Weiss with this concept for a Twisted Sister LP. “If you cover one side and then the other, it’s almost like two different people,” Weiss says. “It shows what makeup can do.”

DAMAGE INC. When Metallica opened for Ozzy in 1986, Weiss got them to pose for a “sweat shot” after a show. “The feet tell the story,” he says. KEEPING THE FAITH This image is meaningful to Weiss, whose first-ever concert was Elton John. “To have rock royalty in there and see him with Jon [Bon Jovi] as equals was pretty cool.”

PERMANENT VACATION Weiss had a great relationship with Aerosmith, until a new manager banned their entourage to keep them sober. This 1985 photo was Weiss’ last of Steven Tyler for a decade. “There was a picture of me, so if I was working with an opening band, I wasn’t allowed by the dressing rooms.”

and he sent it back, and I was like, ‘Ah, he just got a co-write on a song I was trying to write about him.’ ” (Price also says she took inspiration from “a hack blogger that trash-talked me on a lot of forums.”) To get the sound she was going for, Price recorded in L.A. instead of Nashville, putting together a band that included Benmont Tench and bassist Pino Palladino. Price recruited her friend Sturgill Simpson to produce. “I valued his opinion because he won’t sugarcoat things,” she says. “He’s going to tell you exactly what he thinks when he thinks it. That’s probably why both him and I kind of get put on the naughty list at times.”

“There’s countless things I’ve said that definitely cost me record sales. But you have to stand up for what you believe.”

The release marks the end of a difficult stretch. In April, Price lost her musical hero and friend John Prine due to complications from COVID-19. Then, the same month, Ivey — who’s considered a high risk because he is diabetic — came down with symptoms of the virus. “He was sicker than I’ve ever seen him,” Price says, “and I was scared every night that he was going to die in his sleep. It was a lot.” Lately, things are looking up: Price has been practicing outdoors with her band, and she’s hoping to play her songs at a drive-in. “If I can get a date reserved,” she adds. “I know all the corporate bloodsuckers are already on top of all that.”

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE When Guns N’ Roses stopped through New York on the Appetite for Destruction tour in 1987, they invited Weiss to their acoustic gig at CBGB. “It was historic,” he says. “Afterwards, I just gathered everyone together, and Slash started having some fun, climbing up the awning.”

In the meantime, she’s using her time off the road to spread the word about issues that are important to her, including Black Lives Matter, Tennessee’s anti-abortion bill, and getting Trump out of office. “People say, ‘Oh, how dare you say something bad about Trump,’ or, ‘Oh, how dare you talk about gun control, how dare you talk about feminism and the pay gap,’ ” she says. “There’s countless things I’ve said that definitely cost me record sales. But you have to stand up for what you believe. When people say, ‘You’re not going to be the Dixie Chicks’ — I hate the analogy. I never was trying to be the Dixie Chicks. I’m trying to be Neil Young, motherfuckers.” PATRICK DOYLE August 2020

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The Mix

RECOMMENDS 3

OUR TOP POPCULTURE PICKS OF THE MONTH

ASK

CROZ Real-life advice from a guy who’s seen, done, and survived just about everything

I’m a 22-year-old woman, and in the past four years, ever since I lost my virginity, I’ve had sex with 13 men. Potential partners are judging me for it. What is your take on “body counts” in general? Is that really a red flag for men? —Lynn, Washington, DC

SINGLE

1.Shamir’s “On My Own” This genderqueer Philly artist wrote the dreamy breakup song last summer, but the single, released mid-June, took on new meaning. As he explains: “It’s morphed into an accidental quarantine anthem.”

6. Hum’s ‘Inlet’

PODCAST

4. ‘Unfinished: Deep South’

BOOK

2. ‘The Living Dead’ Zombie king George Romero lays his apocalyptic view of society over the Fox News age. Though the novel was completed by Daniel Kraus after Romero’s 2017 death, it still has the urgency of his films.

This new investigation into Isadore Banks — a wealthy black farmer and World War I vet who was lynched in Arkansas in 1954 — uses one man’s story to show how the terrorism of Jim Crow shaped generations of African Americans.

VIRTUAL EVENT SERIES

VIDEO

3. The Secret Arts Curiosities site Atlas Obscura has brought its unconventional events online during lockdown — now, instead of after-dark soirees in graveyards and abandoned subway stations, it’s offering interactive chats with everyone from watchmakers to mud-ball enthusiasts.

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Rolling Stone

ALBUM

5. City Girls’ “Jobs” In this clip for one of this summer’s brashest singles, the two Miami rappers leave behind a fast-food gig for stilettos and OnlyFans accounts. Amid spare, Eighties-inspired bounce, they turn “I don’t work jobs/Bitch, I am a job” into a killer hook.

August 2020

For their first LP in 22 years, these Nineties shoegaze bots return to their home planet: Fuzzy guitars crash into complex melodies about isolation, space colonization, and surviving trying times.

Wizard to the Louisiana House of Representatives — and who continues to push racism into politics. DOCUMENTARY

9. ‘The Go-Go’s’ They were drug-dabbling, death-defying queens of Eighties New Wave — and when it comes to their recounting of the good, the bad, and the ugly in Alison Ellwood’s comprehensive portrait, no one’s lips are sealed.

FROM THE VAULT

7. Prince’s “Witness 4 the Prosecution” At his creative peak on 1987’s Sign O’ the Times, Prince was coming up with so many inspired ideas that even his castoffs feel like lost classics — like this gospel-funk rave-up from the album’s massive new reissue, due this fall. PODCAST

8. ‘Slow Burn’ Season 4 Slate’s hit podcast returns to its political roots for a deep look at David Duke, who went from KKK Grand

TV SHOW

10. ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ For reviews, premieres, and more, go to Rolling Stone.com/ music

Since the show went off the air in 2002, true-crime has become a different genre, but this Netflix reboot — which drops the narrator (RIP Robert Stack) and the violence-porn reenactments — proves the OG can keep up.

In my heart, all I want to do is read old books all day and night. Can someone justify spending their life studying, or must one take some action in the world? —Patrick, Baltimore No one is forced to take action. I could spend my life reading and studying because I’m fascinated with new knowledge. I want to learn things until the day before I die. But there are times when what you believe in is going to have to get you to stand up and say what you feel. If you have a moral compass, you have to do that. If you see evil, you need to say, “That’s evil.”

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I don’t see it as a red flag. The minute a woman does this, she gets called a “slut.” If we do it, we take out an ad in the paper. We brag! It’s such a lousy system and so loaded against women. I think having a healthy sex life is exactly what a person your age should be doing. What I don’t think is healthy is jumping into a marriage 15 days out of high school.

TECH

A Guide to High-Tech, Low-Cost Home Recording MAKING MUSIC has never been easier, or cheaper. And if you’re spending more time at home these days, you may actually have time for it. From an oldschool Tascam four-track that fits in your hand to a high-res console packed with cool effects, here are the best new ways to capture your ideas digitally. BY BR A NDT R A NJ The Simple Studio The hockey-puck-size iZotope Spire Studio ($299) allows you to record wirelessly straight to your phone: Play into the mic (or plug in an instrument) while connected to the Spire app, then use the app to mix tracks. The app also lets you easily collaborate remotely. “It’s an eight-track on your phone that’s actually userfriendly,” says Phish’s Trey Anastasio. “Works like gangbusters.”

I ZOTO P E S P I R E ST U D I O

The All-Around Mic Typically, musicians have to choose between a mic that supports USB, which allows connection directly to a computer, or XLR, which connects to a mixer. Audio-Technica’s ATR2100X ($99) has both, so you can use it in the studio or onstage. You can also plug in headphones and hear yourself play with no other equipment. It’s the most versatile mic around.

FROM TOP: SHURE; IZOTOPE; AUDIO-TECHNICA; TASCAM; FOCUSRITE

Getting Serious The Focusrite Scarlett Solo ($110) is a great console for multitracking. With an XLR mic port and a 1/4-inch input for instruments, you can record vocals and guitar or bass at the same time into programs like Ableton or Pro Tools. It comes with software bundles that allow you to choose from dozens of effects pedals. After you’ve laid down tracks, you can cut and splice from different takes until you’re satisfied.

Classic in Your Pocket The Tascam DR-40X Four-Track Digital Audio Recorder ($178) is a battery-powered digital recorder that completely cuts out the need for other technology. With two built-in condenser mics, plus instrument inputs, you can record, overdub, and mix tracks all on the tiny device. Like old-school recorders, it creates a mono track, which you can export to your computer.

AU D I O -T EC H N I CA AT R 2 1 0 0 X

TAS CA M D R- 4 0 X FO U R-T R AC K FO C U S R I T E S CA R L E T T S O LO

D I G I TA L AU D I O R EC O R D E R

FROM THE STUDIO TO YOUR SPOT The best new headphones for making music and listening for fun The right pair of headphones are crucial if you want to get a studio-quality recording at home. Try Shure’s AONIC 50 ($399, above), a new pair of over-ear headphones with some of the most well-balanced sound we’ve ever heard. Large, 50mm drivers help every instrument come through clearly and brightly — and the headphones are still light enough for daily use. The biggest benefit of using these for your next recording project? When you’re done, you’ve got a kickass pair of over-ear Bluetooth headphones for casual listening. If you plan to record while you’re traveling, lugging along a large pair of headphones can be a real pain. Audio-Technica’s ATHE70 ($399) look like regular wired earbuds, but they have a lot more going on under the hood. The earbuds have three drivers, so bass, treble, and midrange frequencies come at you from different angles; the result is a full, balanced sound. Instead of isolating noise via earpads, the ATH-E70s form a seal around your ear when they’re inserted, creating a chamber that cancels sound just as well as over-ear headphones. The company includes four sizes of eartips so you can get the right fit. B.R.

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S U BS C RIB E TODAY

ONE YEAR FOR $49.95 Iconic. Provocative. Influential.

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The Mix

PROFILE

For Love and ‘Country’ Acting gave Jonathan Majors a way out of trouble. Now, work like HBO’s ‘Lovecraft Country’ lets him stir some up again

T 4 A.M. ON JUNE 24TH, Jonathan Majors woke with a stomach flu. So, naturally, he did what any of us would do: Dragged himself out of bed, headed outside in the predawn light, got situated on the basketball court of a nearby park, threw up, and worked out for an hour and a half. Then he threw up again and walked home. “It’s the ritual,” he says matter-offactly, while alternating sips of a blue energy drink and hot tea a few hours later. “It was rough. But we did it.” Majors, 30, is Zooming from the sun-dappled courtyard of a pink adobe house in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s been quarantined since February. He had flown there to begin production on The Harder They Fall, a Western co-starring Idris Elba. Shortly after he arrived, of course, those plans were put on pause. The delay will likely leave people hungry for more Jonathan Majors, since his most recent projects establish him as one of the most compulsively watchable actors working today. In Da 5 Bloods (streaming now), Spike Lee’s scathing Vietnam-vet epic, Majors plays David, son to Delroy Lindo’s Paul, a hardheaded Trump supporter suffering from PTSD. Tagging along with his dad’s crew on a re-

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turn visit to ’Nam, David is alternately puckish with and cowed by his old man, nudging his way into the group dynamic — as Majors does with an esteemed veteran cast — and emerging with an on-the-ground lesson in brotherhood and sacrifice. Next up is the HBO series Lovecraft Country, co-created by Jordan Peele and debuting August 16th. A mind-bending, genre-blending tour de force, the show plays off of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, a 1920s pulp author and unrepentant racist. The story follows Majors’ character, Atticus “Tic” Freeman, a Korean War veteran searching for his estranged father in Jim Crow-era America. As crafted by writer and co-creator Misha Green, the series makes bedfellows of the ghouls and ghosts who plague Tic and his crew and the real-life bigots who do the same. The role gives Majors a chance to bring his intense physicality, vulnerability, and intellect fully to bear. “Atticus is a character who used to be a geek, but then he went to war and became a killer,” says Green. “And when Jonathan came into the room, his presence just embodied all of that.” Majors had never heard of the author prior to being cast in the series. So he started reading. Sucked into a vivid world of aliens and monsters, he was

thoroughly entertained . . . until he realized Lovecraft “hates black people,” as Majors puts it. “I felt betrayed! It was like, ‘Aw, fuck, man, not you too!’ ” Still, he’s not surprised to find racism lurking under every rock, nor does he feel defeated by the fact that a show set in the Fifties resonates in 2020. “To be mopey about something, that’s a privilege,” he says. “I did not grow up with that. Atticus did not grow up with that. So, he gets active. He begins to rage against the machine. So it made me excited when I saw the parallels. I’m gonna put something into the world that corresponds with a horrific system that plagues my day-to-day life. And I get to do something about it, for 10 episodes. Oh, it’s on. Because we get to win. We’re gonna stick it to ’em.”

“A horrific system plagues my life, and I get to do something about it for 10 episodes. Oh, it’s on. We’re gonna stick it to ’em.”

The part showcases the ferocious willpower that infuses all of Majors’ work — the sense that his body is a dam working to contain a rush of feeling. It is a lever that he commands with precision. Just watch the wrenching moment in Episode One when a sadistic small-town sheriff forces Tic to ask permission to make a U-turn. Discipline is a bit of a theme with Majors, a military brat whose mother was a pastor. But the emotional control he exerts in his work was hardwon. While some of Majors’ childhood in Texas sounds idyllic — roaming his grandparents’ farm with his older sister and younger brother, reading books on top of the chicken incubator, trying to commune with the cows — there was turmoil, too. The family was poor, and his father left them when Majors was about five, planting seeds of chaos that would bloom in his adolescence. He got into boxing, but it wasn’t always the best match with what he calls the “curse” of being highly sensitive. At 13, Majors was arrested for shoplifting — he stole Christmas presents for his family from Kohl’s — and a couple of months later, assault, after a classmate teased him about his arrest and his AWOL dad. “It was a perfect storm,” Majors says. “The teacher asked me a ques-

STYLING BY CHLOE HARTSTEIN

By MARIA FONTOUR A

“To be mopey is a privilege,” Majors says. “I did not grow up with that.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY Stammtisch.604

tion, I told him, ‘I don’t know the answer, man. Not today. It’s a bad time.’ My punkass classmate said something, I got up, and I popped him. Teacher intervened, popped the teacher. That put me on an alternative route. And thank God it did.” He was sent to a juvenile detention program, where an intuitive teacher, recognizing that Majors needed an outlet, walked him into an advanced theater class. In acting, Majors says, he found a place to channel “all that athleticism and energy and anger — and love! Because that’s what happened. I did what I was doing because I loved my mom and siblings and wanted to do something for ’em. It straightened me out. Straightened me out good.” From there, it was onto the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and then, after a year off during which he became a father to a little girl, the Yale School of Drama. He was still finishing up school when Dustin Lance Black cast him in the 2017 ABC miniseries about the modern LGBTQ movement, When We Rise. A year later, he made the most of his role as a preening, Detroit gangster in the Eighties drug-scene biopic White Boy Rick. But it was with 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, an elegiac portrait of friendship set against the backdrop of gentrification, that he announced himself, in a performance both deeply sensitive and quirkily offbeat. Majors is never done working out the personal through the professional. “Art is my therapy,” he says. “That’s why acting is the best job in the world — because you can learn to be a better dad, a better lover, a better friend.” With his most recent projects, he’s tended to early wounds. In Bloods, David has to chase his distant father halfway around the world to bond with him. In Lovecraft, Tic’s father, Montrose, is an alcoholic who holds secrets and flies into rages — and didn’t once write while his son was away at war. Both parts sank into Majors’ blood, changing the alchemy ever so slightly, opening him up to the idea of communication with his own dad. “Ben Kingsley once said, ‘When you’re on a film set, you’re a hunter.’ Everybody’s hunting for the scene,” Majors says. “I’ve applied that to my life. And [in] the hunt I’ve had to get closer to my father, to understand him, to understand myself, why I was so angry, why I’m still a little angry and hurt, Atticus and David have given me tools. And now I have enough courage, some days, to stand there, like the boy you are, always, with your father, and ask the question, and hear the answer, and have enough strength to hold back the dogs of havoc. And just listen.” August 2020

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The Mix

PROFILE

Catching up with Chrissie Hynde in lockdown as her band releases one of its hardest-rocking albums

TOGETHER AGAIN Left: The Pretenders’ current lineup: Hynde, Nick Wilkinson, Walbourne, and Chambers (from left). Below: Hynde onstage in 1984. Starting in the late Seventies, she led the band through a string of hits like “Brass in Pocket” and “I’ll Stand by You.”

By KORY GROW

T’S A FRIDAY EVENING in midMay, and Chrissie Hynde is supposed to be kicking off a tour tonight in support of the Pretenders’ latest album, Hate for Sale. Instead, she’s stuck in her London flat, singing Bob Dylan’s “Standing in the Doorway” over the phone to the band’s lead guitarist for a covers project the two are working on. Her life, like everyone’s, has been upended, but you wouldn’t know it talking to her. “I live alone and I don’t have any pets, so I have all this time to mess around,” she says later. “I feel like I’m 15: no responsibilities, no pressure. I can paint and play songs.” In recent months, Hynde, 68, has reconnected with her saxophone-playing brother, Terry, who lives in Ohio, and she frequently speaks on the phone with her two daughters, who also live in England, Hynde’s adopted home after growing up in Akron. (Her accent remains remarkably Ohioan, though she calls soccer “football” and friends “mates.”) As a longtime vegetarian and environmentalist, she loves that lockdown has meant less smog and more birdsong around the world. “If I knew there would be no more flights, if we can get rid of all cars, I would be the first to sign up,” she says. She’s composed a couple of songs but only writes when she’s moved to. “I’m pretty lazy,” she says. “I like goofing off. That’s what I’m good at.”

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Over the past four decades, Hynde has fine-tuned a seemingly unflappable exterior in the face of trouble. Her toughness helped her move through the male-dominated rock world of the late Seventies, helped her endure the drug overdoses that killed two bandmates early in the Pretenders’ career, helped her raise children at the peak of her fame. At times it seemed like her never-give-a-shit attitude suffuses her whole being. “Of course I give a shit!” she protests. “Someone told me the definition of a disorder is when [something that bothers you] starts to interfere with daily life. So I’m not going to worry myself or something where it starts becoming a disorder.” When I explain that never giving a shit is sort

of a virtue, she laughs and apologizes. “I’m a sensitive person,” she says. Tennis legend John McEnroe, who befriended Hynde in the early Eighties, believes that other than Janis Joplin, Hynde is the “greatest female rock star.” McEnroe witnessed her charisma firsthand. In the mid-Nineties, he accompanied her to see Jeff Buckley

in London: “After the show, Jeff met Chrissie and said, ‘Oh, my God. I’m such a big fan. I know all your songs.’ And she said, ‘Do you want to come and jam?’ I remember carrying his amp to the studio, and the guy knew every note of every song they played. I’m sure it was inspirational to her. Sometimes you need to be reminded of the respect you have.” Hynde worked hard to earn that respect. She felt lost during much of her adolescence, but ended up studying art at Kent State. After moving to London, she spent years on the periphery of the city’s music scene, writing reviews for NME and working in the Vivienne Westwood clothing store that launched the Sex Pistols. Eventually, she started playing in groups that featured members of the Clash, and the Damned, and in 1978 Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead suggested she link up with a drummer improbably called Gas Wild. He didn’t play with Hynde long, but he helped her figure out the first Pretenders lineup, which eventually included guitarist James HoneymanScott, bassist (and Hynde’s former lover) Pete Farndon, and drummer Martin Chambers. The original Pretenders would last for two albums and one EP. Within two years, both Farndon and Honeyman-Scott were dead of drug-related causes. Hynde decided Honeyman-Scott would have wanted the band to continue, so for the next decade she led a revolving door of bandmates through hit after hit: “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” “Middle of the Road,” “I’ll Stand by You.” “I have been asked 10,000 times, ‘Are the Pretenders just you? Or is it a band?’ All I can say is, I’m not a solo artist. My

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How the Pretenders Came Back With a Vengeance

position in any band that I’ve been in is to set the guitar player up to make a goal. It’s all about the guitar.” Hate for Sale is the first Pretenders album to feature the rest of the band since 2008’s Break Up the Concrete; since then, everything Hynde has started wound up as a solo affair, including the Pretenders’ 2016 LP, Alone. Hynde says she never intended to abandon her band. “It’s the logistics of getting a band in one place,” she explains. “I don’t have a studio. So I go where the producer is. I’ve wanted to make the album we just made for 15 years.” Compared to Valve Bone Woe, Hynde’s quiet solo album from last year, Hate for Sale feels like a gut punch, with hard-rocking tunes about bookies, junkies, and crying in public. This is thanks partly to guitarist James Walbourne, who joined in 2008 after Chambers spotted him playing lunchtime gigs at a local pub. “To me, he’s

“I’ve been asked a thousand times, ‘Are the Pretenders just you? Or is it a band?’ All I can say is, I’m not a solo artist.”

Hynde in 2019

the definitive guitar hero,” Hynde says. The pair collaborated on every track on Hate for Sale. When the album was nearly done, Hynde sent it to McEnroe to get his take. “She’d come full circle,” he says. “She’s playing songs that are quick and to the point. This record, to me, is one young musicians should listen to.” Now that the tour has been canceled, Hynde wants to get back to her roots — and away from the band’s warhorse hits. “What I’d really like is a more ‘alternative’ bill with someone like Mark Lanegan on tour with us,” she says. “The audience I want is one where I can pull out any obscure Pretenders thing and say, ‘Here’s something you’ve never heard,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh, OK. Cool,’ instead of, ‘I think I’ll get some beers for us, honey.’ ” She has no interest in “socially distanced” shows (“Where are you going to do it, in an airplane hangar?”) or come-together anthems. “Why do artists think that they’re going to heal everybody and their music is so important? It’s a little bit pompous. “But who knows? If we’re locked down like this for another five years, I might be doing a striptease on Zoom. I don’t know how desperate people can get.” August 2020 | Rolling Stone

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The Mix

ARTIST YOU NEED TO KNOW

Dancing Toward Freedom

Cox, Bilal, and Godwin (from left)

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It was Memorial Day weekend 2011, and Awad Bilal was twerking in front of a thousand people. Bilal was a touring dancer for New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia at the time, and they’d rolled into a festival in Connecticut — only to find what Bilal recalls as an audience of “weird young white boys” who reacted harshly to Freedia’s fabulous spectacle. “They threw bottles at us,” he says. So Freedia and her band cut their set short and headed to a local diner, where the twerking didn’t stop. “Here we are at this diner, living our best lives,” Bilal recalls. “There’s such a strength in being with your crew.” Today, Bilal, 34, has a crew of his own: Too Free, the dance-music trio he sings in with bandmates Carson Cox, 34, and Don Godwin, 49. The three come from strikingly

different backgrounds — Cox sings in post-punk band Merchandise, and Godwin is a longtime recording engineer — which helps them elevate classic house sounds in exhilarating new ways. Their debut, Love in High Demand, is a bass-heavy odyssey that ranges from relentless club energy to disco nostalgia and atmospheric R&B. Too Free’s members all live in or near Washington, D.C., though Bilal is the only one who grew up there; at hometown shows, they’ve made a point of sharing bills with local black artists. “It’s very intentional,” Bilal says, “making sure we’re not playing with all-white-dude indie bands.” For Bilal, Too Free is all about the escape found on a great dance floor. “I go to raves with my partner a lot,” he says. “There is something about that music that gives back to you — that gives you power.” REED DUNLEA

PHOTOGRAPH BY Victor Llorente

MOVIES

Inside the Long, Strange Trip of Bill and Ted As the SoCal duo return to the screen one last time, the cast and crew discuss the creation of a cult-favorite franchise By ANDY GREENE

FROM LEFT: ORION PICTURES; PATTI PERRET/ORION PICTURES

T’S TAKEN three decades, relentless pressure from the hardcore fan community, and a boxoffice phenomenon known as the “Keanuassaince,” but Bill and Ted, the time-traveling heavy-metal enthusiasts who embarked on their first excellent adventure as high schoolers in 1989, are finally returning to theaters this summer. When we last saw them, in the 1991 sequel film Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter), and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) were on the verge of creating music that would usher in a new era of global harmony and world peace. But at the start of Bill & Ted Face the Music, their third (and almost certainly final) adventure, due out August 28th, none of that has happened. They are middle-aged suburban dads playing tiny bars and struggling to understand how things went sideways. “We wanted to ask, ‘What would happen if the things that you were told your life was going to be about when you were a teenager turned out to be wrong?’ ” says Ed Solomon, who wrote all three Bill & Ted movies with his partner Chris Matheson. “ ‘How would you cope with it if you based your whole life on it? How would you deal with the disappointment? And how can we make that into a movie that is absurd and silly and embodies the buoyant spirit of Bill and Ted?’ ” Answering those questions would depend on the willingness of Reeves, now in the middle of a major career resurgence thanks to the lucrative John Wick franchise, to return to a dimwit-

IT’S ABOUT TIME Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reprise their roles as time-traveling SoCal dudes Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and Ted “Theodore” Logan (inset) for Bill & Ted Face the Music.

ted character he hadn’t played since his early twenties. “People’s enthusiasm for the characters became very evident to me,” Reeves says. “But there had to be a reason to do it, and I think Ed and Chris came up with a really great story.” That story concludes a journey that Solomon and Matheson started back in 1983, shortly after they graduated from UCLA. Spitballing ideas in an improv group they had formed, Matheson suggested “a couple of teenage boys who don’t know anything about history, and they’re studying for a course.” They played Bill and Ted onstage in a show, declaring various world events “excellent” or “bogus,” and began envisioning the duo as a small part of a Kentucky Fried Movieesque sketch-comedy film.

But when Chris’ father, Richard Matheson (a legendary sci-fi author best known for I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man), heard their concept, he told them it was strong enough to hold a movie on its own. “Chris and I then started really laughing about this idea that Bill and Ted would be literally responsible for all the bad things that happened in history,” says Solomon, “like the sinking of the Titanic, and Lincoln’s assassination, and losing Amelia Earhart.” Slowly, they fleshed it out into a screenplay called Bill & Ted’s Time Van, where the guys travel through history collecting historical figures to help them pass a history test. In the second draft, they raised the stakes by deciding that all of civilization was hanging in the balance, because the pair are destined to grow up and start a

band that unites all of mankind. “We thought, ‘What if Bill and Ted were actually the most important people who ever lived?’ ” says Solomon. “That really cracked us up.” Back to the Future’s use of a timetraveling DeLorean in 1985 forced them to change the title to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, with a phone booth now serving as their means of transport. And much to their shock, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group bought the script and cast Winter and Reeves as the leads. “When you were our age in those days, a lot of the material you got was very John Hughes-like,” says Winter. “You’re playing a 16-year-old who talks like a 40-year-old, with neuroses and sexual hang-ups. And here were these guys that went the other way. They were like nine- or 10-yearolds with this extraordinarily comAugust 2020

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plex language. I’d never read anything like that.” Crucially, Reeves and Winter were tight from the get-go, and their chemistry bled onto the screen. “We bonded during the auditions since we both played bass and rode motorcycles,” says Reeves. “The hilarious idiosyncrasy of our friendship is we would actually jam together on our basses in our free time.” In the movie, the boys meet Billy the Kid, Socrates, Joan of Arc, and other historical giants, and bring them to modern-day San Dimas, California. The budget was minimal, and clever screenplay aside, nobody thought they were making a masterpiece. “I remember shooting the Socrates scene in Rome,” says Winter. “There was traffic noise everywhere, because we were shooting in the Piazza Venezia, which is like shooting in Times Square. And I remember Keanu and I looked at each other, and said, literally right before they called action, ‘Dude, no one’s ever going to see this movie. Nobody’s ever, ever going to see this movie.’ ” It came out on February 17th, 1989, and made $40.5 million on a budget of $6.5 million. Solomon and Matheson were soon tasked with writing a sequel. Orion Pictures’ suggestion: Bill and Ted study for an English test by traveling through the history of literature and meeting the likes of Romeo and Juliet and Huck Finn. But Solomon and Matheson had little interest in a retread. Instead, they wrote Bill & Ted Go to Hell, in which the buddies die in the first 20 minutes and travel to the underworld, where they befriend the Grim Reaper and bring him into their band as a bass player along with a hairy alien named Station and robot doppelgängers. There is no time travel or historical figures. The studio insisted they remove the word “hell” from the title, but they wanted to start filming in January 1991 and get it into theaters just six months later, so there was no time to change anything else. “It’s like what Neil Young says about driving your car into a ditch after a hit,” says Winter. “There were people who were scratching their heads a little going, ‘Where was the booth?’ ” They also didn’t have the budget to completely fulfill Solomon and Matheson’s grandiose vision, and some of the most wildly imaginative scenes were dropped. “At one point, there was supposed to be huge rabbits coming after us in a highway car chase,”

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AND . . . ACTION! Above: Director Dean Parisot on set in New Orleans last year. “I love the absurd humor,” he says of the films, and Bill and Ted’s “unbridled optimism.” KIDS ARE ALRIGHT Left: Kid Cudi joins Bill and Ted’s daughters (Brigette LundyPaine, left, and Samara Weaving) to help save the world in the new film.

says Reeves. “The ambition of these films is always larger than the business appetite. Eventually, I started calling the second one ‘Bill & Ted’s Omitted Adventure’ because we got page after page that just read, ‘Omitted.’ ” Solomon and Matheson both look back at the movie with some regret (“We never quite got it right,” says Solomon), but scenes like Bill and Ted playing Death in a high-stakes game of Twister were just as funny as anything in the first movie, and it grossed $38 million. In the aftermath, Reeves became a superstar thanks to Point Break, Speed, and the Matrix trilogy, while Winter found success behind the scenes, directing TV shows and tech documentaries like Downloaded and Deep Web. Solomon, meanwhile, wrote the first Men in Black and the Now You See Me films. Everyone stayed close as the years went by, but a third Bill & Ted movie was never discussed until about 15 years ago, when a reporter asked Reeves on a red carpet if he would ever do it and he didn’t rule it out. “There was a little crack in the armor,” says Solomon, “and we went, ‘Hey, it’s actually a possibility.’ ” They all gathered at Winter’s house for a barbecue in 2008 to toss around ideas, and Reeves was enthusiastic enough about revisiting Ted as a middle-aged man that Solomon

and Matheson started work on a spec script. When they finally took it to the studio, interest in a third chapter with Reeves and Winter was practically nonexistent. Executives told them that the characters have almost no following overseas, and the original movies didn’t make enough money to justify another one all these years later. “They were cult-y movies,” says Matheson. “To the degree that there was any interest, it was more like, ‘Well, now their kids need to [do] a history report, so it’s a big family adventure to help the kids pass the history class.’ We could have gotten that off the ground, but we didn’t want to do that.” They went public with the idea for Bill & Ted Face the Music, and fans started petitions and letter-writing campaigns, but the funding never came through. “It was really frustrating,” says Solomon. “We kept getting to the altar, to the part where they go, ‘You may now kiss the bride.’ And we’d pull up the veil, and instead of the bride, it’s just a skeleton that crumbles into dust. That happened quite a few times.” Opinions vary as to what finally pushed things over the edge last year. Solomon points to a couple of wealthy outside investors (David Haring and Patrick Dugan) who stepped in, Matheson to Reeves’ renewed box-office appeal. “It was John Wick that did it,” he

says. “Once those movies started exploding, another Bill & Ted movie started looking different.” Filming began last summer in New Orleans, but they had just 37 days to shoot and half the budget they originally envisioned. “I didn’t know how the hell we were going to do it,” says director Dean Parisot. “It felt like a foolish enterprise. We were going to hell, the future, and all across space and time. Those are big movie elements. I think we solved it by focusing on things that are less about spectacle and more about character.” The movie brings back many familiar faces, including Ted’s dad (Hal Landon Jr.), his ex-wife Missy (Amy Stoch), and the Grim Reaper (William Sadler), along with SNL’s Beck Bennett as Ted’s younger brother Deacon, Kristen Schaal as the daughter of George Clooney’s character Rufus, and rapper Kid Cudi as himself. Samara Weaving and Brigette Lundy-Paine play Bill and Ted’s rock-obsessed daughters, respectively, but the core of the movie is the unbreakable friendship between the men as they travel through time (and back into hell) trying to determine why they have yet to fulfill their destiny. “Ted’s a little down at the beginning, and that was surprising because he was always ebullient,” says Reeves. “But in a weird way, his being down is part of the engine of us moving forward. We’re super symmetry. If I’m velocity, Bill is position. And so when I was down, it forced Bill to lift us up. It creates a dramatic journey for the characters.” It’s unclear as of this writing just how many theaters will be open for the movie’s release. The Bill & Ted camp is prepared for many fans to see it via video on demand, though a bit disappointed by that thought. “To not have that opportunity to have the experience of going to the cinema,” says Reeves, “and going to see a comedy, sharing that breath and those pheromones and that laughter, is definitely a loss.” But no matter what happens financially with Bill & Ted Face the Music, don’t expect to see a fourth one at any point down the line. “I wouldn’t sign up for it, and I can’t imagine the guys signing up for it,” says Matheson. “The only potential path forward is with their daughters.” “Could somebody conceivably want to do that?” he continues. “Why not? If they found the young women versions of me and Ed in 1984, a couple of 25-year-olds who are amused by each other and are funny and come up with it, why not? That would be great. But I don’t have anything more to say about Bill and Ted myself.”

FROM TOP: PATTI PERRET/ORION PICTURES; ORION PICTURES

The Mix

On Newsstands Now Wherever Magazines Are Sold

The Mix

CHARTS THE BIGGEST ARTISTS, ALBUMS, AND SONGS OF TODAY

The Song of the Year Is Up for Grabs THERE’S LITTLE DOUBT that “Old Town Road” won 2019. Lil Nas X’s genre-agnostic hit finished the year 600 million streams ahead of the next closest track, and spent a staggering 16 weeks at Number One. But through the first half of the year, 2020’s a toss-up — and if we do end up with a hit of “Old Town Road” proportions, we probably haven’t heard it yet. Instead, we’ve seen a parade of Number Ones with less staying power, along with

Most Weeks at Number One This Year 11

The Box, Roddy Ricch

Rockstar, DaBaby feat. Roddy Ricch

Toosie Slide, Drake

Blinding Lights, The Weeknd The Scotts, Travis Scott and Kid Cudi

Savage, Megan Thee Stallion feat. Beyoncé

Stuck With U, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande

Baby Pluto, Lil Uzi Vert

Rain on Me, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande

“The Box” reached Number One in the first week of 2020, and stayed for 11 weeks, holding off competition from Drake, Future, and Justin Bieber.

some viral phenoms that went as quickly as they came. By our midyear tally, Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” has come the closest to ruling 2020, racking up 4.7 million song units so far, along with 11 nonconsecutive weeks at Number One under its belt. But “The Box” hasn’t reached the heights of “Old Town Road,” which at one point pulled in more than 150 million weekly streams. Here’s a look at the other contenders for this year’s champ. EMILY BLAKE

Top Songs of 2020 So Far SONG UNITS

Roddy Ricch

Future and Drake

The Weeknd

The Box

Life Is Good

Blinding Lights

Dua Lipa

Doja Cat

Don’t Start Now

Say So

4.7M

3.1M

3.0M

2.2M

2.1M

She’s Just Getting Started Dua Lipa drifted into the mainstream with her woozy 2017 hit “New Rules,” which paved the way to a Best New Artist Grammy. But the disco-drenched “Don’t Start Now” hit harder and launched the British singer to a personal best of Number Three on the RS 100. It’s also had staying power, hanging in the Top 40 from January through June.

Doja Goes Disco After mastering kitsch (“Mooo!”), emo rap (“Bottom Bitch”), and R&B (“Body Language”), Doja Cat perfected summerready disco pop with “Say So.” It’s the biggest hit from her second album, Hot Pink, hitting Number Two on the RS 100 with help from guest Nicki Minaj. To date, the song has had more than 300 million on-demand audio streams.

Streams for “Say So” 20M

Post Malone

Circles

2.0M

15M

5/10/20 Reaches Number Two on the RS 100

10M

Savage

2.0M

1/30/20

3/27/20

6/19/20

Hot Girl Summer, Part Two

Dua Lipa, Roddy Ricch, Doja Cat (from top)

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Tones and I

Roddy Ricch

Arizona Zervas

Dance Monkey

High Fashion

Roxanne

2.0M

1.9M

If there was one song that got us through the bleak early days of quarantine, it was Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage.” After taking off on TikTok, it caught the attention of Beyoncé, whose feature took it to Number One. It marked Megan’s second time on top, after “Hot Girl Summer” in 2019. With the remix and original combined, it’s pulled in 2 million units.

This list ranks the top songs from January 3rd, 2020, through June 30th, 2020, based on song-equivalent units, a combination of on-demand audio streams and song sales that powers the RS 100.

FROM LEFT: GREGG DEGUIRE/GETTY IMAGES; STEVEN FERDMAN/ GETTY IMAGES; MATT BARON/SHUTTERSTOCK

Megan Thee Stallion

REBECCA CABAGE/INVISION/AP

OHN LEGEND’S new album, Bigger Love, is a lush, seductive, often-danceable collection of grown-up love songs, with sweet retro-R&B production touches on nearly every track. There are striking departures, too, like the Coldplay-meets–Kings of Leon power ballad “Wild” (with guitar from Gary Clark Jr.) and the trap/doo-wop hybrid of “Ooh Laa.” In all, it would’ve been a perfect balm for a nation in social isolation; as it happens, Legend ended up releasing it in the midst of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. “Albums take a while to make,” he says, “and there’s still quite a distance between writing it and putting it out. So you can’t ever be sure exactly what environment you’re going to be releasing it into. But here we are. We’re at this moment.” This album does touch on politics. “Never Break” could be about a relationship or something broader, right? Yeah, it was always meant to feel like both. It could be about a couple saying they’re gonna stick together through tough times. But I think it’s more about human resilience. One of my team members feels it’s an ode to our democracy, saying we can get through even these challenges. If it is about our democracy, are you sure we’ll never break? I’m not! I’m an optimist by nature, but I think if Trump gets re-elected we won’t have democracy as we know it. He’s already pretty much thrown off all the guardrails. You’ve been a longtime advocate for criminaljustice reform. What surprises you, if anything, about this current moment? I’m hopeful, because I see the conversation moving leaps and bounds from where it was before. Part of it is due to the sheer volume and diversity of the coalition in the streets, protesting for justice, asserting that black lives matter — even seeing a Republican senator utter

Q&A

John Legend The singer on his new album of love songs, the Black Lives Matter movement, and why he’s hopeful for the future By BRIAN HIATT those words. I see momentum toward serious change. Many white people seem to have understood only in the past few months that police treat black people differently. Is it hard not to wonder what took so long? Yeah, it’s frustrating because black people have been saying this for a long time. But videos make a big, big difference. And white people have been given reason to believe that they should trust the police, because the police do

treat them pretty well most of the time. And so it’s hard for them to realize that we see the police in a completely different way, because we’ve been the subject of so much brutality and unfairness and injustice over the years. You’re one of the only modern artists to mention Nat “King” Cole as a model. What does he mean to you? I discovered him through my dad — something about his tone, his piano playing, his phrasing was just so beautiful

to me. As I got older, I found out one of my other favorite singers, Marvin Gaye, really looked up to [him] as well. Sometimes I’ve had visions of me hosting a variety show like Nat’s, with music and talk and comedy. When Chrissy [Teigen] and I are doing these Christmas specials and Father’s Day specials, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking of Nat “King” Cole. I can hear Raphael Saadiq’s touches on this album. But what does

“executive producer” really mean in this case? He helps me decide what songs we put on the album, or the order that we put them in. And when tracks need something else, he helps. So sometimes it’s him personally playing the bass or playing the guitar. Or it’s him calling a drummer that he likes to add some live drums. He played on the track Charlie Puth produced and just made it a little more funky. And then he played on the song “Slow Cooker” and made it more churchy and D’Angelo-ish. And he’s the one that said we should call Gary Clark. So there’s little sprinkles like that that elevate the songs. You skipped two grades, starting high school so young that other kids called you “Doogie.” How did that affect you? I was definitely a nerd. I was slow at making friends, slow talking to girls. I was just behind, and you can understand why — you walk into high school, you’re 12 years old, and everyone else is 14. I eventually caught up. But the one thing I wasn’t shy about when I was a freshman was the fact that I could sing. It made other kids notice me and say, “Oh, my God, you sound so good.” Music opened that door for me. Kanye West was very important to your career. What do you think is going on with him politically? I heard he was marching in Chicago. That’s an interesting development — we’ll see what happens. My experience of him was that he was never very political to begin with. We were in many conversations together, especially about music, but also about fashion, life, about women. But we almost never talked about politics. He’s made some of the most important and brilliant and beautiful pieces of art we’ve seen in the music business over the past 15 years. I was just in a conversation the other day about the Grammys, and one of the travesties of this era of the Grammys is that Kanye has never won Album of the Year. Also a travesty that Beyoncé hasn’t. August 2020

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ALL- EL

and inspired design, electric cars are miles from where they were even just a few years ago. Here are five super-advanced, fun-to-drive

8 . 2 0 2 0

models you can buy right now

Thanks to improved technology

EDITI

RS ROAD TEST

T EC RIC

FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE

2020 Porsche Taycan Turbo S The Porsche Taycan Turbo S is a great antidote for social distancing. During a Saturday drive just north of Los Angeles, pedestrians wave, motorcyclists flash thumbs-ups, and a surfer pulling on his wetsuit simply points and stares. It’s the most socializing I’ve done in months. The Taycan is Porsche’s first-ever all-electric vehicle, and the Turbo S is the most powerful version of the Taycan, so it makes sense that the car commands so much attention. The four-door sedan boasts unmistakable Porsche design elements even people who don’t care about cars recognize: bulging fenders, swooping roofline, all-around beauty. (It’s also got an unmistakable Porsche price: $185,000.) But the roads in and around L.A. are teeming with luxury automobiles. What’s so notable about the Turbo S? The answer is the sound — or lack of it. When people see, say, a Tesla Model S — the

Taycan’s main competitor — they aren’t surprised by the absence of engine noise; that’s what you expect from a Tesla. But a silent Porsche? That doesn’t seem right. It does, however, feel right. Mashing the “gas” pedal to launch onto the 405 freeway, the acceleration shellacs me to my seat as two electric motors, one in front and one in back, deliver 774 pound-feet of torque to all four wheels. Porsche quotes a zero-to-60 mph time of 2.6 seconds, but

SHOCKING SPEED The Turbo S is fast even when it’s not moving. Thanks to cutting-edge tech, the Taycan can gain up to 75 percent of its charge in about 22 minutes — if, that is, you manage to find a relatively rare (for now) 350-kilowatt charging station. At more common 50-kilowatt chargers, it takes about 90 minutes.

it’s likely even quicker than that. Plus, the Turbo S has something other EVs don’t — a second gear, which helps maintain acceleration up to the car’s 161-mph top speed. With an EPA-rated range of just 192 miles, the Turbo S might not be ideal for road trips. But it offers a surprisingly comfortable ride while still handling like a Porsche. It carved up canyon roads in Malibu with Teutonic precision, despite weighing in at a whopping 5,121 pounds. And truth be told, it doesn’t do it in actual silence. The Turbo S features a standard “Electric Sport Sound” system that broadcasts acceleration noise inside and outside the cabin, like a techno remix of a high-revving gas engine. “It sounds like being in a spaceship,” a passenger said. Considering the Turbo S is a feat of engineering that moves far quicker than humans have any business moving, that’s a pretty apt description. KY HENDERSON

31 PHOTOGRAPH BY Damon Casarez

RS ROAD TEST FOR ALL-AROUND LUXURY

2020 Jaguar I-Pace

2020 Nissan Leaf Like those familiar posters of ape-to-man evolution, the Nissan Leaf shows how EVs have morphed from grunting primitives into smarter, socialized beings. The 2010 Leaf was the world’s first mass-produced EV for a global audience. But I still remember cringing at its clown-car looks and meager 73-mile range. The new 2020 Leaf Plus can roam FULL STOP up to 226 miles on a charge — three times Nissan’s smartly tuned the original’s abilities. “e-Pedal” shows serious This is a legitimate engineering chops. car, not a comproLifting your foot off the mised science project, accelerator slows the a generously featured Leaf or brings it to a stop hatchback that’s cemwithout the brake pedal. etery-quiet and relaxing to drive. Welcome gains include a 45 percent stronger, 214-horsepower motor. Robust, 100-kilowatt fast charging allows the Leaf to slurp up an 80-percent charge in 45 minutes. And Nissan’s available ProPilot Assist delivers a useful, affordable suite of robotic driver aids, including steering assist on highways, adaptive cruise control, automated emergency braking, and pedestrian detection. The price can creep uncomfortably into Tesla Model 3 territory — my deluxe Leaf SL Plus cost $44,825 (though a basic S Plus can be had for $39,125). But a federal tax credit eases the blow. LAWRENCE ULRICH

SPARE NO EXPENSE Among the Jag’s optional high-end features are four-zone climate control, an 825-watt Meridian surround-sound stereo system (standard on the HSE, $450 on the other two models), and a heated steering wheel.

FOR THE CITY DWELLER

2020 Mini Electric If you’re in the market for a handy urban errand runner, look no further than the Mini Cooper SE. On the surface, it’s the same Mini people know and love — a frisky-handling, high-design British coupe by way of BMW (which owns Mini). The SE squirts from zero to 60 mph in a peppy 6.9 seconds, darts around lumbering SUVs in city traffic, and grips the pavement like mad with its sticky Goodyear tires.

The interior reads posh, from the light-ringed orb of its center display screen to sport seats clad in diamond-pattern, eco-friendly faux leather. The downside: The Mini is so tiny, its makers could only stuff so much battery inside, a lithium-ion pack just one-third the size of the largest Tesla units. Still, my test drives in Miami and New York proved the Mini could go more than 130 miles on a

charge, easily stretching past its official 110-mile range. You’d be surprised

VISUAL CUES You’ll spot the electric Mini on the street by its kicky “energetic yellow” exterior mirrors and trim and its funky alloy wheels, whose three-hole pattern cleverly recalls a British electrical outlet.

how long that is when you’re just commuting or short-hopping. Plus, batteries are heavy and expensive as hell, so the Mini’s T-shaped pack makes for a lightweight and ultraaffordable EV: $23,250 after a $7,500 federal tax credit. That price is in line with gasoline-powered econoboxes that can’t touch the Mini’s style or performance, let alone its zero tailpipe emissions. L.U.

FROM TOP: COURTESY OF NISSAN; NICK DIMBLEBY/JAGUAR; BERNHARD FILSER/MINI

FOR EVERYONE

SUVs tend to be bulky and utilitarian, focused on either surviving off-road adventures or shuttling the kids from school to practice (pre-pandemic, anyway). But the Jaguar I-Pace (from $69,850) is straight-up gorgeous. It’s also a blast to drive. Along the iconic Angeles Crest Highway in the San Gabriel Mountains, the I-Pace kept up with smaller cars through the twists and turns. A brief detour up Mount Wilson saw the Jag eat up the narrow road’s tight corners. Meanwhile, roomy seats and a comprehensive (if sometimes hard-to-use) infotainment system helped keep everyone happy inside. On the way down the mountain, the regenerative braking system — it’s how EVs recharge their batteries on the fly — slowed the vehicle whenever my foot came off the pedal. At times it was too eager, but the function can be softened via an onscreen menu. And with the I-Pace’s 394 hp, all-wheel drive, and crisp handling, you’ll want to keep your foot on the floor anyway. KY HENDERSON

THREE EVS TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 Advancements in electric tech are coming so fast that next year will see the field expand significantly — even into all-American muscle cars

FOR THE TECH-OBSESSED

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF TESLA; COURTESY OF POLESTAR; COURTESY OF FORD; COURTESY OF MERCEDES-BENZ

Tesla Model Y Tesla makes electric cars. But what it’s really doing is chipping away at mainstream America’s resistance to electric cars, one innovative model at a time. The latest is the Model Y, a piercing shot into the SUV-loving, traffic-stressed heart of the American buyer. Go ahead, trot out all those reasons why an EV doesn’t work for you. The Model Y knocks them dead, and adds onboard digital fart noises to remind you that Elon Musk still has a sense of humor (really — hit the whoopee-cushion logo in the vehicle’s accompanying app). “Fun” certainly describes the Model Y, which can time-warp to 60 mph in as little as 3.5 seconds. That’s faster than several fossil-fueled, and increasingly fossilized, high-performance SUVs. On New York’s roller-coaster Taconic Parkway, the Model Y glided past slowpokes in addictive, stealth-assault fashion, its dual electric motors emitting the barest whine and whisper. A limbo-low center of gravity, a signature of EVs that pack their batteries below the floor, helped the Model Y slingshot through curves with grace and pace alike.

So-called range anxiety is also banished: The Long Range version, starting from $52,900, can cruise for 316 miles on a full electric “tank.” That’s enough for round trips from New York to the Hamptons, or Los Angeles to Palm Springs, with miles to spare. An ingenious heat pump, a first for any Tesla, aims to preserve driving range in freezing-cold temperatures, long a challenge for electric vehicles. And when it’s time to juice up, Musk’s sprawling Supercharger network can add up to 158 miles of driving range in just 15 minutes on the plug. That nationwide network, now with more than 9,000 charge spots in North America, underlines perhaps the biggest competitive gap between Tesla and its rivals: an Apple-like ecosystem that takes all the guesswork and hassle out of the user experience, from a hyperintuitive, 15-inch central touchscreen interface to over-the-air software updates. Within minutes, Tesla updated my Model Y to sample beta versions of its latest Autopilot functions, including the ability to halt robotically for stoplights and stop signs. (The latter seems a

bit of a work in progress, but it’s coming.) Tesla was also ahead of rivals in understanding that people live through their smartphones. So a smartphone app replaces a traditional key, pre-cools or heats the cabin, and even summons this sloperoofed SUV to drive itself out of parking spaces (at short range). And the Model Y’s new wireless charging is one of those brilliant ideas that seems inevitable in hindsight: A driver’s and a passenger’s phone sit side-by-side on the console, in plain view, on a rubberized pad that holds them rock steady even during the hardest cornering. Expect other car companies to follow suit quickly. Equally inevitable, it seems, is that the Model Y will supplant its Model 3 sedan sibling as America’s, and the world’s, favorite EV. That California-built Model 3 found 300,000 buyers last year, nearly three times as many as its nearest global rival. To that, the Model Y adds not just the latest upgrades and tech, but the up-high seating, standard allwheel-drive, and versatile space that have led SUVs to crushing market domination. Try all you like: Resistance is futile. L.U.

Polestar 2 MONEY TALKS In addition to zero tailpipe emissions, the Model Y makes a financial case for going green: A class-whipping 121-mpge rating, with “mpge” the electric equivalent of a gallon of unleaded. The EPA figures an owner will spend $550 for enough electricity to cover 15,000 miles, an annual savings of $650 compared with the average new car.

This five-seater brings polish and style to battle Tesla’s Model 3. Beyond the green powertrain, the second ride from Volvo’s new performance arm boasts forward-thinking designs, from frameless mirrors to vegan fabric modeled on a wetsuit. From $59,900.

Ford Mustang Mach-E With the Mach-E, Ford turns the Mustang, its muscle-car nameplate, electric. The Mach-E crossover has four doors — a Mustang first — along with room for gear and groceries. That’s not to say the latest ’stang is docile: Opt for the Performance Edition and the Mach-E will hit 60 mph faster than a Porsche 911 GTS. From $43,895.

Mercedes-Benz EQC Mercedes enters the category with this fiveseat crossover, and the result is predictably luxe. Nothing about the 402-horsepower machine screams “electric car” — no design flourishes like gull-wing doors or glowing green lighting. It’s pure Mercedes, gone electric. Price TBD. JESSE WILL

The Plot Against America Blocking ballots, intimidating voters, spreading misinformation: How the Trump campaign plans to suppress the vote and undermine our democracy By ANDY KROLL

N JUNE, President Trump sat in the Oval Office for one of his periodic interviews-turnedairing-of-grievances. When the conversation turned to the 2020 election, Trump singled out what he called the “biggest risk” to his bid for a second term. It was not the mounting death toll from COVID-19, or further economic damage inflicted by the pandemic, or anything else a reality-dwelling president might fret about. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits,” Trump told the Politico reporter he’d invited. He was referring to the series of lawsuits filed by his campaign and the Republican National Committee, fighting the expansion of mail-in voting and seeking to limit access to the ballot box in November. “We have many lawsuits going all over,” he said. “And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think — I think it puts the election at risk.” Going into 2020, Trump had the political winds at his back with a strong economy, roaring stock mar-

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ket, and historically low unemployment. Then came COVID-19. As of this writing, more than 130,000 Americans are dead from the virus, more than 3 million have gotten infected, and the economy has tipped into Great Depression territory. With Trump at the helm, the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has ranked as one of the worst anywhere in the world. By mid-summer, the president’s approval ratings had sunk to the high 30s; according to Gallup, in the past 72 years only one incumbent president with a comparably dismal standing, Harry Truman, went on to win re-election. The possibility of Trump going down in flames, Hindenburg-style, and bringing the rest of the Republican ticket with him has even Fox News speculating on whether he might drop out of the race before the election. But Trump defied the prewritten obituaries in 2016, and he could do it again this year. In recent months, a central theme of his re-election strate-

gy has come into clear, unmistakable focus: Trump and his Republican enablers are putting voter suppression front and center — fear-mongering about voting by mail, escalating their Election Day poll watching and so-called ballot-security operations, and blocking funding to prepare the country for a pandemic-era election. “The president views voteby-mail as a threat to his election,” a lawyer for the Trump campaign recently told 60 Minutes. Attorney General William Barr told Fox News that vote-bymail “absolutely opens the floodgates to fraud.” And Trump blasted out in a May tweet that “MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.” “They’re shouting the quiet part out loud,” Marc Elias, one of the Democratic Party’s top election lawyers, tells ROLLING STONE. “They’re not whispering it. They’re shouting it.”

USTIN CLARK, A senior lawyer on the Trump 2020 campaign, had a message for the group of Republican lawyers gathered at a members-only club in Madison, Wisconsin, last November. Every time he met with President Trump, Clark told the group, Trump asked, “ ‘What are we doing about voter fraud? What are we doing about voter fraud?’ ” “Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places,” Clark said. He would later explain that he was referring to what Democrats say about Republicans, but it was all part of a larger point — namely, to ensure the president’s election, the Trump campaign and RNC were stepping up their efforts to root out the supposed scourge of “voter fraud.” “It’s going to be a much bigger program, much more aggressive program, a better funded program,” said Clark. The president, he assured the group, “believes in it, and he will do whatever it takes to make sure it’s successful.” To be clear, rampant voter fraud is a myth, a fantasy dreamed up by those who need a pretext to make it harder for certain people to exercise their right to vote. Instances of in-person and mailin voter fraud are extremely rare, according to decades of data and academic research. The conservative Heritage Foundation — whose co-founder Paul Weyrich once told a group of evangelical leaders that “I don’t want everybody to vote” because “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down” — is one of the loudest proponents of the voter-fraud myth. Yet according to Heritage’s own research, in the past 20 years, 0.00006 percent of all mail-in ballots cast were fraudulent. “There is no support for the

ILLUSTRATIONS BY Victor Juhasz

argument that mail-in voting is a problem,” says Lorraine Minnite, a political-science professor at Rutgers University and author of The Myth of Voter Fraud. But that isn’t stopping Trump and the Republican Party from going on the offensive. Trump officials argue that Democrats are using COVID-19 as an “excuse and pretext” to rush through drastic changes like universal vote-by-mail that are intended to benefit their candidates and that would inject more uncertainty into our elections. “President Trump will not stand by as Democrats attempt to tear apart our entire election system just months before votes are cast,” Clark, the Trump campaign lawyer, said in a statement to ROLLING STONE. In February, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced that they would spend $10 million on voting-related lawsuits in 2020 — a figure that has since doubled to $20 million. The RNC has so far filed lawsuits in more than

a dozen states, including the battlegrounds of Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. These suits are a mix of offense and defense: Some attempt to block litigation brought by Democratic groups to expand mail-in voting in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Others seek to invalidate state-level policies by saying that expanding access to mail-in ballots invites fraud. But the uniting theme of the RNC’s suits, says Rick Hasen, a University of California, Irvine law professor and author of Election Meltdown, is simple: “Casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election. Raising spurious fraud claims.” In Pennsylvania, for instance, the RNC is suing the state government and election boards in all 67 counties to ban the use of secure drop boxes for submitting take-home ballots and to eliminate the requirement that poll watchers can only serve in the county where they live. In Florida, Republicans have sued to block efforts that would make the state pay for postage on mail-in ballots, would change state law so that any mail-in ballot postmarked by the date of the election (as opposed to received by Election Day) will be counted, and would allow paid organizers to gather and submit completed absentee ballots. It’s a sign of how aggressive and deep-pocketed the GOP legal strategy is that the party is waging legal battles in states that Trump has no chance of winning. In May, the RNC and two other groups sued California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, over a newly an-

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nounced plan to mail absentee ballots to all eligible voters in the nation’s most populous state. “That would be like me waking up one day and saying, ‘I’m going to file a voting-rights lawsuit in’ — I don’t even know what the equivalent is — ‘Wyoming or South Dakota,’ ” says Elias, the Democratic Party election lawyer. The RNC’s suit against California “suggests to me that their $20 million is only a small tip of the iceberg,” he adds. The funders of the RNC’s 2020 legal war chest are a who’s who of plutocrats and industry titans for whom a $100,000 check to the president is pocket change. According to an analysis of election records by ROLLING STONE, these funders include L.L. Bean heiress Linda Bean, private-equity magnate Stephen Schwarzman, Johnson & Johnson heir Ambassador Woody Johnson, Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), the Ricketts family that founded TD Ameritrade, coal barons Joe Craft and Robert Murray, billionaire financiers John Paulson and John W. Childs, financial executive Charles Schwab, Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan, and Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter. “It’s no surprise to see that the list of wealthy people bankrolling the RNC’s attack on voting rights includes some of the biggest benefactors of the Trump administration’s economic policy,” says Morris Pearl, chair of Patriotic Millionaires. “They don’t want to protect our elections — they want to protect their positions of privilege.” The Trump campaign has a deep-pocketed ally in its attack on mail-in voting: the Honest Elections Project. Funded by undisclosed dark money and linked to Leonard Leo, the conservative activist who helped put Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court and steered more than $250 million for conservative judicial causes between 2014 and 2017, the organization says on its website that voter suppression is a “myth.” The group has run ads that warn against “risky new methods” like mailin ballots, and accused Wisconsin Democrats of sowing election “chaos” after the state’s Republicans refused to send every voter an absentee ballot or delay its April primary election because of COVID-19. The group has hired the same law firm spearheading the RNC’s massive litigation campaign, Consovoy McCarthy, to pressure election officials in battleground states to purge their voting rolls, threatening to sue them if they don’t comply. The group’s executive director, Jason Snead, is a former Heritage Foundation scholar who has argued that felons “should be required to prove that they have turned over a new leaf ” before they can vote again and that “fraudulent” voting behavior is “deeply ingrained in certain regions of the country.” Earlier this year, Snead told Breitbart News that the “greatest danger” facing American elections amid the COVID19 crisis wasn’t the risk of illness or death, but Democratic proposals for reforming the voting process to meet our pandemic moment. (Snead did not respond to a request for comment.) Voting-rights activists say Snead’s comments are typical of a conservative movement that wants to make it harder for people of color, ex-felons, and college students to vote. Lauren Groh-Wargo, CEO of Fair Fight Action, founded by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and funded by major liberal donors, says Snead is “directly dog-whistling around this racist idea that there are these droves of illegal voters, which is not true.”

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ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee have devoted $20 million to voting-related lawsuits, including efforts to block vote-bymail, and have already filed suits in more than a dozen states.

N NOVEMBER 3RD, 1981, Lynette Monroe, who lived in northwest Trenton, headed out to her polling place. It was Election Day in New Jersey. When Monroe, a Democrat, arrived at the polling site, she was stopped outside by a member of a group called the National Ballot Security Task Force. Monroe was asked if she had her voter-registration card with her. She said she did not but that it didn’t matter — she was a registered voter. But the National Ballot Security Task Force members “turned her away, preventing her from casting her ballot,” according to a lawsuit later filed by the Democratic Party, Monroe, and several others.

When she was turned away, Monroe had no way of knowing that the National Ballot Security Task Force was a massive voter-suppression project funded and carried out by the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican Party. Republicans hired county deputy sheriffs and local policemen with revolvers, two-way radios, and NATIONAL BALLOT SECURITY TASK FORCE armbands to patrol predominantly black and Hispanic precincts in New Jersey. They posted large WARNING signs outside polling places saying that it was “a crime to falsify a ballot or to violate election laws.” The signs omitted any mention of the GOP’s role in this egregious intimidation

scheme, but the intent was obvious: “to harass and intimidate duly qualified black and Hispanic voters for the purpose and with the effect of discouraging these voters from casting their ballots,” the lawsuit stated. The result of the suit was a 1982 consent decree between the Democratic and Republican parties. Even though the RNC refused to admit wrongdoing in New Jersey, the group agreed to stop harassing and intimidating voters of color, including by deputizing off-duty law-enforcement officers and equipping those officers with guns or badges. Over the next three decades, Democrats marshaled enough evidence of ongoing Republican voter suppression to maintain the consent decree until 2018, when a federal judge lifted the order. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in nearly 40 years when the RNC isn’t bound by the terms of the 1982 decree. Clark, the Trump campaign lawyer, told the group of Republicans at the private meeting last November that the end of the consent decree was “a huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” freeing the RNC to directly coordinate with campaigns and political committees on so-called Election Day oper-

cept. “That’s what we need. We need people who are unafraid to call it like they see it.” To voting-rights advocates, the RNC and True the Vote’s poll-watching plans, if realized, are nothing more than a blatant voter-intimidation strategy. “Their program is based on a false premise that Americans, and especially Americans of color, are breaking the law when it comes to voting, so their poll monitors become de facto policemen and serve no purpose but to intimidate voters, because fraud is so rare,” says Groh-Wargo of Fair Fight Action. “They’re aiming to pack monitors into polling places to disrupt voting from within, but they’re also hoping that the existence of their massive program creates an aura of intimidation that deters eligible voters from participating in the first place.”

UST AS RACISM and xenophobia have always been essential to Trump’s political DNA, so, too, have nonstop, evidence-free claims of “voter fraud” and “rigged” elections. Even after he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, he claimed — with zero evidence — that 3 to 5 million noncitizens

“They don’t want to protect our elections,” one voting-rights advocate says. “They want to protect their positions of privilege.” ations. The RNC is sending millions of dollars to state Republican parties to vastly expand these measures, which include recruiting 50,000 poll observers to deploy in key precincts. Josh Helton, a lawyer who has advised the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has described Philadelphia, where black people make up 41 percent of the population, as “probably the epicenter for voter fraud in this country” and a likely target for the GOP’s 2020 poll-watching efforts. Depending on the state, poll watchers enlisted by political parties can challenge a voter’s eligibility based on their address, citizenship, and even the date they registered to vote. Michigan law, for instance, says poll watchers need only “good reason” to pull a prospective voter out of line and challenge their eligibility. North Carolina allows anyone registered to vote with “good moral character” (whatever that means) to work as a poll watcher. Even in Oregon and Washington state, where elections are conducted by mail, poll watchers can observe county clerks count mail-in ballots and make challenges when they see fit. Here again, outside groups seem to be drafting off of the Trump campaign’s aggressive plans. Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, a group that spreads misinformation about “voter fraud” and has accused “globalists” of exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to “finance a massive push to ‘vote at home,’ ” laid out at a closed-door conference in February a plan to enlist Navy SEALs to monitor polling places in 2020. “You get some SEALs in those polls and they’re going to say, ‘No, no, this is what it says. This is how we’re going to play this show,’ ” Engelbrecht said, according to a recording obtained by The Inter-

had voted, and that was why he lost the popular vote, thus surely becoming the first presidential victor to allege historic levels of “illegal” voting . . . in the election he just won. Now, with COVID-19 ravaging the country and disproportionately afflicting people of color, Trump has found a way to attack the democratic process that combines his Stephen Miller-inspired racist agenda and his deranged voter-fraud obsession. Vote-by-mail didn’t used to be a partisan idea. Before COVID-19, five states, led by Democrats and Republicans alike, conducted their elections entirely by mail — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah — and 29 more states plus D.C. permitted “no-excuse” absentee voting, meaning voters can request absentee ballots without having to provide any reason why. U.S. service members have long mailed in their ballots from overseas, and until recently both political parties have touted its benefits. But suddenly Republican elected officials, from Trump on down to local lawmakers, are blocking efforts to make it easier to vote by mail. Consider Iowa. In response to the pandemic, Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, extended early voting and sent an absentee ballot application to every voter. Turnout in the state’s June primary elections surged and the vast majority of people voted absentee. Iowa Republican legislators responded by hastily passing a law to limit the secretary of state’s emergency authority. “Mail-in voting wasn’t created in this pandemic,” says Janai Nelson, associate director-counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “It’s only when we see the expansion of access to this very practical tool that we see the casting of votes being subjected to such scrutiny and malignment.”

The naked hypocrisy of the Republican Party’s newfound antipathy toward mail-in voting is all the more glaring considering that Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, AG Barr, and many other senior Trump administration officials have voted absentee repeatedly in the past. And as an actual strategy, Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting could even turn out to be self-destructive if you account for the fact that Republican voters have long been avid users of mailin voting. In Florida, absentee voting is widely popular among the state’s Republican voters. In Arizona, where the Republican presidential candidate has won every four years since 1972 with only one exception, the GOP initiated and perfected the use of mailin voting. Chuck Coughlin, a consultant who advised Sen. John McCain, calls it “a very effective way of letting people participate” with few incidents of fraud. The real threat to the 2020 elections is not what Trump, Barr, and their allies want you to believe. It’s the funding and readiness crisis facing thousands of election jurisdictions trying to shift to a hybrid in-person/vote-by-mail model in a few months’ time. In California, where 72 percent of voters mailed in their ballots in the most recent primary, the transition won’t be as hard. But Pennsylvania, where the percentage of mail-in ballots is in the single digits, faces a daunting task. Coughlin, the Arizona consultant, says it took years and many elections for Arizona to master the use of widely adopted mail-in voting. Underfunded election operations are a perennial issue, but with state budgets facing dramatic cutbacks due to COVID-19, the funding shortfall could be worse than ever. “My usual election-cycle comment is that we’re trying to find enough duct tape to cover the holes in the bucket,” says Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and voting-rights expert. “This time, we’re trying to make the bucket out of duct tape.” Civil-rights groups have asked Congress to approve $4 billion as soon as possible for election funding. (So far, Trump has signed off on just $400 million, onetenth of the recommended amount, and local officials have already spent most of that initial money.) House Democrats included that funding in a coronavirus relief bill, the HEROES Act, but Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, blocked the bill and Trump called it “dead on arrival.” How to explain this? It’s possible that voter suppression isn’t the only goal — it’s also about creating chaos and confusion before, on, and after Election Day. Perhaps Trump’s assault on voting in our pandemic election year isn’t a “strategy” at all but rather a kamikaze mission aimed at the heart of American democracy. The way Coughlin sees it, the ultimate goal of Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting is “to sow doubt in people’s minds about the process, which validates any view of his unless he wins.” By beating the drum about “massive fraud and abuse” and spreading misinformation about the integrity of the election, Trump could be laying the groundwork to challenge or outright deny the results. And if the RNC were to follow his lead and file lawsuits challenging the vote count, we could wind up in dangerously uncharted territory for American democracy. Picture Bush v. Gore on steroids. “We’ve never had a president delegitimize our democratic process intentionally,” says Rachel Bitecofer, a senior fellow and election forecaster at the Niskanen Center. “It is the kind of behavior you would not see — and should not see — in a healthy democracy.” August 2020

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PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS

‘This Is the Reckoning’ Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley on channeling the protest movement into real change By JAMIL SMITH

HE LAST OF AYANNA Pressley’s hair fell out in the middle of December, on the day before the Massachusetts representative and the rest of the House voted on President Trump’s articles of impeachment. Losing her crown of Senegalese twists — the signature hairstyle that Pressley, 46, had been wearing since winning the 7th Congressional District seat two years ago — was traumatic for several reasons. It was also the anniversary of her mother’s death. “I was missing her. I was mourning my hair. I was mourning the state of our democracy,” Pressley said when she revealed her alopecia diagnosis in January. The world has only become more tragic and tumultuous since then, but Pressley, who is currently running unopposed for re-election in November, has not slowed down. She has emerged boldly to become more than an aesthetic icon for both black women and the new progressive wave of Democratic political power. Last fall, Pressley introduced the People’s Justice Guarantee, a resolution laying out many of the principles now being discussed in city halls across the country in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests: decriminalizing nonviolent offenses and shifting budgets to support community-led public-health and safety initiatives rather than punitive policing. Since the uprising, Pressley has put forth a series of bills and resolutions calling for targeted reforms to criminal justice, transit, and other areas where underserved communities are being discriminated against. “You believe black lives matter? So legislate like it. Invest like it,” she tells ROLLING STONE. “This

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is the moment. This is the reckoning. I don’t see this waning. I really don’t.” I want to hear what your emotions are right now, in this moment of reckoning, just as a black woman, and as an American. I’ve had moments when I have felt completely gutted, exhausted, filled with tremendous dread. To see so many unarmed black folk murdered consecutively at a time when we are in the midst

of a pandemic, which has disproportionately hit black communities. The gravity of this tsunami of a crisis within a crisis, it has been heavy. But I have made a promise to myself, and I’m enlisting all of my accomplices in the work of justice to do the same, which is hold space for our righteous rage, be radical and bold in our demands, and also hold space for our radical healing. The day after [George Floyd’s homicide], I had put up a thread on my Twitter and I said,

POWER STANCE

“I feel I have to lead, because if you can’t lead from the most progressive seat in the nation, God help us,“ says Pressley, who is currently running unopposed for re-election in November.

“Just for a moment I’d like to deviate from the onslaught of images of black men being choked, brutalized, surveyed, profiled, policed, lynched, murdered.” And I created this timeline on black boy joy and black man joy, and it did go viral, but some people responded that they thought it was tone deaf. And I said, “This is what we’re managing, that we would retweet what [rapper and activist] Killer Mike referred to as ‘murder porn,’ and then wonder when is the right time to promote our humanity, to promote our joy, our healing.” I think often about those images being recirculated. I understand that they often provoke action — I don’t think we’d see people in the street if we had not seen George Floyd under that man’s knee. But what damage does it do to us to continually see this “murder porn”? I’ve been guilty myself of watching those things on repeat. And I think you’re trying to reconcile something, or — here’s the thing, to be black in America is to have your pain delegitimized. Black pain has been delegitimized since the inception of this country. And we see that embedded across every issue. Where it might be more obvious is in police brutality and in our health care system. And that’s why there has not been justice. We have had people that are sworn to protect and to serve operating with reckless impunity. And because of statutes like qualified immunity, which I have introduced a bill with Rep. [ Justin] Amash to end, there is no consequence. There is no justice. If we can, through lawmaking, codify hate, hurt, and harm and foist it onto black folks with great precision, then we can be precise in the work of healing and justice in our lawmaking and in our budgets. What should Congress be doing going forth to meet the demands of the uprising? Listen, we’re just getting started. In the early days of the civilrights movement, which we’re still in, because folks like to think it was bookended — they’ll winPHOTOGRAPH BY Philip

Keith

KEIKO HIROMI/POLARIS/NEWSCOM

now down the story and have you thinking Rosa sat and Martin marched and Medgar died and then John crossed a bridge and black folks had full emancipation and liberation. And, of course, we know that is not true. Every transformative change, just our basic rights — which we’ve had to organize, mobilize protests, and demonstrate for — was only brought about because of movements. Birmingham was 37 days. The Freedom Rides were seven months. The Greensboro sit-ins were six months, and the Montgomery bus boycott was 381 days. So I’m very encouraged by the sustainability of this current chapter in the civil-rights movement. And I do think it will lead to what the early days led to. And that is law change, [like with] the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. I believe that Congress must act as the conscience of our nation in this moment. It is important to get folks on the record. We have close to 200 co-sponsors for a resolution [against police brutality], but I want to vote. I think the House should go on record condemning police brutality, racial profiling, and excessive use of force. Congressional intent is a powerful tool. Congressional intent, to me, is about showing people where you stand. Absolutely . . . I mean, look, we’re in a Democratic majority, we have the most diverse and representative Congress in the history of Congress, the biggest congressional black caucus that we’ve ever had, and we should act like it. I know that in some instances we’re still kind of building our muscle and figuring out how best to flex that. What do you think we should be hearing from your nominee right now, Joe Biden? Actually, I think it’s what we need to be hearing from everyone. I don’t want to pretend that any one person, even the president of the United States, could alone undo 401 years of structural racism and systemic oppression. And particularly when you talk about the issue of police brutality and accountability. That’s why who your district attorney is matters. That’s why who your police commissioner is matters, right? This is work that we all have to do, to be actively anti-racist in dismantling these systems.

STANDARD BEARER

Pressley at a Juneteenth celebration in Boston. “I’m very encouraged by the sustainability of this current chapter in the civil-rights movement,” she says.

I would say the fact that we have a nominee and candidates and electeds that are saying black lives matter, that in itself is growth. But what that is indicative of is a culture shift. As my friend, [political analyst] Tiffany Cross reminds me, we have a culture shift, but we have yet to see a power shift. That’s why the only receipts we can care about in this moment are law change and budget change. Think of how long it took for people to say black lives matter at the level at which they’re now saying it. And now think about

new floor. I represent the Massachusetts 7th District, a seat that was held by John F. Kennedy. This is one of the most, if not the bluest, one of the most progressive seats in the country. Diverse, vibrant, dynamic — and one of the most unequal. We’re in a threemile radius from Cambridge, home to Harvard and MIT, [and] Roxbury, the blackest part of my district. Life expectancy drops by 30 years and median household income by $50,000. I feel I have to lead, because if you can’t lead from the most progressive seat in the nation, God help us.

how long it takes for the laws to shift, as you mentioned with the bus boycotts and Freedom Rides. We’re talking about long years to get to the reparative processes that this society needs. I hear you on that. But I do believe we are well-positioned to take the Senate back, and that’s going to make a big difference. But I would also say that that’s why governors and mayors and secretaries of state matter, because these are people who, with the stroke of a pen, can effectuate the kind of change we’re talking about, who can make sure that black folks are getting city contracts, who can fund communities. Instead of school police, school nurses. But to your point, people will say to me, “Well, you’re going to pass this, but the Senate won’t pick it up.” Well, just because they don’t want to do their job that is no reason for me to abdicate my role and my responsibility. Because at the very least you set a

We’re still dealing with a pandemic that is disproportionately killing black and brown and indigenous folks, and people are out here not wearing masks. How does the federal government mitigate this crisis, particularly for those who are underserved? The scale and scope of this, the gravity of this, it is overwhelming. Although we have passed numerous bipartisan bills on the House side in the midst of COVID, our disconnected and callous colleagues across the aisle in this GOP-led Senate just don’t get it. We’re in a pandemic. You’re supposed to be leading, and we started out behind because of their science denials and their criminal negligence. And you look at those lines in Kentucky and Georgia [to vote], and you get angry. I just need to say stop with this narrative that black folks don’t vote. I saw so many parents with their kids. Six, eight hours in line. Elders, young

mothers with babies on their hips, in inclement weather. We have been the preservers of democracy and this party for decades, so black folks vote. And when we don’t, it’s not because we’re ignorant and apathetic and don’t know any better, it’s because we know too much! We know too much based on our lived experiences, and there is a deficit of trust. You came forward in January to talk about living with alopecia. How have you seen that revelation impact your constituents? I’ve been embraced by the people that I represent. I won’t pretend that it’s easy all the time, because to be a black woman, to be a black woman in Congress, and to also be navigating the world bald, makes many people uncomfortable, and they are often vitriolic and hateful in their response. But representation is a powerful thing. And so when I’m tempted to shrink in a corner, because I’m still coming to grips with this, I think about all of the men, women, and children living with alopecia who have contacted me just to tell me what it means to them, to turn on the television or to open a newspaper and to see themselves reflected back. And so I’m going to continue to stand firm in it. There are so many extraordinarily pressing problems right now. If Democrats are successful in November, there’s the worry that Congress will get only one or two chances to take really big swings. What do you think would be the first thing a Democratic White House and Congress should tackle? Maybe we would go back to the first bill that we voted on in this 116th Congress, H.R. 1, because everything comes back to rooting out corruption. I mean, you have to begin there. We have to address corruption, the influence of dark money in our elections. We have to protect our elections and increase access to the ballot. But I don’t believe in this youonly-get-one-bite-of-the-apple thing. Are you looking at what’s happening in the country right now? We better be moving on more than one. This is the time for overhaul. Folks talk about how they can’t wait till COVID is behind us so we can return to normal. There’s no returning to normal. The normal was insufficient, it was unjust, and it wasn’t adequate to begin with. August 2020

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R E P O RT S

Progressive City, Brutal Police The paradox of Portland, Oregon, shows why the fight to change police culture takes more than liberal values and good intentions By TIM DICKINSON

ORTY EIGHT hours later, the only mark of the “riot” at the Portland Police union headquarters is a small hole in one of the gold-tinted windows, plugged with putty. The police killing of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis on May 25th unleashed a torrent of anger against police departments across the nation. But in this Pacific Northwest city, with a shameful history of racism and police killings of black residents, the reaction has been intense and sustained. Protesters have marched by the thousands across bridges. They have toppled statues of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — who enslaved more than 700 humans between them. And they have marched on police strongholds every night since the end of May. With no remorse or sense of irony, the Portland Police Bureau has met this last group of demonstrators denouncing police brutality with yet more brutality. In the national imagination, Portland reigns as a lampoonable bastion of progressivism, naked bike rides, and handlebar mustaches. But there is nothing Portlandia about the PPB. Police here routinely embrace the violent crowd-control tactics that President Trump commanded to clear Lafayette Park — indiscriminately attacking protesters with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, and other “less

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lethal” munitions. The bureau has been hit with two temporary restraining orders from federal judges: one rebuking the PPB for likely violations of protesters’ rights to free speech and against excessive force; the other ordering the PPB to stop arresting journalists and legal observers for documenting police clashes with protesters. On the evening of June 30th, demonstrators marched on the city’s policeunion headquarters, a tan stucco building in a sprawling stretch of north Portland, just down the street from Pipes “R” Us, a smoke shop that advertises with a knockoff Geoffrey the Giraffe taking a rip off of a giant bong. Marchers advancing on the union hall were met by Portland Police in riot gear, backed by state troopers, who formed a phalanx around the building. After provocations from the rowdy crowd gave the police a pretext — the bureau later posted a picture of a can of Razz-Cranberry La Croix and a rock of similar size that it claimed had been lobbed by protesters, whom it also said launched “commercial grade” fireworks — the police declared the scene a riot, and attacked. The urban assault was chaotic. Police tackled a video journalist who was live-streaming the event, and launched tear gas into the crowd, which engulfed not only targeted agitators but also passing motorists and apartments lining the busy street. The use of force would bring condemnation from state officials — who had just passed legislation banning police use of tear gas, except in the case of a riot. The speaker of the House, Tina Kotek, blasted the PPB’s riot declaration as “an abuse of the statute” and its actions as “unlawful.” Gov. Kate Brown called on the PPB to de-escalate, warning that its use of force “will do nothing to solve the underlying con-

cerns of racial justice and police accountability raised by the protests.” Yet by the time the tear gas cleared the next morning, the City Council proceeded as if nothing had happened, and did the union’s bidding: It approved a yearlong extension of the police contract — exempting cops from a citywide salary freeze. THE PLAGUE of police violence against America’s black and minority communities does not fit with the familiar redversus-blue divides of our national politics. The most violent policing often takes place in our most progressive cities. This paradox is acute in Portland — but it is alive in metros across America, from Denver to Minneapolis to New York City, where ostensibly liberal mayors allow police departments to operate as a nearly autonomous branch of government, as if beyond their control. The conflict between progressive communities and reactionary cops is rooted in America’s darkest history, and deeply entrenched, says Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Municipal policing in America arose in the service of slave owners, catching runaways, and after the Civil War the same police brutally enforced segregation under Jim Crow. Outside the Deep South, early police were deputized “to manage what political leaders considered to be unruly immigrant populations,” says Tracey Meares, a Yale law professor who served on President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. This legacy has never been repudiated, Goff insists: “At no point in time in our history did we say, ‘You know what? That was fucked up! We should not do it that way. We should imagine a different system.’ ” Modern policing has evolved on an ad hoc basis, often

RIOT SQUAD Portland cops at a protest; the police face accusations of racism and excessive force.

following political intuition and gut theories about deterring crime. “There was no enabling legislation,” Meares says, and precious little data to prove that policing strategies work. “Think about the extent to which we tolerate this agency, in which everyone carries a gun,” she says, but that gets a pass to operate as “an evidence-free zone.” As a consequence, American policing continues to prioritize the safety and comfort of white people and property owners, often with acts of official violence. Most politicians in charge of police are “deeply, profoundly ignorant” about the legacy they’ve inherited, Goff argues, making even progressive politicians feckless reformers. “It’s just not the case that intention and ideology are likely to produce the kinds of outcomes and solutions that we might want.”

GREGORY REC/”PORTLAND PRESS HERALD”/GETTY IMAGES

True reform depends on moving resources out of “law and order” — which primarily serves to enforce the existing social order — and investing in programs and services that increase public well-being and safety, Goff insists. There are structural obstacles: In many cities, union contracts limit the ability to reorient police resources (or even provide meaningful oversight). Fear of change also creates a conceptual barrier. “People think that you need a police force oriented around the threat of the use of force in order to address violent neighborhoods,” Meares says, when research has, in fact, “proven for years that that’s not correct.” OREGON’S HISTORY shares more in common with the Deep South than is commonly understood. The state was admitted to the union on the eve

of the Civil War as a white-separatist state. Its constitution banned slavery — and black people, declaring that “No free Negro, or Mulatto . . . shall come, reside, or be within this state,” and ordering their “removal, by public officers.” Made moot by the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment, this racist language was not amended until 1926. And by then Oregon had emerged as a hotbed of Klan activity, using racial terror to keep all but a few thousand blacks out of the state. Only during World War II, when black laborers arrived by the thousands to work in Portland’s shipyards, did Oregon’s color barrier begin to break down. Even today, however, Portland is known as the whitest big city in America. Three-quarters of the population is white; only six percent of residents are black. The black commu-

nity — historically redlined into a single neighborhood near downtown — is now buffeted by gentrification and displacement, as white millennials seeking the “dream of the Nineties” have transformed Mississippi Avenue into a stretch of boutiques, brewpubs, and farm-to-table restaurants. Portland Police have long intimidated, harassed, and killed black residents without facing legal consequence. Marine veteran Lloyd “Tony” Stevenson’s gravestone in Willamette National Cemetery says “Vietnam,” but Stevenson was killed on the streets of Portland in a 1985 altercation with police who ended his life with a “sleeper” chokehold. In shades of the Eric Garner homicide a generation later, Stevenson’s killing sparked national outrage, but Portland Police responded to the controversy with arrogant, rac-

ist defiance: selling T-shirts out of a precinct parking lot that read DON’T CHOKE ’EM, SMOKE ’EM. In recent years, the police here have also shot and killed many unarmed black people. In 2003, 21-year-old Kendra James was gunned down during a traffic stop; in 2010, 25-yearold Aaron Campbell was killed by a sharpshooter during a welfare check; in 2017, police shot 17-year-old Quanice Hayes with an AR-15 while he was on his knees during an arrest. None of these cases were prosecuted. “There’s no appearance of justice when it comes to the death of a black person at the hands of the police,” says City Council member Jo Ann Hardesty, who formerly served as a president of the local NAACP. The Portland Police Bureau has been under supervision [Cont. on 80] August 2020

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LIL BABY S Four years ago, Atlanta’s Dominique Jones got out of prison and learned to rap. Now, he’s a superstar who’s streaming in the billions and helping to shape a new vision for America

BY CHARLES HOLMES

IL BABY has four pockets stuffed with cash, and he’d like to keep it that way. The 25-year-old rapper has spent the past 15 minutes teaching me to play cee-lo, a dice game that helped make him famous in certain some Atlanta circles long before he reached legal drinking age. Outside, torrential rain falls on a collection of cars worth many, many mortgages. Inside the headquarters of Quality Control, the most successful hip-hop label currently operating in Atlanta and home to Migos, City Girls, and Lil Yachty, three green dice bounce against the wooden floor. Baby, born Dominique Jones, is a patient and methodical teacher, calmly answering my inane questions about throwing technique. Every time he throws the dice he snaps his fingers, trying to will the numbers to his cause. “The object of the game is to get two of these [dice] the same,” Baby says. For example, the young

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rapper rolls a 4-4-2 and explains that his score would be two. There are additional rules: 4-5-6 is an automatic win, so is rolling two matching numbers and one 6; 1-2-3 is an automatic loss. It’s complicated, but under Baby’s tutelage I — eventually — win $200 and reach for the pair of hundreds on the floor. That’s when Baby breaks into a grin. “Guess what?” he says. “They got to hit the wall.” “I told you,” he says with a smirk. I maintain that he never told me, and look to his crew for support that never comes. Baby offers no leeway. “You got to just keep shooting,” he says. Within a couple of seconds, all of the money returns to Baby’s hands. Satisfied, he packs the dice up while finishing a blunt the size of Kawhi Leonard’s middle finger. As ashes hit the floor, Kevin “Coach K” Lee, the founder and COO of Quality Control, appears, as if endowed with a sixth sense for moments when Baby might say something that will land him in trouble. Baby is detailing a night when acquaintances chipped in money in hopes of seeing one of his winning streaks up close, the type that would leave everyone chasing him across the city to win their cash back. To this day, he says, he still hasn’t paid certain parties back from the nights when his hot hand went cold. It’s not because he doesn’t have the funds to give, he assures the room. It’s merely the principle of the matter. “I don’t care if I owe you — in my head, I’m running off anyway,” Baby says, laughing. “I ain’t got no intention of paying them, for real. Like, I still owe niggas right now.” “Are you taping this right now?” Coach K asks me. “Yeah,” I say. “He can tape that — I don’t give a damn,” Baby shoots back. Lil Baby is, by many metrics, the most popular rapper in the world right now. He has the most-streamed album in the country this year, and even with projects from rappers like Drake or pop stars like the Weeknd to contend with, it’s not really close. Before he was a rapper, Baby was a constant presence in the orbit of QC. When Migos, Rich the Kid, Skippa Da Flippa, and Lil Duke were cutting their teeth in the label’s studio, he was right there, not rapping. A weed dealer with a prodigious reputation, Baby would wait for rappers to return from shows flush with cash that he might take from them, one way or another. “They was getting money, but goddamn,” Baby says, still incredulous. “They probably get like 30 grand a show, but they’re doing three, four shows, so they come back with 50, 60, and I might win the whole 50.” It was Coach K who noticed something in a 17-yearold Baby the young dealer had yet to see in himself. K is the power broker behind the millennium’s

first cadre of Atlanta legends (Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane) and those shaping the city’s future (Migos, Lil Yachty). With a salt-and-pepper beard and slow gait, he’s the calm at the center of Quality Control’s constant hurricane. In Baby, he saw someone with the voice, style, and respect required for success in Atlanta rap’s ecosystem. “I remember one day, we was standing outside the studio,” Coach K says. “I’ll never forget this. He had on all white, and I was just like, ‘Baby, man, why don’t you rap? Like, you got the swag, you got the lingo, you get respect around the city from the east side to the west side to the south side. Why don’t you rap?’ He used to be like, ‘Coach, I’m a street nigga.’ He used to laugh at me.” Rap is a genre built on embellishment. It inspires correctional officers with delusions of grandeur to become faux kingpins and multicolored internet trolls to envision themselves as the most notorious gang member in America. But Baby’s life story was already interesting. He didn’t need hyperbole. “I was just like, ‘Shit, half these rappers telling your story,’ ” Coach K continues. “‘Dog, your shit so real. I bet if you decide to do it, you’re going to be big.’ ” By any standards, Lil Baby’s rise was unnervingly fast. After Coach K’s cajoling, Baby recruited Young Thug, already an Atlanta superstar, and his future collaborator, Gunna, to help teach him how to rap. It turned out he was good at it, a dexterous rhymer with a strong grasp of melody, firmly in the tradition of late-2010s Atlanta hiphop: He favored booming trap drums, smeared Auto-Tune, and worked at a frighteningly productive pace. Within three years, he was a star: His second album, My Turn, was released in February and is the most streamed in the U.S. this year. Then the country began to fall apart. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Lil Baby, like millions of other Americans, took to the streets to protest. “That type of shit I would want to do if I wasn’t a rapper,” he says. “It’s like something that’s going on in history and time.” But unlike the majority of protesters still marching for change, Lil Baby wrote a song about it. Released in June, “The Bigger Picture” was a daringly precise stream of consciousness that finds Baby grappling with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks against a simple, piano-led beat. “They killing us for no reason/Been going on for too long to get even,” he raps. “Throw us in cages like dogs and hyenas/I went to court, and they sent me to prison.” According to Baby and his team, the proceeds from the song will be donated to a variety of organizations. To Lil Baby, “The Bigger Picture” isn’t a protest song. “I just rap about my life — all my songs are basically about me,” Baby says. “It was at a point where I felt I needed to say something.” Before he was a platinum-selling rapper, the system made sure to underscore the fact that his black life didn’t matter. “The

“I’VE BEEN A VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY AND A SYSTEM WHERE JUDGES GIVE YOU TIME THEY WOULDN’T GIVE SOMEONE WHITE.”

Staff writer CHARLES HOLMES wrote the Megan Thee Stallion cover story in March.

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Lil Baby outside the Wendyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s where Rayshard Brooks was killed by two police officers on June 12th

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the problem where I’m from,” Baby raps in the second verse. “But I’d be lying if I said it was all of them.” When pushed on the idea that there can’t be good police in a fundamentally flawed and racist system, Baby pushes back. “Just ’cause you work in a racist system doesn’t mean you racist,” he explains. “Damn near every system that got a job is a racist system. You know what I mean? CEOs be like old white people. You never know, they got to be some kind of racist ’cause at some certain age, your parent, that was the way of life almost. So I almost feel like all these corporations or whatnot may be racist. And black people are racist too.” “Black people can’t be racist,” I shoot back. “Why?” Baby responds. “Racist means to be just to your race.” “Well, the thing about racism is you would have to have some type of power, and black people, historically speaking, don’t have any power to be racist. We can be prejudiced.” “To me, a racist is someone who treats a different race than theirs a different way than they would treat theirs,” Baby says. “I feel like if you’re a black person and you treat all black people one way and all white people one way, you’re racist. I’m not a racist, so I give a white person a chance to talk and actually we get into it before I can say I don’t like you or not. And I feel the same way about a black person. You ain’t gon’ be my buddy just ’cause you’re black. Just straight up.” Baby and I agree to disagree.

BABY’S WORLD Baby [ TO P ] with Coach K, co-founder and COO of Quality Control Records. After helping launch the careers of stars like Migos and Lil Yachty, Coach K persuaded Baby to rap. “I was just like, ‘Shit, half these rappers telling your story,’ ” Coach K says. “ ‘Dog, your shit so real. I bet if you decide to do it, you’re going to be big.’ ” Baby [ R I G H T ] at age 11, with his mother. “Hardest thing I’ve ever had to see in my life,” she remembers of watching her son go to prison. “I hope and pray I never have to go through anything like that again.”

Bigger Picture” isn’t a radical gesture; it’s Baby’s sheer existence that’s a more potent act of protest. “Now, this shit counts,” he says. “You gon’ hear me.” “I’ve been a victim of police brutality,” he continues nonchalantly, while staring at his phone and placing a Chick-fil-A order for nuggets and an ice cream. “I’ve been in prison where white officers control you. I’ve been in a court system where white judges give you a different time than they would give someone white. There have been times I had a physical altercation with an officer, and he then grabbed me and took me to a room where there’s no camera. We have a physical altercation and left me in a room for about an hour. I’m in there yelling and screaming. I’m so accustomed to it, we don’t even make it no big deal.” “But that’s a huge deal,” I respond. “That’s what I was saying. Where we come from, we’ve got so accustomed to something going wrong. Right? Ain’t nothing we gon’ be able to do about it. I’m from Atlanta, where they had a unit of police that got dismantled for police brutality. The Red Dogs got dismantled for using way too much force. . . . That shit an everyday thing where I’m from.” “The Bigger Picture” is among the most urgent artistic statements released since Black Lives Matter exploded into, by some counts, the biggest American protest movement ever recorded. Even if Baby

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D isn’t rapping about anyone but himself, it’s clear people are listening: “The Bigger Picture” has been streamed more than 100 million times, and Coach K says it brought a new level of attention to Baby’s entire catalog. “The Bigger Picture” shouldn’t have been necessary for people to take Baby seriously. The sociopolitical screed wasn’t a surprise for Lil Baby or his fans — he’s always been a thoughtful writer, wrapped in bass-filled beats — but for those not paying attention, or with a predisposition to writing off trap MCs in favor of more traditionalist lyricists like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, it was a culture shock. Someone who talks like Baby, drawl and all, isn’t the type of rapper who tends to be critically revered or obsessively analyzed, but he has long been discussing the ground-level effects of systemic racism and brutality; it’s impossible to escape. And as a new generation of protesters take to the streets, it’s not the jubilant Kendrick and Pharrell refrain “We gon’ be alright” that they’re often heard shouting. Instead, people demand that cops “Move, bitch,” like Ludacris, or summon the spirit of the late Pop Smoke when chanting “Christian Dior, Dior/I’m up in all the stores/When it rains, it pours.” “The Bigger Picture” isn’t perfect. At points it seems as if it hedges its bets. “Corrupted police been

OMINIQUE JONES grew up in Atlanta’s West End, a historic neighborhood where burned houses blend with encroaching gentrification and emerald-green trees. Over the two days I spend with him, any mention of it is met with resistance and disdain. “Do you have life insurance?” he asks, after I suggest we go see it. He momentarily mulls over the decision and goes back to his blunt and fast food, pushing the choice off to another day. At one point, Baby walks into the Quality Control kitchen talking aloud about Scooby-Doo to no one in particular. When he returns, he begins addressing someone as “Velma.” I turn to Baby’s friends in confusion, and they quietly inform me that Baby thinks I look like the bespectacled teen detective. By the next day, the Velma nickname has stuck. Indignities aside, Baby does begrudgingly acquiesce to drive through the West End with me. In 2017, Lil Baby introduced viewers to this world in the video for his first breakout moment, “My Dawg.” With an Auto-Tuned drawl, Baby painted a life he was partially still entrenched in. “Me and my dawgs, me and my dawgs/We tryna run in your house,” he sang. “We want them bricks, we want the money/You can keep all of the pounds.” Three years later, riding past the Oakland Food Mart prominently featured in the video, it’s hard not to note that as Baby has become more economically free, his old neighborhood too has become a hot spot for the free market to take root. In 2013, $18 million in federal funding was secured for Atlanta’s Beltline, a project to develop a trail through the city that accelerated gentrification in neighborhoods like the West End. Five years later, The Atlanta JournalConstitution dubbed the West End one of the city’s “upward-trending neighborhoods.”

OPENING SPREAD: LOCATION BY TREEHOUSE STUDIOS. FASHION ASSISTANT: VICTOR ALLEN. THIS AND OPPOSITE PAGE: SWEATSUIT BY VINTAGE GUCCI. T-SHIRT BY POLO RALPH LAUREN. SOCKS BY GUCCI. SHOES BY NIKE. THIS PAGE, BOTTOM: COURTESY OF LIL BABY

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“Only reason I don’t buy these houses now [is] because maybe three years ago, these houses that sold for 10,000, now they selling for 180,000, no work,” Baby explains. And yet he notices that longtime residents of the West End don’t necessarily share his upward mobility. “All these people you see have been in the area for their whole life,” Baby continues. “It’s not that easy to make it away from here. Not too many people do; it’s like zero chance.” The closer we get to Baby’s old neighborhood, the pricklier he becomes. As a group of children selling water see Baby’s white Rolls-Royce truck zooming down the road, they rush toward it. Yet, instead of slowing down, he speeds up and jokingly swerves toward the kids. With each mile, Baby grows more acidic, taking it as a personal affront when a dirt bike zooms past the car and I register no response. “He ain’t paying attention no more,” Baby sneers. “You ought to be capturing every car, every building, every house. “Don’t just sit here being serious. Smack shit out of you,” he continues. “I don’t want to sit around and be serious. You got to live a little. It’s fun. You work for Rolling Stone, man. Nigga of the world.” Baby grew up in a small house with his mother, who worked in the post office after serving with the Marines, and two sisters. “He was the only boy, and I had two girls,” Miss Lashon, Baby’s mother says. “I spent a lot of time with him. He didn’t really have anybody.” Baby’s father was absent. When asked how that shaped her son, Lashon laments, “I guess you can’t miss what you never had. It wasn’t like his father was in the picture and then took off.” By 16, Baby was getting what he calls “real money,” enough to afford apartments and cars that would make most high schoolers jealous. Around that time he was dubbed Lil Baby by a man named Wicced. “I used to be going to sleep wherever, I used to leave my trash everywhere. Typical little baby shit,” Baby says. “They start calling me Lil Baby.” Eventually, Baby would stop attending high school, committing full-time to drug dealing. “Needed the money, more than anything,” he says. “I knew all the drug dealers around my neighborhood. When I was like 10, 11, I was hanging out with a dude who was like 17. He was getting money to buy a car, having his own little spot. So he was a lot of my motivation, too.” By the time Baby turned 17 himself, he had two condominiums that cost about $2,000 a month. Meanwhile, Baby was beginning to see the ways his friends’ lives were changing. Young Thug was ahead of him at Booker T. Washington High School, and at one point he shared a condo with Offset. “Offset was the rapper,” Baby remembers. “He’s coming to me like, ‘I got a two-bedroom condo, give you half of it,’ but he was going on the road so, shit, it was really like my condo.” Then, at 20, it finally caught up to Baby. After being sent to jail three times, he was inevitably sent

to prison for about two years on weapons and drug charges. “You gon’ have to be there to actually just fathom what it was like,” he shares of his time behind bars. “It’s misery.” By Baby’s estimate, he knows 20 people currently serving life sentences. Five of those are close personal friends. He refers to Quality Control’s studio, a space the size of a couple of conference rooms. “Imagine just sitting in QC until you die,” he says. “Whether you do everything I tell you to do, you’re in here until you die. So you ain’t living no other purpose, until you die. Man, that’s a fucked up way to live. I’d rather everybody just — you get a life sentence and they just take you in the back and kill you. I guarantee you, you asked half of the people who got a life sentence if they’d rather be taken out back right now and killed, they’ll say yeah. Guaranteed. Because what are you living for?” “Hardest thing I’ve ever had to see in my life,” Miss Lashon says of watching her son go to prison. “I hope and pray I never have to go through anything like that again.” She visited him every weekend during his sentence, and she distinctly remembers a conversation that would ultimately change their lives: “He had called home. We talked like we always talk. And I asked him what was his plan when he got out. He was like, ‘Mom, I want to be a rapper.’ I was like, ‘A rapper? Really?’ You know how when people go away they say anything. [But] the day he came home he went to the studio, and it took off after that.” Pierre “Pee” Thomas, Quality Control’s CEO, knew firsthand the allure of Baby’s old life. Pee, fatherly and proud when discussing his signee, has known Baby roughly since 2010, when he was a wiry teenager. “He used to run around my best friend Big,” Pee says. “Baby like my brother.” While Baby was locked up, Pee began planting seeds. “When he was in prison, I used to talk to him and tell him, like, ‘Yo, when you come home, try to get in the studio and rap,’ ” Pee continues. “I had a big influence in Baby switching over from the streets to the music.” A couple of days after his release from prison in 2016, Baby arrived at the studio, ready to rap. After trying and failing to make a fully realized song, Baby said “fuck it” and abandoned his dream. It wasn’t until January 2017 that he’d finally commit to his new path and finish a song. “Days Off,” the introduction to Baby’s inaugural mixtape, Perfect Timing, shows off a voice he had yet to settle into, a nasally delivery that sounds like an unpolished imitation of Future. Baby raps, “Savage for the money, goin’ hard for my kid/Sometimes I had nightmares ’bout the shit that we did.” From there, Baby’s palette developed as he learned to mine feelings of heartbreak (“Close Friends”) and despair (“Emotionally Scarred”), all while his technical skills sharpened. On songs like “Spazz” and “Pure Cocaine,” Baby grew more and more deft. The speed of his performances and the growing fluidity of his delivery were antithetical to the hypnotic repetitive-

“MAN, SOMEBODY DONE DIED EVERYWHERE WE DONE WENT [TODAY],” BABY SAYS. “EVERYWHERE. WE. DONE. WENT.”

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ness of peers like Gunna and 21 Savage. He’d continue to contend with his past on record, but he is adamant that his songs are not about him wrestling with any internal guilt he has yet to shake. “You keep saying guilt,” Baby says. “I ain’t never been guilty. Even if I did it, I ain’t guilty.” “What does that mean?” “I don’t got no guilty conscience. I’m a firm believer in what’s done is done. And I don’t believe in conflict. I believe in manifestation.” As Baby began to finish songs, Pee saw an opportunity to saturate the market. In 2017 alone, Baby released four projects; the following year, he’d drop three more. Pee’s formula was simple: Grab whatever songs Baby had lying around, sequence them, commission artwork, release to streaming services, repeat. The most challenging part wasn’t even making the music, but persuading Baby to hit the same circuit that forged the now-legendary work ethic of his predecessors, Migos. “I had to argue with him sometimes, because at the time he was making a lot of money in the streets and I used to put him on the road to do promo,” Pee explains. “He used to go through the Chitlin’ Circuit and do shows, but he wasn’t getting paid. He might be getting $500, $1,000 a show. In order for him to do these shows he got to get a van, drive three, four hours, go do the show, and come back.” Rashad, Baby’s affable day-to-day manager, vividly remembers taking the budding artist to hole-in-thewall clubs in places like Jackson, Mississippi. “Seeing him perform in those clubs, you don’t have production, you don’t have a screen, you don’t have pyrotechnics, you don’t have CO2. I don’t even think we had a DJ. I think I was just telling the DJ, like the club DJ, what song to play at the time. Like, he would be the performer, I would be in a DJ booth for the DJ, like, ‘Cool, play this song next. Play that song.’ ” For Baby, the process was slow. “He used to be really frustrated, like, ‘This ain’t nothing. I make more money than this in the streets,’ ” Pee remembers. “I used to always tell him, ‘But you don’t have to deal with the consequences that you have to deal with in the streets. You ain’t taking no chances with your life and your freedom.’ I used to have to instill in his head to just trust the process. I used to always tell him, ‘Baby, just trust me. It’s going to pay off in the end.’ ” A drug shortage finally curbed Baby’s appetite for his old life and cemented his commitment to a music career. “It probably was a drought for three weeks,” he says. “So I was like, ‘I’m straight. I don’t want to do it no more.’ So when it was time to go back and everybody got some again, I just didn’t get none. I just stayed rapping.”

FTER BABY’S CAR emerges from his neighborhood, we arrive at the burned-down husk of the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed by two police officers on June 12th. A group of protesters are gathered to mourn Brooks. Stands selling Black Lives Matter shirts pepper the area, and a collection of candles, teddy bears, and photographs roast amid the hot and humid afternoon. “It’s walking distance from my neighborhood,” Baby notes. For days now, the video of Brooks begging officers to let him walk home has been playing in a loop on my phone. As Baby pulls in, I describe being here as eerie.

“Man, somebody done died everywhere we done went,” Baby retorts forcefully. “Everywhere. We. Done. Went.” For the past two days, he has described a bleak world, where death and injustice are daily realities for black people in Atlanta, with a resigned familiarity. But for a moment, even his cynicism cracks. “Now that I do got power, I can say something,” he says. “Where we come from, we’ve got so accustomed to something going wrong.” As he pulls into the Wendy’s lot, a crowd mills, keeping guard. An armed man named Garry Stokes, apparently in charge of keeping the area secure, directs Baby to the back of the building. Stokes describes himself as a member of the National African American Nation and an “unbiased individual” working with the Brooks family. He tells his associates to make sure nothing happens to the rapper. “No one did care before the situation occurred,” Stokes says. “If they did, they just wasn’t to the point of where they wanted to stand up and express their opinion on what was going on.”

“We need a place for the community to be able to come to, for peace of mind,” he continues. “We need a place where the community can come to and get their training. They can get their help, especially when it comes to civil-rights training. Our main focus, and our main objective here, is to have a monumental peace center for the community.” (Two weeks later, Atlanta police would clear protesters from the site.) Soon, children and their parents swarm Baby, hoping to touch a man who lived five minutes away for the bulk of his existence and is beginning to represent something else entirely. Baby poses for photos, while Coach K buys a handful of Black Lives Matter shirts. Coach K doesn’t seem fazed that it took this long for the masses to notice the side of Baby he knew was there all along. “All those new listeners [after “The Bigger Picture”]?” he says. “They went back to listen to his work. ‘Oh, my God. Oh, this kid.’ Now they’re listening. That song caught them. I watched the 13th week, up four percent. The 14th week, up 12 percent.

And I think this week it might be right at 12 percent, or right at 14 percent.” “Me, him, and Pee was having a conversation,” Coach continues. “Like, ‘Man, who’s coming? You’re going to get this Number One.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t really care. I’m not caught up in first-week numbers.’ He said, ‘The real conversation is where I’m going to be in 10 weeks from now.’ I was like, ‘Damn, his mind was somewhere else.’ It’s about the marathon, not the sprint.” Lil Baby isn’t even five years into his career, and he’s already envisioning a dramatized version of his life, whether that be a movie or documentary: “That’s why I really don’t want to talk, ’cause my shit be raw. I feel like my story before I got here is just like one in the million. So I don’t want to give it up yet.” I ask if he can relay one jewel before that day comes, and Baby smiles. The blunts are finished, the dice are packed, and the young superstar agrees to answer one more question. “I mean, you’re talking to me,” Baby says. “So that’s like a jewel. Right?” August 2020

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FIGHT THE POWER 40 ESSENTIAL PROTEST SONGS

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“Strange Fruit” Billie Holiday 1939 Written by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx and definitively recorded with chilling power by Billie Holiday, the 1939 anti-lynching statement “Strange Fruit” startled audiences with its stark imagery: “Pastoral scene of the gallant South/The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” It’s been covered countless times since, most memorably by Nina Simone, whose 1965 version was sampled on Kanye West’s “Blood on the Leaves,” sounding as wrenchingly timely as ever.

“We Shall Overcome” Pete Seeger 1948

Guthrie in the early 1940s

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“This machine kills fascists,” Woody Guthrie famously scrawled on his acoustic guitar. The Oklahoma boy grew up amid the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, radicalizing him into America’s most legendary folk singer. “All You Fascists” is a fight song he wrote during World War II. In a 1944 radio broadcast, Guthrie begins by announcing, “We’ll show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!” It’s a rowdy singalong with bluesman Sonny Terry on harmonica. With the end of the war still a year away, Guthrie sings about the long tough battle ahead — not just beating Hitler and Mussolini, but oppression closer to home, from racism to union busting. As he explained in a letter he wrote to his still-unborn daughter, “Maybe I could talk to you about fascism. It is a big word and it hides in some pretty little places.” Guthrie had seen America at its worst, but this was a song imagining its best and making it sound like a future worth fighting for.

Folk-music pioneer Pete Seeger originally adapted the 1940s labor song “We Will Overcome” into his own version in 1948; it became ubiquitous during the civil-rights movement, performed by Joan Baez at the March on Washington and quoted by President Lyndon Johnson when he introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965; it’s continued to echo around the globe as a universal anthem of freedom and solidarity.

“The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Bob Dylan 1964 Hattie Carroll was working at a society gala in Baltimore when William Devereux Zantzinger, a wealthy white tobacco planter, beat her to death with a cane. The 1963 killing moved Bob Dylan to write this angry, mournful song, which elegized Carroll (“who carried the dishes and took out the garbage/And never sat once

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t is up to us to take a stand and demand that they ‘stop killing us,’ ” Beyoncé said in 2016. When pop’s biggest superstar is talking like an activist, it’s clear that historic change is happening right now. And indeed, the past few years have been a golden age for protest in pop music, especially in R&B and hip-hop, as artists have risen to confront the presidency of Donald Trump and the racist police killings that have been answered by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Of course, these artists are building on a legacy that goes back many decades, from folk singers like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to socially conscious Sixties truthtellers like Sam Cooke, John Fogerty, and Joni Mitchell, right up through Seventies soul, reggae, and punk, Eighties agit-rap, and Nineties feminist riot grrrl. What makes a classic protest song? Some, like Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Teejayx6’s “Black Lives Matter,” confront the horror of oppression and violence with shuddering realism; others, like N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police” and Green Day’s “American Idiot,” are torqued-up jeremiads that shatter the complacency of American political life; some turn inward, mixing rage with sorrow, while others strive to find solutions, turning angst into hope and using love to conquer hate. “I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself,” Guthrie once said. Here is a playlist you can take to the front lines.

at the head of the table”) and condemned her wellconnected killer and the legal system that let him off with a six-month sentence. Decades later, the song’s indictment rings out with tragic clarity.

a Montreal hotel room, when they recorded the song that became Lennon’s debut solo single. “No one’s ever given peace a complete chance,” Lennon said. “Gandhi tried it, and Martin Luther King tried, but they were shot.”

“Mississippi Goddam”

“Whitey on the Moon”

Nina Simone 1964 Before 1963, Nina Simone hadn’t been interested in recording topical songs, calling them “simple and unimaginative.” Then a church bombing in Birmingham killed four black children and Mississippi NAACP official Medgar Evers was shot to death, and a song “erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down,” she said. Deceptively jaunty, like a mordant show tune, “Mississippi Goddam” channeled the mood of a stunned nation.

“A Change Is Gonna Come”

Gil Scott-Heron 1970

Aretha in 1969

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Sam Cooke 1964 Five months before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sam Cooke summed up the long struggle and new hope of the era, taking inspiration from Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and drawing from the anger he felt after being denied a room in a segregated Louisiana hotel. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he quoted the song in his acceptance speech.

“I Ain’t Marching Any More”

MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, 2

Phil Ochs 1965 Phil Ochs was the burning conscience of the Sixties folk scene, denouncing the political establishment’s hypocrisies long after many of his peers lost interest in topical songwriting. This anti-war broadside, where he tallies up the human costs of the American military machine from 1812 onward, is a fine example of his pointed truth telling: “It’s always the old to lead us to the wars, always the young to fall.” As resistance to the Vietnam War grew, the song became a counterculture standard.

“Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” James Brown 1968 Promoted as “a message from James Brown to the people of America,” the Godfather of Soul’s landmark anthem

It “was a battle cry,” said Aretha Franklin. “Everyone needs respect.” Flipping the gender roles of Otis Redding’s original 1965 version, Franklin turned a song written from the point of view of a man arrogantly demanding respect from his partner into an anthem for beleaguered women everywhere, adding in the unforgettable “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” and “sock it to me” segments to the song. After years of false starts, it launched her career, arriving with perfect timing at the intersection of the black power and feminist movements. When “Respect” producer and Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler played Franklin’s version of the song for Redding, the singer said, “I just lost my song.”

With America patting itself on the back after the Apollo moon landing, black poet and activist Gil Scott-Heron opened this classic 1970 song-poem with “A rat done bit my sister Nell/ With Whitey on the moon/Her face and arms began to swell/ And Whitey’s on the moon.” It still might be the sharpest indictment of white privilege ever recorded.

“Ohio” Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young 1970 “We were speaking for our generation,” Neil Young said. Inspired by an image in Life magazine of the 1970 Kent State massacre, in which four students were gunned down by the National Guard, Young penned a blunt, melancholic song that reportedly left bandmate David Crosby crying in the recording studio.

“War” Edwin Starr 1970

of black pride and selfdetermination was radical enough that Brown brought in a group of kids to sing on the chorus in the hope that their cute voices might help its in-your-face politics feel less threatening. Radio programmers resisted at first, but his message couldn’t be denied, and the song went to Number One on the R&B charts.

“Fortunate Son” Creedence Clearwater Revival 1969 At the height of the Vietnam War, CCR frontman John Fogerty wrote this furious rocker about the hypocrisy of working-class kids being drafted to fight in a rich man’s war. “To me those soldiers were my brothers,” said Fogerty, who had been in the Army

The Godfather of Soul, James Brown

Reserve. After George W. Bush took America into the Iraq War in 2003, Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen performed rousing versions of “Fortunate Son” at Vote for Change concerts in support of John Kerry.

“Is It Because I’m Black”

When it comes to great protest songs, subtlety is hardly a necessity, as Motown stalwarts Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong demonstrated with “War.” The Temptations’ original was funkier, but label second-stringer Edwin Starr added a forceful urgency that took the song to Number One. It was the “Huh! What is it good for?” heard ‘round the world.

Syl Johnson 1969

“Big Yellow Taxi”

Grief-stricken after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Mississippi-born Chicago soul singer Syl Johnson poured out his desperation on this slowburn, seven-minute lament: “Something is holding me back/Is it because I’m black?” he sings, touching a raw nerve that’s never healed.

Joni Mitchell 1970

“Give Peace a Chance”

“Impeach the President”

Plastic Ono Band 1969

The Honey Drippers 1973

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were in the middle of their second Bed-In for Peace, in

The Honey Drippers were a band of black high school kids from Queens, New York,

On a trip to Hawaii, Joni Mitchell looked out her hotel window, literally saw paradise paved over by a parking lot, and wrote this elegant environmentalist pop tune, singing “Put away the DDT now.” In 1972, the EPA did just that, banning use of the chemical.

FIGHT THE POWER 40 Essential Protest Songs

Painting a bleak portrait of inner-city life in the Reagan era, “The Message” proved that rap could, as Flash put it, “speak things that have social significance and truth.”

off on the state of modern American police departments, which remain a fetid breeding ground for white-supremacist groups like the Klan. The hard-hitting results got frat boys reading Noam Chomsky.

“Born to Die” MDC 1982

“Fuck tha Police” N.W.A 1988

“WHAT’S GOING ON”

Ice Cube said “Fuck tha Police” was “400 years in the making.” Drawing on his own experience with racist cops growing up in L.A., he came up with a six-minute diatribe/comedy record, with Judge Dr. Dre handing down a ruling that’s echoed through the years right up to today’s BLM protests.

M A RV I N GAY E 1971

On May 15th, 1969, California Gov. Ronald Reagan sent hundreds of police officers to forcefully bust up the People’s Park in Berkeley, a sort of autonomous zone of young protesters. Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the Four Tops’ bass singer, was watching the events unfold in Berkeley, and it sparked him to start writing “What’s Going On”; he finished the song with Motown staffer Al Cleveland and, eventually, Marvin Gaye, who’d been hearing harrowing tales from his Vietnam-vet brother and infused the track with his own sense of anguish. Motown initially refused to release something so pointed and ambitious, but its success began a new era of freedom for artists on the label.

convened by Georgia-born songwriter Roy C. Hammond; when Congress announced an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump in 2019, streams of their Watergate-era banger shot up 1,053 percent.

“You Haven’t Done Nothin’ ” Stevie Wonder 1974 “Everyone promises you everything, but in the end, nothing comes out of it,” Stevie Wonder noted when he put out “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” a funky bowshot against neglect and apathy. Released two days before President Nixon resigned, the song became another chart-topping Wonder hit.

“Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” Bob Marley 1974 Bob Marley was an international star by 1974, but he

hadn’t forgotten where he came from. This highlight from Natty Dread distills Marley’s voice-of-the-people philosophy into a pithy warning to the ruling classes of Jamaica and the world; by the bridge, he’s inviting listeners to “forget your troubles and dance,” which only makes it a more effective vessel for his message about economic inequality.

“Oh Bondage Up Yours!” X-Ray Spex 1977 Fronted by braces-wearing Somali British firebrand Poly Styrene, X-Ray Spex set the London punk scene ablaze with their call to arms against sexist consumerism and its role in enforcing gender oppression. “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard,” she shouts, “but I think ‘Oh, bondage! Up yours!’ ” her voice echoing down through generations of feminist resistance.

“Fight the Power”

“(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay” Tom Robinson Band 1978 Openly gay New Wave singer Tom Robinson took on homophobia with this acerbically jaunty 1978 song, decrying the police and the media while describing incidents in which his friends had been beaten by “queer bashers.” Yet he still came around to a rousing chorus of “Sing if you’re glad to be gay,” fighting oppression with community pride.

“Feels Blind” Bikini Kill 1991 The riot-grrrl warriors set off a feminist punk explosion in the Nineties, with the slogan “Revolution Girl Style Now!” Bikini Kill made “Feels Blind” a rock & roll exorcism of growing up female with misogyny on all sides, with Kathleen Hanna snarling, “As a woman I was taught to always be hungry.” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein later said, “It was the first time someone put into words my sense of alienation.”

Public Enemy 1989

“Ride the Fence”

Repurposing the refrain from the Isley Brothers’ funky 1975 single “Fight the Power” and lashing out at “straight-up racist” institutions from Elvis to the U.S. Postal Service, PE gave us rap’s greatest political block rocker; the song’s Spike Lee-directed, protest-themed video put black radicalism in heavy rotation on MTV.

The Coup 2001

“Killing in the Name Of” Rage Against the Machine 1991 Rap-rock lefties Rage roiled the mosh pit as they sounded

“The Message” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five 1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five delivered this historic blast of urban realism at a time when hip-hop was still mainly party music.

Rage’s Zack de la Rocha

Public Enemy circa 1988

For 25 years, Boots Riley of the Coup has been one of hip-hop’s most radical voices. “Ride the Fence” goes after imperialism, FBI operatives, La Migra, picket-line-crossers, and expensive watered-down drinks, among dozens of other ills. It’s not shiny sloganeering, either; The Coup’s Oaklandschooled funk makes Boots’ manifesto sound, as he puts it, “joyful like jwailbreaks.”

“American Skin (41 Shots)” Bruce Springsteen 2001 Springsteen’s piercingly sad response to the brutal 1999 police murder of Amadou Diallo got him labeled a “fucking dirtbag” by police organizations. “It ain’t no secret/You can get killed just for living in your American skin,” Springsteen sang. He brought back the song in the 2010s, dedicating it this time to the memory of Trayvon Martin as the rest of white America began catching up to the fact that black lives matter.

FROM TOP: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES; MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES; LISA HAUN/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Texas punks MDC sounded the alarm about Nazi-skinhead violence at hardcore shows, chanting “No war, no KKK, no fascist USA!” on “Born to Die.” Decades later, that slogan started popping up at anti-Trump rallies, with “no Trump” replacing “no war”; Billie Joe Armstrong even hollered it at the 2016 American Music Awards.

often experienced by black trans women into the stunning “Don’t Shoot.” Diamond sings about her own story, including the years she spent in prison after trying to hold up a liquor store to get money to pay for her gender-affirming surgery.

“FTP” YG 2020 In 2016, Compton rapper YG released his instant-classic “FDT (Fuck Donald Trump).”

After the killing of George Floyd, he updated it with “FTP,” itself an update of N.W.A’s eternally reliable “Fuck tha Police.” Along with his righteous rage, YG also captures the exhausted spirit of attending protest after protest amid a never-ending loop of racist injustice. “Been tired, fuck cardboard signs, we in the field,” he says at one point, adding, “I’m tired of being tired of being tired.”

“I CAN’T BREATHE” H.E .R. 2020

Kendrick Lamar in 2015

“American Idiot” Green Day 2004 Green Day’s power-chord condemnation of mindless jingoism broke through the creepy conformity of America in the age of “freedom fries” and the Patriot Act to become the era’s top protest rocker. “You go through periods where no one’s talking about anything,” Armstrong told ROLLING STONE. “That was happening in the lead-up to the Iraq War.”

“Alright”

FROM TOP: ILYA S. SAVENOK/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE

Kendrick Lamar 2015 The Pharrell Williams-produced linchpin of Kendrick Lamar’s self-interrogating rap masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly became a modern civil-rights standard when its chanted refrain, “We gon’ be alright,” started popping up at Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump rallies. Rousing yet bittersweet, it even drew comparison to “We Shall Overcome.” Said Lamar, “I wanted to approach it as more uplifting — but aggressive. Not playing the victim, but still having that ‘We strong.’ ”

“Freedom” Beyoncé feat. Kendrick Lamar 2016 Beyoncé made a worldchanging statement when she strode into the halftime

show at the Super Bowl, leading a phalanx of black women in military garb that evoked the Black Panthers. Her liberated radicalism came through equally powerfully on “Freedom,” her most gripping political song, featuring a searing assist from Kendrick Lamar; when she sings, “I can’t move,” the line echoes “I can’t breath,” Eric Garner’s final words before being choked to death by police.

“Mexican Chef” Xenia Rubinos 2016 When most people think of resistance, they think of taking to the streets. Cuban-Puerto Rican artist Xenia Rubinos takes it inside America’s homes and kitchens: “Brown walks your baby/Brown walks your dog/Brown raised America in place of its mom,” she sings in “Mexican Chef,” a witty reminder that without the painstaking labor of brown people, the United States would simply grind to a halt.

Appearing on the iHeartRadio Living Room Concert Series, rising R&B artist H.E.R. opened her June 10th live set with a new song, “I Can’t Breathe,” which she introduced by saying, “These lyrics were kind of easy to write because it came from a conversation of what’s happening right now, and the change that we need to see. I think music is powerful when it comes to change and when it comes to healing, and that’s why I wrote this song — to make a mark in history.” What followed was an acoustic blues full of mournful intimacy, with H.E.R. accompanied by just organ and electric guitar. “Praying for change because the pain makes you tender,” she sang. “All of the names you refuse to remember/Was somebody’s brother, friend/Or son to a mother that’s crying, singing/ I can’t breathe, you’re taking my life from me.”

“Black Lives Matter” Teejayx6 2020 A perfect example of the rapid-response nature of protest music in 2020, Detroit rapper Teejayx6’s “Black Lives Matter” was released within days of George Floyd’s death under the hashtag #RIP GEORGEFLOYD and paired with a video featuring footage of Floyd’s final moments and other instances of police brutality against black people. “Another black man just died on camera,” he raps, then adds darkly, “We can’t even use our hammers/All we can say is, ‘Black lives matter.’ ”

“2020 Riots: How Many Times” Trey Songz 2020 “I know this ain’t usually my message and you’re not used to hearing this from me, but this is the person I’ve always been,” Trey Songz wrote in an introduction to this new track, crafted in the midst of the current protests. The song finds the singer pivoting from his sensuous R&B wheelhouse to a yearning, gospel-tinged sound and posing a litany of questions (“How many mothers have to cry? How many brothers gotta die?”), none of which has an answer that won’t break your heart.

“The Bigger Picture” Lil Baby 2020 The superstar Atlanta rapper used his diamond-encrusted platform to offer what might by the signature protest song of the Black Lives Matter movement since the killing of George Floyd. “The Bigger Picture” is full of anger, paranoia, and sorrow, taking on such cathartic resonance because it sounds as if Lil Baby is working through his pain in real time, trying to find the right words to process the violence engulfing his world: “I find it crazy the police will shoot you and know that you dead but still tell you to freeze.” It’s the voice of America.

C O N T R I B U TO RS

“Don’t Shoot” Shea Diamond 2019 “I got whoopings for walking like a girl,” soul singer-songwriter Shea Diamond recalled of her youth in Michigan. She explores the alienation, aloneness, and physical terror too

Jonathan Blistein, Jonathan Bernstein, David Browne, Jon Dolan, Suzy Exposito, Andy Greene, Kory Grow, Brian Hiatt, Christian Hoard, Elias Leight, Angie Martoccio, Rob Sheffield, Hank Shteamer, Simon Vozick-Levinson

ROLLING STONE

BATTLEGROUND MICHIGAN T

HE BELLS OF Hamtramck’s Saint Florian Church ring out for Sunday Mass. The building was enlarged in 1928, and the June sun glances off a spire built 200 feet high so that its Polish-immigrant parishioners would have a symbol of Christ that towered above the smokestacks that blotted the Detroit skyline. There’s little evidence of Christ’s mercy a block away on Poland Street. Biba Adams cooks up bacon and beignets in her bungalow. She is treating herself because it is her birthday, the first without her

mother, grandmother, and aunt. They have all been taken away by the COVID-19 plague that swept through Detroit’s black neighborhoods like a 21st-century angel of death skipping few homes. Her eyes are red. “I like living here, the church and the bells give me peace,” Adams tells me. She pauses for a moment before speaking quietly. “I cried a million tears before you got here.” We take seats on her porch and watch parishioners walk quickly toward the church. Adams is wearing a DETROIT GIRLS AROUND THE WORLD T-shirt, one of many pro-Detroit T-shirts that I will see during my time in Michigan. Adams was born and raised on Detroit’s west side, just 10 minutes away. Her grandparents were immigrants of the black diaspora, moving from Louisville, Mississippi, to

The state that narrowly went for Trump in 2016 has seen some of the fiercest fights over lockdowns, masks, the president, and the pandemic — now all roads to the White House lead through it

BY STEPHEN RODRICK ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE McQUADE

Twisting the knife further were the actions of Michiganders outside of Detroit. Adams watched as white folks gathered at the state capitol, brandishing semi-automatic rifles and demanding Gov. Gretchen Whitmer end the lockdown so they could plant their gardens and visit their vacation homes. The protesters’ great act of civil disobedience was providing illegal haircuts on the capitol steps. It wasn’t clear how much of the right-wing protests was about opening the state and how much it was about damaging Whitmer’s chances of being named Joe Biden’s vice presidential nominee. “It’s a privilege not to have anyone affected,” says Adams with disgust. “Because if they did, they would be in a panic. They certainly wouldn’t be worrying about their hair.” African Americans make up only 14 percent of Michigan’s population but account for 40 percent of the state’s COVID deaths. To Adams, that meant the rest of Michigan could check out: “If it’s a black problem, it’s no problem at all.” It is shortly after George Floyd’s murder and African American communities smolder under the yolk of police brutality and the pandemic. Trump’s macho Twitter blather has only poured more jet fuel on the pyre, and before I leave, Adams tells me how much the president makes her seethe. “After the impeachment, I told my friends that it would take an act of God to get Trump out of office.” She pauses for a long time. “Maybe the pandemic was an act of God.” Her big eyes well up. “I just wish I didn’t have to lose my whole family.”

Detroit in search of factory jobs in 1951. Her mom, Elaine, was a single parent and school counselor who sang backing vocals on Motown demos, and with her sister put out a well-received gospel-funk album as Sweet Communion. The matriarch of the family was Minnie, who sewed seats at Chrysler and bought only Chrysler. There were services three times a week at the New Testament Church of God in Christ. Adams earned a degree from Detroit’s Marygrove College eight miles away. Adams left the area to work on her career, first in Atlanta and then to Harlem, fulfilling a lifelong dream. But she sensed her mother and grandmother’s health were flagging, so she moved home four years ago. She liked to have Sunday dinner with her mother and grandmother at the house they shared, bringing along her own daughter and her baby granddaughter. In March, there were five generations of family celebrating the little girl’s first birthday, with Adams smack in the middle. She remembers her mom looking tired and rushing people out at the end, but didn’t think much about it. Then it all disappeared. Later that month, Adams had just started her dream job as a writer for the Detroit Metro Times. The coronavirus was just a flicker on her screen; in an editorial meeting the only mention was what Detroit songs could be sung during the recommended 20-second hand-washing. Then she heard that both her mother and grandmother were feeling poorly, and that her aunt had been hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms. She drove over to their house and was frightened by what she found. “She looked the sickest I’ve ever seen her,” says Adams. “She’d had bronchitis flare-ups, so I tried steam, I tried everything. Nothing helped.” The next day, March 26th, she persuaded her mother to go to the hospital. They didn’t speak on the ride to the emergency room. “We were just silent,” says Adams. “In both of our hearts we knew that she could pass away.” After she got back from the ER, a relative stopped by with horrifying news: Adams’ aunt had just died at home. The next morning, her grandmother was admitted to the hospital. Adams had a series of faltering phone conversations with her mom before she was put on a ventilator. Then she received the long-dreaded call. It was time. She drove down to the hospital. Adams put on a mask, gown, and gloves. And she said goodbye. The next day, her mother died at age 70. A few days later, her grandmother was gone as well. Adams hasn’t held a service for her mother yet. “My relatives are so mad at me, but I just can’t do it right now, I just can’t,” says Adams. Instead, she wonders if it had to happen. She thinks if we had a different president, she would still have her family. “Trump tried to bury it,” says Adams. “Look how he responded when he was asked what could he say to people who were scared. His response was ‘That’s a nasty question.’ It’s not a nasty question, I was fucking scared.” Adams insists that if the Trump administration hadn’t minimized the risks, she would have taken care of her family differently. “I think I could have saved her if I had known earlier. I would have made her stay home.”

I 5

mention during my adolescence about heading into Detroit for a concert or a Tigers game was met with furrowed brows by concerned parents. The rest of the state adopted a condescending and paternalistic approach to Michigan’s black citizens. The most recent examples have been the Republican-controlled state government taking home rule away from the city of Flint and Detroit public schools, supposedly for mismanagement. This led to Flint drinking poisoned water. Detroit? Let’s just say the schools did not get better. Some of the racial tension you can’t see, but some is in the open. Just after the pandemic hit, Dale Zorn, a white state senator from southeastern Michigan, wore a coronavirus mask made out of the Confederate flag on the Michigan senate floor. He apologized but wasn’t censured. On July 1st, a white woman pulled a handgun on a black mother after they bumped into each other outside a suburban Detroit Chipotle. In 2016, Trump tapped into white fear and resentment in a state that lost the most jobs in the century’s first decade. Michigan workers hemorrhaged a whopping 17 percent of their jobs, totaling 806,000, almost double that of the next state, Ohio. Many of the lost positions were auto-industry union jobs with good benefits that allowed generations of Michigan blue-collar workers to enjoy great medical care and enough cash left over to buy a cottage up north. Trump’s angry rhetoric managed to win him the state by a mere 10,000 votes out of 4.6 million cast. The story wasn’t just Reagan Democrats returning to the GOP; it was a 12 percent drop in black turnout. Some of it was expected without Barack Obama on the ticket, but the magnitude of the lost votes suggested that black Michiganders were giving up on a government that had been taken away from them in Flint and Detroit, and gave so little in return. Now the same beat-upon community was enduring a pandemic and being asked to haul Joe Biden over the line in November. Those were the reasons I headed to Michigan. But there was an ulterior motive. I wanted to check in on my mother, who lives alone just outside of Flint. I drive because it seems safer than flying. I knock on my mom’s door on a 90-degree afternoon and signal that I’ll meet her on the back porch. Like many sweet old moms, she wants her boy to come in and give her a hug, which would have broken the germ-free biosphere she had been living in for three months. My sister had been delivering her groceries and sometimes her grandchildren would wave from the front yard. Her quarantine was for the best. A woman in her town had buried both her husband and son. She gives me some water. “I don’t know why you have to stay in a hotel, I’ve got the whole house.”

ADAMS BLAMES TRUMP FOR THE DEATH OF HER MOM DUE TO CORONAVIRUS: ”IF IT’S A BLACK PROBLEM, IT’S NO PROBLEM AT ALL.”

WENT TO MICHIGAN in the hopes of finding out what happens when a pandemic hits a state that might decide who will be our next president. Most of the places hardest hit by the coronavirus’s first wave were blue states such as New York and New Jersey. They were already voting against Trump. Michigan was where the Venn diagram between tragedy and Trump’s chances best intersected. James Carville once famously said that between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is Alabama. Leave Detroit, and Michigan is Minnesota with worse roads. Historically, the Wolverine State has fought its own civil war of sorts between the city and the rest of the state. After the 1967 riots, there was mass white flight, and malls popped up in the suburbs so moms wouldn’t have to head into Detroit to buy new school clothes. Whole neighborhoods in Detroit were abandoned, leaving plenty of empty houses to play host to the 1980s crack epidemic. Any

Senior writer STEPHEN RODRICK profiled Greta Thunberg in April. ROLLING STONE

M I C H I G A N

AUGUST 2020

PREVIOUS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPHS IN ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES, 2; JOSH EDELSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF BIBA ADAMS

B A T T L E G R O U N D

I change the subject to politics. My mom is a Navy wife dealt a shit hand, widowed at 36 with three kids. We moved to Michigan in 1980 to be closer to relatives. Back in 2016, I feared she would be easy pickings for Trump; she was someone who had given so much to the country, but received little back. But she surprised and inspired me. She disliked him and his pompous style. A child of the Old South, she would tolerate none of the casual racism about the Obamas that slipped from the side of the mouths of other white Michiganders. This year, she at first watched the state unify with a common purpose to fight the virus. But then in April, state Republicans turned against Whitmer, calling her a dictator. “Everyone was working together, then it’s like someone flipped a switch,” she tells me. And maybe someone had.

N MARCH 9TH, the buzz in Michigan was about the next day’s presidential primary and whether Joe Biden could nail down the Democratic nomination or if Bernie Sanders was capable of making a last stand. “We had a big rally with us, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker in Detroit on March 9th,” recalls Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, the first African American to hold the office. “Then on primary night we get word at 9:30 we have the first two confirmed cases. The governor did a press conference at 11:30, and then everything changed after that.” At first, Whitmer and the Republican-controlled Legislature were united as the governor shut down

threats against Whitmer and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. One of the conservative groups promoting the protests was the Michigan Freedom Fund. The MFF is an organization funded by the DeVos family, whose members included Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince, who tirelessly advocates the Trump administration hire his privatearmy firm for unseemly missions. “This group is funded in large part by the DeVos family,” Whitmer told reporters. “It’s really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president’s Cabinet to be waging political attacks on any governor, but obviously, on me here at home.” (The group denied their involvement besides running a $250 Facebook ad on their home page.) Nessel, Whitmer’s attorney general, was aghast as she watched the protests. Her thoughts turned to her years defending black clients in Detroit. “I’ve had to sit down with my young African American male clients more than I can count when they explain to me, ‘I don’t understand why I got arrested. I don’t understand why I got shot. I see white guys do this all the time, I’m open-carrying,’ ” Nessel says. “And I had to tell them, ‘Open carry only applies to white people.’ ” Emboldened by the protests, Trump sent a tweet screaming “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and then toured a Ford plant in Detroit while refusing to wear a mask, leading Nessel to call him a “petulant child” on CNN. Now it’s time to assess the damage done. “They say that when America gets a cold, black America gets the flu,” says Abdul El-Sayed with a sad smile. “And that’s when Detroit gets pneumonia.”

IN MOURNING Biba Adams [ ] outside her Detroit home and [ O P P OS I T E ] with her with her granddaughter, daughter, and the mother and grandmother she lost to COVID-19. A B OV E

the state and launched a media campaign to reach the African American community, where a rumor had started that blacks were immune from COVID-19. Like many states, Michigan scrambled for protective equipment in a country woefully unprepared for a pandemic. This was understandable to everyone except one man: Donald Trump. After a tension-filled conversation between Whitmer and Trump, the president went public with his dissatisfaction. He said he had a “big problem” with “the woman” governor and labeled her “Gretchen ‘Half ’ Whitmer.” From that moment on, she became a target of protesters both at the state capitol and her residence. “They were standing outside my home, with AR-15s,” Whitmer tells me. “My kids and I were looking out the window, but you know what? I have lost three people to COVID-19, three people that I was close to. I’m making decisions to save people’s lives.” The onslaught culminated with Operation Gridlock on April 15th, when thousands of protesters descended on the state capitol in Lansing, armed with semi-automatic rifles. Michigan is an open-carry state. There was one man with a Barbie doll resembling Whitmer dangling from a Betsy Ross American flag. Posters read HEIL WHITMER with the governor surrounded by a swastika. Around the same time, a man was arrested for making credible death

PHOTOGRAPH BY RACHEL ELISE THOMAS

ROLLING STONE

El-Sayed, 35, is in an optimal position to make that observation. He is an epidemiologist, the former medical director for the city of Detroit, and finished second to Whitmer in the 2018 Democratic primary. “The framework that epidemiologists use to think about a pandemic is three things: agents, host, and environment,” says El-Sayed. “In Detroit, it is the story of how an environment beats up the host over a long period of time to make them vulnerable.” COVID-19 is largely a virus that breeds in the lungs. The more vulnerable the respiratory system, the more likely it will prove fatal. Not coincidentally, Detroit citizens breathe some of the most polluted air in the country. “If people were breathing terrible air, they have lung disease, everything from asthma to lung cancer,” says El-Sayed. “And now you have a virus that disproportionately attacks the lungs.” He makes a persuasive case that it all gets back to Trump’s disastrous view that the virus would simply go away. “The thing about Donald Trump is not just that he’s a nut. It’s that he is mendacious. He’s not just fumbling around for a solution, he’s actively looking for a way to divide Americans.” Whitmer’s response has been far from perfect. She has never called El-Sayed despite the fact he is an Oxford-educated epidemiologist. Her policy of sending COVID-19-positive patients to nursing homes, where the virus has wreaked havoc, has come under scrutiny. Whitmer denies the charge, insisting that the state never forced nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients and that those who returned did so under CDC guidelines. Even some supporters say she has done too many national interviews while skipping local reporters. Still, few doubt her sincerity in trying to fight a pandemic that has claimed 6,200 Michiganders, of whom roughly 2,500 were black. How many more would have been lost if Whitmer had caved to the protesters is unknown. Whitmer will tell you the deaths are a great tragedy, but we live in a realpolitik world. It’s hard to see a Trump path to re-election without the state. But a strange thing has happened. Despite Michigan protests being blared on Fox News, Whitmer’s approval numbers remain high even as unemployment hovers near 20 percent here; meanwhile, Trump trails Biden by around 10 points. Michigan may be about to teach Donald Trump a lesson most six-year-olds learn: Actions have consequences.

I’m looking for an unmarked white van driven by a man with a long arrest record. He has become the face of the Michigan resistance. I mean that literally. An AFP photographer captured a goateed man screaming between two cops at the state capitol on April 30th. The photo went viral and became the image of the right-wing protests. The man’s name is Brian Cash; he’s a 52-year-old floor installer. Cash grew up in New Hudson, the son of the fire chief. His white van pulls up. The bar is too crowded

BATTLING THE CRISIS Whitmer [ TO P ] says she’s “making decisions to save people’s lives.” But epidemiologist and Whitmer rival ElSayed [ A B OV E ] says she hasn’t called on him for help.

so we head over to a nearby school in his van. Besides protesting Whitmer, Cash’s main political activity has been pushing for pot legalization, as indicated by the bong that rests near the gas pedal. “Let’s get one thing straight,” says Cash with a smile. “I wasn’t yelling at those cops. It was another guard who had treated a woman rough the day before.” He is wearing blue gym shorts and is covered with dust from a long day of work. “I was asking him if he wanted to try that with me.” Cash is the quintessential kaleidoscopic Trump voter. He never voted before 2016 and began the year as a Bernie Sanders voter.

HAT SUNDAY, I leave Biba Adams and drive 33 miles to New Hudson in Lenawee County, a Detroit suburb that went for Trump over Hillary Clinton by more than 20 points. I stop at the New Hudson Inn, a bar populated by Harleys and a stand selling corn dogs and cotton candy. Nearby, a telephone pole holds a stapled poster with a picture of Whitmer and a pair of hands in shackles with the words, “Lockdown for All, But Not for Me.” ROLLING STONE

M I C H I G A N

“Sanders gets fucked by the DNC. Right?” says Cash. “And Hillary’s a bitch, there’s no way I would vote for her,” says Cash. “I didn’t like Donald Trump. I thought he’s a rich, fucking asshole, arrogant, a womanizer piece of shit. But it’s two shitty choices, right? So I gave him a chance.” Cash’s face opens with wonder. “And I just can’t believe the advances he’s made. I’ve been bitching about us being the world police for 30 years, and Trump takes care of it. And my business takes off, more work than I can handle.” Now, he’s turned over the running of the floor-installing business to his son as he bounces from rally to rally. (He says he went to a police-brutality demonstration in nearby Ypsilanti and was chased out by 150 protesters when he shouted “Trump 2020.”) I ask Cash when he turned on Whitmer’s lockdown policy. He laughs. “Minute fucking one. And if you think this is about haircuts, then you’re lost,” says Cash. “It’s about America. It’s about jobs. You don’t quarantine healthy people. Quarantine is meant to keep the sick away.” Cash is ready to protect his convictions and risk his health rather than wear a piece of cloth over his mouth. “We don’t let the governor decide what is open and what is closed, ” Cash says. “And she definitely doesn’t have the power to make me wear a mask.” Like many Trump supporters, Cash sees a dark hand moving to sabotage his president. “You had all the people on the streets of China protesting over Hong Kong,” says Cash, stubbing out his cigarette. “Millions and millions of people, and then boom, all [of a] sudden this virus gets released. Everybody’s off the streets in China. Then China let it go throughout the world because Trump’s not letting them get away with screwing us anymore. Right?” We head back over to the bar. I offer to buy Cash a beer, but he says he doesn’t drink any more, just enjoys now-legalized weed. He parks the van and digs into the dashboard looking for rolling papers. “We can smoke a joint before you head out,” he says. Then it dawns on me, a man with a violent opposition to social distancing is asking me to put my lips on the same wet piece of paper in the midst of a raging pandemic. Cash asks the patrons if they have papers. Some recognize him from the photo and throw in ad hominem slurs at Whitmer. Alas, no one is holding. Cash is bummed. I am not.

VERY DAY THAT Michigan’s Lt. Gov. Gilchrist makes the 90-mile drive from his Corktown neighborhood in Detroit to Lansing, he passes through the small city of Howell, the longtime home of the late Robert Miles, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. Miles held several KKK rallies on his farm and served time for plotting to bomb school buses to stop school integration in the 1970s.

E L- S A Y E D P H O T O G R A P H B Y B R I T T A N Y G R E E S O N

TOP: COURTESY OF THE OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR

B A T T L E G R O U N D

FROM TOP: JEFF KOWALSKY/AF/GETTY IMAGES; NICK KING/ ”LANSING STATE JOURNAL”/USA TODAY NETWORK/SIPA USA

“Howell historically has some disturbing history when it comes to the role that some people in that community have played in very tense race relations here in the state,” says Gilchrist, who runs a COVID-inspired racial-disparities health task force for Whitmer. It’s a bit of an understatement. “I drive through there every day,” he says. “So yeah, frankly, this is the diversity of the state of Michigan.” Like the rest of the country, Michigan’s black community was pushed to the brink with George Floyd’s murder. Coupled with the pandemic and the Flint water crisis, it seemed too much for one community to bear. Police brutality has been a way of life in Michigan for decades, and Floyd’s death brought back something that state Sen. Jim Ananich of Flint reminded me of a few days earlier. My family moved to the Flint suburbs in 1980, just before the shooting of a black teenager named Billy Taylor. The 15-year-old had stolen a television set and his punishment was a hail of bullets in the back from an off-duty police officer who was never charged with a crime. Ananich’s father was Flint’s ombudsman at the time and brought home the crime-scene photos. “It might seem strange to have your father show you those pictures when you’re only 10, but he wanted me to know what people had to live with every day, the thought their child might not come home,” Ananich says. “It’s 40 years later, and they still live with the same fear.” Somehow, in this moment of nationwide racial turmoil, Flint and Detroit exercised their right to protest vigorously without the violence that plagued other cities. On a broiling June morning, I join Whitmer and Gilchrist as they march from Highland Park to Detroit’s Wayne State University four miles away. Rabbis, ministers, and hundreds of citizens accompany us. Everyone wears masks, but there is very little social distancing. This will become a new talking point for Michigan right-wingers, citing it as a prime example of Whitmer’s hypocrisy. Ironically, the only moment of unrest occurs when a young white man in a construction worker’s reflective vest stumbles into the rally. He refuses to put on a mask and unsuccessfully tries to turn a “Black Lives Matter” chant into “All Lives Matter.” A few of the march leaders exchange troubled glances, but the man soon peels off. At Wayne State, Whitmer talks about the community’s exhaustion and asks them to push on. Gilchrist, an imposing six-foot-six man with three children, then speaks. “Can this be the last time we march against injustice?” asks Gilchrist. A sweating old black man mumbles, “No, it won’t be the last time.” Gilchrist pauses for a second. “I believe it can be. And if you don’t, maybe you shouldn’t be out here.”

Gilchrist has lost 22 friends and relatives to the coronavirus. “This has been absolutely real and personal for me,” he tells me. Later, I ask him between breaks in presiding over the state Senate if he truly believes what he said at the march, that this time might be different from all the protests that have come before. His eyes betray that he is smiling behind his University of Michigan mask. “That’s my optimism,” he says. “We need to get beyond exhaustion to acceleration.”

head. “Now everybody’s got so sensitive, you can’t even say those words.” You might recognize Karl if you are a Fox News hobbyist. He appeared on Hannity, Tucker, and Ingraham after opening his one-man barbershop in April in defiance of Whitmer’s closing of all hair salons. He became a folk hero, a lone man standing up to Big Government. Whitmer attempted to shut him down, but instead the sheriff came into his shop and said, “I love you.” Then a Michigan court ruled that the governor was not vested with the power to suspend Manke’s barber license. There was great rejoicing throughout unmasked America. The old man became the cuddly face of COVID-19 protest, a welcome contrast to all those scary guys with AR-15s and Whitmer Barbies on a stick. Well, he was a cuddly contrast until the scary guys with AR-15s showed up to “protect” him from, uh, bureaucrats. He’s been doing boffo business with a line of customers stretching out the door. A friend had to be enlisted to help keep all the appointments straight. Yesterday, there was a guy from Maine and another from Los Angeles. “Some of them don’t even need haircuts,” marvels Manke. “They just say, ‘I wanted to show my support.’ ” The Manke phenomenon is a distillation of the American right’s vilification of Democratic governors and a massively deluded belief that individual citizens have the right to go about their business, pandemic or no pandemic. The impact their actions might have on innocents never occurs to them. “You’ve got a constitutional right to protest your inability to get a haircut,” says Nessel, the attorney general. “But you don’t have a constitutional right to a haircut, and whoever is telling you otherwise is doing you a great disservice.” Besides, Manke is not the ancient naif he pretends to be on television. He has self-published nine books, including Age of Shame, which treads sketchy ground as he draws a moral equivalence between a Jewish girl in 1940 Warsaw and a German boy persecuted by the Russians for being German. Manke tells me the book includes a section on compliant Polish Jews getting on the trains that would take them to their deaths. “I refuse to get into any kind of cattle car, whether it be a real one or one that’s just manufactured,” Manke tells me. “Even as the government is saying ‘It’s going to be wonderful, I will take care of you.’ ” He pauses for a moment and glances at the customers piling up, then continues. “She’s not my mother. She might be a stepmother that hasn’t got my best welfare in mind.” The one consistent thing I find talking to the Michigan resisters is that they start off sounding almost reasonable, but once they proceed past the sound bite, it moves into cuckoo conspiracy land. In an aside, Manke tells me the reason Russia [Cont. on 81]

RESISTING THE LOCKDOWN Brian Cash [ TO P ] became the face of the protests. Crowds flocked to Karl Manke’s barbershop [ A B OV E ] when he illegally opened up.

N MY WAY back from chatting with Michigan’s first black lieutenant governor, I stop in the rural town of Owosso to see barber Karl Manke. Karl would like to keep things the way they are. Actually, he’d like to set the clock back a bit. “When I was a kid, you had these stereotype things that you’ve played with each other,” says Manke, a white-haired man chatting for a bit before his barbershop illegally opens. “You were a Polack, you were a kraut, you were a kike, you were a spic, you were a dago. All these terms didn’t mean a damn thing. We just teased each other.” He mournfully shakes his

AUGUST 2020

ROLLING STONE

T H E

FAC E S

O F

D E P O R TAT I O N One year. Six families. Dozens of lives disrupted by the Trump administration’s punitive and unpredictable immigration policies

B Y T ESSA S TUART & R EED D UNLEA

Ph o t o g ra p h s b y

F E D E R I C A VA L A B R E G A

centers into viral tinderboxes, and giving the administration cover to institute some of its most draconian measures yet. A year ago, ROLLING STONE began documenting the stories of immigrants around the country who are fighting removal, waylaid in detention centers, and mired in endless court proceedings, with the stability and safety of their families hanging in the balance. (Last names have been withheld out of concern over retaliation.) Beto, a 25-year-old DACA recipient, was deported back to a country he hadn’t seen since he was nine. Ignacio, a father of three, may be forced to leave his family and the town he’s lived in for more than three decades. But despite the administration’s best efforts to drive them away, these families share a determination to hang on to the lives they’ve made here. “What we want is the same as any Americans,” says Hormis, Ignacio’s wife. “We dream of buying a house, like anyone. We have a family, we have a dog. We’re hardworking people that love the country. That’s why we’re here.”

HE YEAR Donald Trump was carried into office on a frothing anti-immigrant platform, there were an estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. Roughly two-thirds had been here for more than a decade. Prior administrations had abysmal records, but generally acknowledged that the U.S. was enriched by the immigrants who chose to build their lives here. It’s why Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to some 3 million undocumented immigrants, why George W. Bush supported a path to legal citizenship, why Barack Obama — labeled “deporter-in-chief ” after removing nearly 3 million people — also created DACA to protect immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. But from the start, Trump embraced a rabid xenophobia once restricted to the furthest fringe in modern American politics, slashing refugee admissions, rescinding DACA, and ratcheting up arrests of longtime residents. All of that was before the pandemic hit, shutting down immigration courts, turning detention

Alfredo, a cook in New York, is fighting an order of removal.

Rosalína O S S I N I N G , N E W YO R K A nanny contracts the coronavirus as she fights for the return of her husband from Guatemala

JORGE AND ROSALÍNA are

Alfredo

QUEENS, N E W YO R K

IN JULY 2018, Alfredo boarded a Greyhound bus in New York City bound for Seattle, to meet with his brother. “I was super excited,” Alfredo says. “It looked like we were going to have months of work.” But near Buffalo, New York, the driver announced that the bus was being diverted into Canada. “That’s when things started to make a turn.” Searches of Greyhound and other bus lines by Customs and Border Protection increased dramatically in the first year of the Trump administration. An internal CBP memo called it an opportunity “the likes of which we have not seen in a decade,” and was signed, “Happy hunting!”

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A family strains under the pressure of uncertainty as the father awaits a ruling on his removal

Alfredo, who had his Mexican passport and a driver’s license from Washington state, where he lived after first immigrating to the U.S. from Puebla, Mexico, without papers in 2004, was taken into custody by Canadian authorities, then sent to an ICE detention center near Buffalo, where he spent 20 days while his wife raised money for his bond back home in Queens. Alfredo, 38, has since had a work permit approved, but he’s still waiting to find out if he will be deported; his next court date is not until 2021. Before the pandemic, he was working at a Mexican restaurant in Manhattan, but he doesn’t know if that job will

ever come back. He says he feels depressed and unsure of his future, and that the ordeal has ended his marriage. “With the stress of what was going on, she didn’t want to be involved with the case, so she kind of distanced herself,” Alfredo says. They share joint custody of their three kids: Eduardo, seven; Valentina, six; and Hector, five. “When I’m with them, I try to stay relaxed, not sort of transmit to them what’s going on — the emotion of what’s going on,” he says. But he can tell that they worry. “Whenever they see police, they hug me and say, ‘Oh, there’s cops over there, let’s go this way.’ It really affected them.”

> “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I try to stay positive,” says Alfredo, “mostly for the kids.”

both from Guatemala, but they met and fell in love in Ossining, New York, a small village on the Hudson River where Jorge worked in a deli for 13 years. In 2008, they returned to Guatemala and opened a general store, but it wasn’t long before the threatening phone calls started — gangs demanding that Jorge deposit money for them into a bank account. “And that if he didn’t, the kids would pay,” Rosalína recalls. The family crossed back into the U.S. on Christmas Eve 2016, seeking asylum from gang violence and extortion. Rosalína and the kids were allowed to go back to Ossining, where she works as a nanny, to await hearings, but Jorge was detained for eight months, then deported. In 2018, he attempted to cross again and spent almost two years in a Texas detention center before he was deported in December. He’s in hiding in Guatemala, even as his asylum case is still being appealed. Their daughter Angelica, 19, speaks to her dad often, but not about the gangs. “I don’t have the courage to speak about it,” she says. A grocery worker, Angelica contracted the coronavirus in March, at the same time as her mother. They have both recovered, but “it hasn’t been easy,” says Rosalína. “I know the kids are watching me, so I tell them we’ve got to keep going.” Rosalína, a nanny, had to isolate from the kids for months during COVID.

THE FACE S OF DEP ORTATION

Fredy

C A R T H AG E , M ISSISSIPPI

After living in the U.S. for 18 years, a father is swept up in the largest workplace raid in ICE history

FREDY WAS DRIVING a bus in Guatemala some 20 years ago

when the woman who would become his wife got on. “That’s where everything started,” he says. She came to the United States first; he followed on foot in 2002. They settled in Mississippi, where he found work at a chicken-processing plant. “I started from the very bottom — in the area where they cut the breast in half,” he says, but worked his way up, becoming a janitor, then a painter, and finally a mechanic. That’s what he was doing in August 2019 when he and 679 other undocumented workers were swept up in the largest coordinated workplace raid in ICE history. The day he was detained, he couldn’t stop thinking about his wife and four children, about his oldest daughter, Marleny, and the 15th birthday she had coming up. “In that moment, many things were running through my mind because my family was home and I didn’t know anything about them,” he says. “All my sons and daughters were born here. If we take them there, they are going to be immigrants like us.”

The raid ostensibly targeted the executives at seven Mississippi plants, but to date none of them have been prosecuted. An ICE official expects that all of the workers, including Fredy, who was released with an ankle monitor, will be deported. A few months after the raid, many of them gathered to celebrate Fredy’s daughter’s quinceañera. “Even though we are going through tough times, the best solution is to come together, spend time together, and forget our sorrows,” he says. Fredy’s final hearing was set for June, but ROLLING STONE has been unable to contact him since early spring, around the same time COVID-19 swept through his community — dozens of cases were reported at the same plants raided months earlier. Back in November, Fredy said he hoped the Trump administration realized it was wrong: “They left a lot of children without parents. With our kids, we can give back. A doctor, a lawyer — our daughters and sons can become that. If we have done something wrong, it was not because we want to take from your country, but because we want to give something good.”

Fredy and his family at his daughter Marleny’s quinceañera, a few months after the raid.

Ignacio & Hormis W O L C O T T, N E W Y O R K A married couple — one a citizen, and one undocumented — fight to keep their family together

IGNACIO CAME TO the United

Beto

C H I C AG O , I LLINOIS

“FRESH AIR — that’s what I

miss the most,” Beto said from behind the glass at the Hardin County Jail in Eldora, Iowa, back in February. Over the previous nine months, he’d lost 30 pounds as he bounced between three different county jails that had contracts to hold ICE detainees. Last May, he and three friends went hiking in Colorado to celebrate his 25th birthday. Beto, who arrived in Illinois from Guadalajara, Mexico, with his parents on a tourist visa when he was nine, was napping in the back seat on the drive home when the car was pulled over for speeding. They were booked for pos-

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A birthday hiking trip turns into a nightmare for a former DACA recipient

session of marijuana, but the charges were soon dropped. His friends were citizens: “They went home. I didn’t go home.” Beto had been a DACA recipient, but when the Trump administration rescinded DACA in 2017, his status was thrown into limbo. With support from his community in Chicago, Beto made bail. But in June, in the midst of the pandemic, he was called back to Iowa for a hearing. If he failed to show, he was told, his $25,000 bond would be > Beto, a construction worker from Chicago, in custody in Iowa before being deported

forfeited and a warrant would be put out for his arrest. Beto was detained at the hearing, transferred to Nebraska, given a flimsy mask for protection, put on a plane to Texas, then driven across the border to Reynosa, Mexico. From there, he had to find his way to an uncle in Guadalajara, more than 600 miles away. Just one week later, the Supreme Court declared that Trump had ended DACA illegally. “It’s a place I don’t recognize,” he said on the phone from Mexico in June. “I’ve been trying to adapt, but it’s difficult. My life belongs over there, with my parents and my family.”

States some 31 years ago, on foot through Tijuana, when he was just 18. “I don’t remember much about Mexico,” he says, now 49. But he does remember when he first met Hormis. She arrived from Mexico at the apple orchard where he worked in 2003. They married two years later, settled into the steady rhythm of life at the orchard that they now supervise, and had three sons. In December 2016, Ignacio was putting the kids on the school bus when he noticed a black sedan parked a few doors down. It was ICE. “The kids got back from school and asked where their dad was,” Hormis says. She told the oldest child the truth, but initially kept it from their two younger sons: “I had to lie and tell them he had gone to work someplace far.” Released after six months on $15,000 bond, Ignacio was given an order of removal; the family is appealing and also applying for a green card based on his marriage to Hormis, who became a citizen in 2017. If he’s deported, she and their sons will stay in Wolcott. But it won’t be easy without him: When COVID struck, Hormis had to cut back hours at the orchard to home-school the kids. “I tell them not to worry,” says Ignacio. “I might not be there, but they’re in my heart, wherever I am.” “The government treated him like a criminal when he hadn’t done anything but work,” says Hormis.

THE FACE S OF DEP ORTATION

Suyapa, who came to the U.S. from Honduras in 2014, dreams of opening a Honduran restaurant.

In her room at First United, with her sons Junior and Jeison. “People in the church are supportive,” she says.

Suyapa

P HIL A DELPHI A, P E N N S Y LVA N I A

FOR 562 DAYS, Suyapa and

four of her children lived on the second floor of the First United Methodist Church of Germantown in Philadelphia. She came to the United States in 2014 after her oldest daughter was granted asylum. A victim of domestic violence, Suyapa, 38, had applied for a special visa, but ICE refused to defer her deportation while the application made its way through the system. That’s

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A domestic-abuse survivor gets a visa after two years of hiding, and emerges to a pandemic

why the family sought refuge inside the church. She just didn’t expect to be there as long as she was. “It’s not so easy being in the sanctuary — the girls are closed in,” Suyapa said in September. “God gives me strength. People in the church are supportive.” Once a month, Suyapa cooked dinner for the parishioners; she hopes to one day open a Honduran restaurant.

On March 12th, Suyapa’s visa was finally approved, and she left First United for the first time in nearly two years — just as the country was going into lockdown for COVID. Almost immediately, Suyapa got sick with symptoms of COVID. She recovered, but amid the economic crisis, she’s struggled to find work. “I feel safe,” she says. “It’s just when the rent is due, I start to worry.”

Music

THE CHICKS JUMP INTO THE FIRE The country trio’s first record in 14 years is their poppiest and most personal LP ever By CL A IR E SH A FFER

Gaslighter The Chicks COLUMBIA

N THE NINETIES, the Dixie Chicks paved the way for the truth-telling women who dominate country music today. But they’ve never had much luck living in the world they made. In 2003, some light bashing of President Bush got them exiled from Nashville, and their rock-influenced comeback LP, Taking the Long Way, failed to create a viable path forward. Even their recent decision to drop “Dixie” from their name echoes the burden of bad history. The trio’s first studio release in nearly 15 years is their most pop-sounding, but they still have some bones to pick. This time the conflict is coming from inside the house. Much of Gaslighter is centered on Natalie ILLUSTRATION BY

Jody Hewgill

Reviews Music

Maines’ acrimonious 2019 divorce from Heroes actor Adrian Pasdar. The resulting album is at times so brutally honest that Pasdar reportedly tried to block its release. When Maines sings, “After so long, I learned to hold my tongue/ And now that you’re done, I get to write this song,” on “Hope It’s Something Good,” it’s less a triumph than a weary sigh of relief. Jack Antonoff, producer extraordinaire for the likes of Taylor Swift and Lorde, is the main collaborator here, along with a cadre of other hitmakers — Julia Michaels, Teddy Geiger, Ian Kirkpatrick. As with the Chicks’ long-overdue name change, the arrangement dissolves most of the group’s lingering connections to their street-corner bluegrass origins. Martie Maguire’s fiddle sounds more like a violin; Emily Strayer’s banjo has lost its twang. All of the Chicks have experienced divorce, but Gaslighter is Maines’ story to tell, often in excruciating detail. “My husband’s girlfriend’s husband just called me up/How messed up is that?” she sings with a laugh on “Sleep at Night,” then stops herself short, remembering that her two sons are trying to grow up in the midst of such chaos. If Gaslighter does anything right, it’s this peppering of wry (and often very petty) humor amid the stop-andgo pain and frustration that accompanies a fragmented relationship. “It’s my body, and it hates you/Why does everybody love you?” Maines asks on “Everybody Loves You,” and it’s enough to break your heart. Unfortunately, the LP’s production doesn’t rise to the occasion, falling back on tepid ballads, flattened melodies, acoustic-guitar strums with plastic textures, and soaring whoaoa’s and whoo-oo’s. The best moments are when the band sounds like itself; “Texas Man” creates a hoedown vibe with electric guitar and rock percussion, while “Hope It’s Something Good” takes on a dream-pop quality with gorgeous vocal lilts and hazy pedal steel. The Chicks have always stood for liberation. At times, Gaslighter pushes toward a calmer freedom. “I can see a wildfire comin’/Burnin’ the world that I know,” Maines sings on “My Best Friend’s Wedding.” “Take what I need and go.” It suggests that the band members may be ready to escape the madness and settle down, or at least settle into their own pace. Maybe this time, they’ll finally outrun the flames.

KATY PERRY GETS BACK TO BASICS The singer has a good time for the first time in a while on her fifth album By JON DOL AN

T’S BEEN 10 YEARS since Katy Perry’s mega-blockbuster Teenage Dream set an almost stratospherically high bar for modern Californicated pop bliss in the 21st century, becoming the first album to land five songs at the top of the charts since Michael Jackson’s Bad. That’s a tough

Katy Perry Smile Capitol

act to follow, and like Jackson in the post-Bad era, Perry struggled to come up with the right second act, failing to keep pace with an increasingly ambitious and arty pop world as she tried genre-leaping introspection on 2013’s Prism and therapeutic wokeness on 2017’s Witness.

On Smile, she stops trying to keep up with the Halseys and happily defaults to the fizzy bombast that is her stadium-size safety zone. “I’m ready for a shameless summer/Champagne on ice only makes you stronger,” she sings on “Cry About It Later.” The Zedd co-produced

BREAKING

Natanael Cano’s Down-Home Mexican Trap LAST YEAR, Bad Bunny hopped on a remix of the track “Soy El Diablo,” by rising teen-

age Mexican artist Natanael Cano. Now, Cano is making good on that endorsement, racking up streams for two 2020 LPs, Corridos Tumbados Vol. 2 and Trap Tumbado, on which he combines traditional regional Mexican music and trap, crooning with a winning mix of grit and energy. On tracks like “La Reina” and “Calle Pero Elegante,” Cano and a host of U.S. and Latin rappers evoke a Norteño band holding it down in an Atlanta club, offering a crafty new twist on pop without borders. JON DOLAN

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+++++ Classic | ++++ Excellent | +++ Good | ++ Fair | + Poor

opener, “Never Really Over,” is a fan-servicing surge of mirror-ball synths, heroically martial snare thwacks, and Perry crushing every note into golden dust. On “Teary Eyes,” she skates over silky house music, while “Tucked” is disco fluff of the first order. Charlie Puth co-writes “Harleys in Hawaii,” a cute island R&B escapade about riding road hogs, chasing rainbows, and doing the “hula, hula, hula” down to the “jeweler, jeweler, jeweler.” Of course, it wouldn’t be a Katy Perry joint without some resplendently goofy cringecore lyrics, and the lady doth not disappoint in that regard. She sings, “Tried to knock me down/Took those sticks and stones/Showed ’em I could build a house,” on the empowerment maelstrom “Daisies,” and follows that up with an I’m-a-flower-growingthrough-the-concrete conceit on the very next song, the equally gigantic “Resilient.” In promoting the album, Perry talked about the depression brought on by a debilitating breakup with her now-fiancé Orlando Bloom a couple of years back, and yet while there’s enough eye water here to fill a Big Gulp, she usually powers through to remind herself that it’s perfectly OK to be happily partnered with Legolas. “We put the dirty work in/So now we know it’s worth it,” she sings over the juicy beat and Bee Gees strings of “Champagne Problems.” The only turd in the Champagne glass is the closing bummer, “What Makes a Woman.” If it’s possible to be condescending to yourself, this song does it: “I feel most beautiful doing what the fuck I want/Is it that my intuition is never really off/I need tissues for my issues/And Band-Aids for my heart,” she sings. For the most part, though, this is the sound of ably inching back to pop heaven.

RATINGS ARE SUPERVISED BY THE EDITORS OF ROLLING STONE.

FROM TOP: DANIEL POCKETT/GETTY IMAGES; PETER BALTIMORE

THE CHICKS

Quic

REISSUE

Ten new albums you need to know about now

JARV IS

Beyond the Pale Rough Trade

Fontaines D.C.

A Hero’s Death Partisan

Bully

Sugaregg Sub Pop

Margo Price

That’s How Rumors Get Started Loma Vista

The Streets

None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive Island

Bruce Hornsby

Non-Secure Connection Zappo

Fantastic Negrito

Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? Blackball Universe

FROM TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: JAMES MCCAULEY/SHUTTERSTOCK; ANGEL MARCHINI/ SHUTTERSTOCK; SUZANNE CORDEIRO/SHUTTERSTOCK; C FLANIGAN/IMAGESPACE/ SHUTTERSTOCK; DAVE SIMPSON/WIREIMAGE; JORDI VIDAL/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

Gang of Four

Anti Hero Gill

Luke Bryan

Born Here Live Here Die Here Capitol Nashville

Lemon Twigs

Songs for the General Public 4AD

CLASS ACT Brit-pop legend Jarvis Cocker returns with his satiric wit and wiggly hips in top form, flashing his sharpest batch of new tunes since Pulp’s classic 1998 album, This Is Hardcore.

PUNK POWER An ambitious Irish band that’s as influenced by James Joyce as the Smiths. “Life ain’t always empty,” singer Grian Chatten offers, as messy guitar textures make that positive vision hit home.

NINETIES NOISE Catchy, noise-loving

tunes that could soundtrack your next breakdown or your next party, given period detail by being recorded at the same studio as In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me.

TOP PRICE Price’s sturdy third LP is a mix of breezy roots rock and earthy country soul that finds her pontificating on some favorite topics: hardscrabble upbringings, Nashville hypocrisy, and open highways.

A DEEP DIVE INTO A DEAD CLASSIC A new edition of ‘Workingman’s Dead’ is all about studio process

HERE HAVE BEEN countless Grateful Dead archival sets over the years. Pegged to the 50th anniversary of one of their totemic LPs, Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share is the first time the band has given us an exhaustive overview of its studio process. These two and a half hours of previously unreleased tapes allow us to finally hear Jerry and Co. at

STREET SURVIVOR A welcome return from droll, deadpan London rapper Mike Skinner. Grimey bangers like “Phone Is Always in My Hand” nail a unique vision of weeded-out sad-sack malaise.

SPACY SATIRE Dreamily orchestrated takes on topics from online hackers to racial justice (assisted by pals like Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and the Shins’ James Mercer). It’s kind of like a psychedelic Randy Newman.

NEW BLUES Modern electric blues as Prince and George Clinton would have it, with a potent song about police violence and a cameo from Negrito’s Oakland buddy, rapper E-40.

MARX BROTHERS The legendary U.K. lefty punks polish up some old tunes, like 1979’s searing “Glass,” and offer a moving new one in tribute to guitarist Andy Gill, who passed away earlier this year.

LIFE OF BRYAN Country-radio mainstay Bryan’s seventh studio album examines small-town origins, fatherhood, and matters of the heart with extra earnestness but few surprises.

RETRO NO-NO The Long Island brother duo’s third LP is full of shiny Seventies pop-rock simulations, but you would be much better off putting on an old Todd Rundgren or Raspberries record.

Grateful Dead Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share

4 work, honing every song on their pivotal, roots-centric album: Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir practice the chord changes to “Uncle John’s Band”; Weir works out his guitar part in “Casey Jones”; the late Ron “Pigpen” McKernan leads everyone through more than half a dozen slightly different, sometimes eerie takes of his showcase “Easy Wind”; and the band members attempt, over 11 tries, to nail a satisfactory version of “New Speedway Boogie.” It all demonstrates what they could accomplish when practice and focus were as important as toking. DAVID BROWNE

Jarvis Cocker

CONTRIBUTORS: JONATHAN BERNSTEIN, JON DOLAN, BRENNA EHRLICH, JON FREEMAN, KORY GROW, ANGIE MARTOCCIO, ROB SHEFFIELD

Rolling Stone

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Reviews Music in me/Tellin’ me I gotta be free.” A good captain follows the tide where it takes him.

The smooth Seventies sound that’s enjoyed a sweet second life

to come: sharp-dressed white soul, burnished ballads that evoked wine with a quiet dinner, and splashes of Me Decade decadence (the narrator of the pumped “Lido Shuffle” is setting up one more score before leaving the country). With the Philly Soul homage “What Can I Say” and the lush sway of “Georgia,” Silk Degrees set a new high bar for Seventies smoothness.

Christopher Cross Christopher Cross 1979

By DAVID BROWNE

URING THE LATE Seventies and early Eighties, the radio was dominated by silver-tongued white-dude crooners with names like Rupert and Gerry, emoting over balmy R&B beats, swaying saxes, and dishwasher-clean arrangements. Though it didn’t have a name, the genre — soft rock you could dance to — was dismissed by serious rock fans as fluffy and lame. But thanks to a web series in the mid-2000s, the style — belatedly named “yacht rock” — has since spawned a satellite-radio channel, tribute bands, and a Weezer cover of Toto’s “Africa.” Is the modern love of the music ironic or sincere? Hard to say, yet there’s no denying yacht rock is a legit sound with a vibe all its own that produced a surprising amount of great, summer-friendly music.

MustHaves

The Doobie Brothers Minute by Minute 1978

Steely Dan Aja 1977 The sophisticated high-water mark of yacht, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s masterpiece is the midway point between jazz and pop, with tricky tempo shifts, interlocking horn and keyboard parts, and pristine solos. Not settling for easygoing period clichés, these love songs, so to speak, are populated by a sleazy movie director (the gorgeous rush of “Peg”), a loser who still hopes to be a jazzman even if the odds are against him (the heart-tugging “Deacon Blues”), and a guy whose nodding-out girlfriend is probably a junkie (“Black Cow”). The most subversive cruise you’ll ever take.

The Doobies got their start as a biker-y boogie band, but they smoothed things out for Minute by Minute. Highlighted by “What a Fool Believes,” the unstoppable Michael McDonald-Kenny Loggins co-write, the LP piles on romantic turmoil, falsetto harmonies, and plenty of spongy electric piano. But it also proves how much personality and muscle the Doobies could bring to what could be a generic sound. McDonald’s husky, sensitive-guy delivery shrouds the unexpectedly bitter title song, and honoring their biker roots, “Don’t Stop to Watch the Wheels” is about taking a lady friend for a ride on your motorcycle.

Cross’ debut swept the 1981 Grammys for a reason: It’s that rare yacht-rock album that’s graceful, earnest, and utterly lacking in smarm. The Lite FM staple “Sailing” is a powereddown ballad, and with its rousing McDonald cameo, “Ride Like the Wind” sneaks in raw outlaw lyrics (“Lived nine lives/Gunned down 10”) into a breezy groove, perfecting the short-lived gangster-yacht subgenre.

Rupert Holmes Partners in Crime 1979

Further Listening

Seals and Crofts

The album that made Holmes a soft-rock star is known for “Escape (The Piña Colada Song),” which sports a madefor-karaoke chorus and a plot twist worthy of a wide-collar O. Henry. But what distinguishes the album is the Steely Dan-level musicianship and Holmes’ ambitious story songs, each sung with Manilow-esque exuberance — like “Answering Machine,” in which a conflicted couple trades messages while continually being cut off by those thenstate-of-the-art devices.

Get Closer

Boz Scaggs Silk Degrees 1976 Before yacht rock was an identifiable genre, Scaggs (no fan of the term, as he told ROLLING STONE in 2018) set the standard for what was

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Rolling Stone

The hit title track validated the idea that folky singersongwriters could tap into their R&B side and cross over in ways they never imagined — making it the Dylan-goes-electric moment of yacht. Get Closer has plenty of other pleasures. In “Goodbye Old Buddies,” the narrator informs his pals that he can’t hang out anymore now that he’s met “a certain young lady,” but in the next song, “Baby Blue,” another woman is told, “There’s an old friend

Steely Dan Gaucho 1980 The Dan’s last studio album before a lengthy hiatus doesn’t have the consistency of Aja, but

MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES

1976

Gaucho cleverly matches their most pristine, vacuum-sealed music with their most sordid and pathetic cast of characters. A seedy older guy tries to pick up younger women in “Hey Nineteen,” another loser goes in search of a ménage à trois in “Babylon Sisters,” and a coke dealer delivers to a basketball star in “Glamour Profession.” It’s the dark side of the yacht.

Going Deeper