Hvbv

S P E E D M A S T E R M O O N WAT C H S I LV E R S N O O P Y AWA R D

Snoopy, has shared a proud association with NASA for more than 50 years. The connection first began in 1968 when NASA assigned Snoopy as the mascot for its safety program to represent total mission success, while also keeping serious situations, light.

Snoopy became so beloved by NASA’s own astronauts, they created a very prestigious prize in his name: the Silver Snoopy Award.

On May 18th, 1969, Commander Stafford tapped Snoopy’s nose for good luck (above) before the Apollo 10 mission blasted beyond Earth, providing the dress rehearsal for the first ever moon landing.

Charles M. Schulz designed the original Silver Snoopy Award by depicting the beagle wearing a spacesuit and his famous Flying Ace scarf.

dior boutiques 800.929.dior (3467) – dior.com

TOMFORD.COM

Children of God while we were tinkering with the layout of this month’s cover, it dawned on me that Justin Bieber is the third GQ cover subject in a row to delve into his Christian faith in our pages. So I couldn’t help but wonder (if I may have a Carrie Bradshaw moment here): Is God making a comeback? ¶ Historically, bringing up Jesus has been a reliable way for celebrities to stonewall profile writers and sideline reporters while also projecting humility and faith. You know—no matter what question the interviewer asks, just thank God and you won’t have to answer it. ¶ But there’s something different going on here: From Russell Wilson and Ciara in our March “Modern Lovers” issue to Minari star Steven Yeun in April to Justin Bieber in the issue you are currently reading, the so-called “God stuff” has gotten deep.

AT SOME POINT

6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

This month, spirituality dominates Justin’s exchange with writer Zach Baron, and the results are riveting and downright biblical: Mired in loneliness and addiction, racked with shame, and going through an excruciating dark night of the soul, the pop star cries out to God. Okay, I know how this probably sounds, but over the course of creating this issue, I developed a favorite among Justin Bieber’s tattoos. It’s huge, a little ridiculous, and on his abdomen—basically the Tupac “Thug Life” spot. I find it genuinely moving.

It reads: “SON OF GOD.” My own conception of God is a little di≠erent from Justin’s. I believe in karma and reincarnation.

But I relate to Justin and his tattoo because my own pathway out of my own dark night of the soul required me to crack open my heart and allow myself to truly surrender to being a child of God. That surrender has been the most profound experience of my life. It has allowed me

P H O T O G R A P H

to not just feel loved but to actually be loved.

Not long after we decided to title Justin’s cover story “Amazing Grace,” I was driving to work listening to my favorite podcast of late, the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast. And there was an interview segment with TechGnosis author Erik Davis on the subject of grace that knocked me out.

“What is grace in Christianity?” Davis asks. “The important thing about grace is that it’s unearned.… Grace is unasked for and unearned.

They call it superfluity: that excess of God that spills over into your ridiculous, sometimes miserable little life. That’s the moment of grace.”

There was a time when magazines like GQ weren’t interested in stories about grace—about the superfluity of the divine.

But what other story is there?

Will Welch

GLOBAL EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

B Y

R Y A N

M c G I N L E Y

ST Y L I ST, K A R L A W E LC H . F O R FA S H I O N C R E D I T S , S E E “ O N T H E C O V E R ,” PA G E 8 .

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

CONTENTS

GQ May Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

The Fix 22 Design Grails for Your Home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Contributor

Inside New York’s Coolest Design Studio. . . . . . . . . . 20 on the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. .. ..... ... ...... . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . 24 B ENJA MI N CLY ME R

How Hermès Invented Hype. . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . . .. . . . .. 26 Keeper of Country Music’s Secret History.... . ...... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . 30 T Y L ER MA HA N C O E,

DANA MATHEWS Entertainment director Mathews first booked Justin Bieber for a magazine cover a decade ago and coordinated his GQ cover debut in 2016.

“It’s been awesome working with Justin through the years, seeing his evolution as an artist and as a person,” she says.

“He is one of the best subjects of all time.”

Office Grails

Features

→ Associate manager

Cover Story: J US TIN BIEBER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 The Triumphant Career of DEL ROY L IND O . .. . . . . . . 52 The Crimes of the Jailbreak Auteur. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 on Colon-Cancer Scars. . . . . . . . . . 62

The Mellowing of VI NCE S TAPL E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 ← MEGAN

content manager

sweats.”

On the Cover Photograph by Ryan McGinley. Styled

by Karla Welch. Jumpsuit, $4,200, by Dior Men. Ring, his own. Grooming

by Brittany Sullivan. Tailoring by Susanna Badalyan. Set design by Heath Mattioli at Frank Reps. Produced by Alicia Zumback at CAMP Productions.

8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

here is

DANA MATHEWS AND “OFFICE GRAILS”: COURTESY OF SUBJECTS.

IB R AM X. K ENDI

GET YOURS AT GQ.COM/BESTSTUFFBOX

BEST STUFF

Nothing transforms your look—your whole energy—more completely than a fresh pair of sunglasses. So for the latest GQ Best Stuff Box, we’re sending you this pair from Raen. They blend a bold and blocky shape with a laid-back color, and have polarized lenses to keep your eyes safe.

You can snag these $150 shades for just $50—along with a haul of luxe grooming products and summer essentials— when you subscribe to the Best Stuff Box today.

The box also includes goods from: Harry’s Pake Klean Kanteen Mantl Art of Sport & more

$200+ VALUE FOR ONLY $50 Learn more at gq.com/beststuffbox

CONTENTS

ST YLIST, K ARL A WELCH.

GQ May

For our story on Justin Bieber, see page 36.

Jeans, $198, by Levi’s Authorized Vintage. His own underwear by Calvin Klein Underwear.

1 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

R Y A N

M c G I N L E Y

THE RE AC OFF FIELD.

AL TION IS THE WAT C H AT

youtube.com/gqsports

Chief Business Officer

Susan D. Plagemann

Visuals

e x e c u t i v e d e s i g n d i r e cto r

Robert Vargas

b o o k i n g s d i r e cto r

d i r e cto r o f e d i to r i a l o p e r at i o n s

Sarah Schmidt

Victoria Graham

d i g i ta l d e s i g n e r

h e a d o f sa l es , b i z /f i /t ec h Doug Grinspan head of sales, cpg & vice Jeff Barish h e a d o f s a l e s , h e a lt h Carrie Moore h e a d o f s a l e s , h o m e & t r av e l Beth Lusko-Gunderman vp, revenue–midwest Pamela Quandt vp, revenue–san francisco Devon Rothwell v p , e n t e r p r i s e s a l e s – lo s a n g e l e s Dan Weiner v p , f i n a n c e & b u s i n e s s d e v e lo p m e n t Sylvia W. Chan vp, brand marketing Rachael Klein

p r o d u ct i o n d i r e cto r

Kelly Hwang

s e n i o r p r o d u ct i o n m a n a g e r

Published by Condé Nast

p r o d u ct i o n m a n a g e r

Roger Lynch

s e n i o r w e b /co m m e rc e p ro d u c e r

g lo b a l c h i e f r e v e n u e o f f i c e r & president, u.s. revenue

s e n i o r v i s u a l s e d i to r s

Jennifer Aborn, Stephanie Tran

v i s u a l s d i r e cto r

Roxanne Behr

v i s u a l s e d i to r

Daria Di Lello

fa s h i o n d i r e cto r

Mobolaji Dawodu

s ta f f p h oto g r a p h e r

e x e c u t i v e e d i to r

Martin Brown

s i t e d i r e cto r

Matteo Mobilio

Geoffrey Gagnon

a s s o c i at e v i s u a l s e d i to r

Ben Williams

b o o k i n g s c o o r d i n ato r

d i g i ta l d i r e cto r

Lauren Norton

e n t e rta i n m e n t d i r e cto r

Art & Production

s p e c i a l p r oj e ct s e d i to r

Keir Novesky

s t y l e e d i to r

Simon Abranowicz

Jonathan Wilde Dana Mathews

d e s i g n d i r e cto r

Mark Anthony Green

a rt d i r e cto r

Noah Johnson

C.J. Robinson

a rt i c l e s e d i to r s

Chris Gayomali, Alex Hoyt

s e n i o r s ta f f w r i t e r

Jim Gomez

s e n i o r e d i to r

John Markic

Zach Baron

Sam Schube

Timothy Meneely

d e p u t y m a n a g i n g e d i to r

Codie Steensma

Ben Pardee

w e l l n e s s e d i to r

Chris Cohen

web producers

e n t e rta i n m e n t e d i to r

Stephen Aguila, Gabe Conte

s ta f f w r i t e r s

Copy & Research

Luke Leifeste

Gabriella Paiella, Clay Skipper, Rachel Tashjian, Tyler Tynes, Cam Wolf

s e n i o r a s s o c i at e e d i to r s

Samuel Hine, Frazier Tharpe a s s i s ta n t to t h e e d i to r i n c h i e f

Colin Groundwater

e d i to r i a l b u s i n e s s a s s i s ta n t

Danielle Cohen

d e p u t y fa s h i o n d i r e cto r

s e n i o r m a r k e t e d i to r

Rebecca O’Connor

Deirdre Findlay

r e s e a r c h d i r e cto r

chief people officer

Jordan Reed

Stan Duncan

senior research manager

c h i e f c o m m u n i c at i o n s o f f i c e r

Mick Rouse

l e g a l a f fa i r s e d i to r , content integrit y group

Karthic Bala

Audience Development

corresp ondents

a u d i e n c e d e v e lo p m e n t & a n a ly t i c s senior manager, social media

Willa Bennett

Doug Bock Clark, Sean Flynn, Alice Gregory, Chris Heath, Julia Ioffe, Drew Magary, Brett Martin, Michael Paterniti, Daniel Riley, Wells Tower

c o lu m n i s t s

s e n i o r a n a lys t

Benjamin Clymer, Joe Holder

s e n i o r m a n a g e r , n e w s l e t t e r s t r at e gy

Communications

Alex Wedel

Stephanie Talmadge a s s o c i at e m a n a g e r , s o c i a l Melissa Yang

v p , c o m m u n i c at i o n s media

Megan Gustashaw commerce writers

Yang-Yi Goh, Avidan Grossman, Gerald Ortiz, Daniel Varghese

Jackson Chiappinelli a s s o c i at e m a n a g e r , c o m m u n i c at i o n s

Dane McMillan

Video

head of programming, gq

Benjamin Key

c h i e f c o n t e n t o p e r at i o n s o f f i c e r

Christiane Mack

In the United States c h i e f c o m m u n i c at i o n s o f f i c e r

Joseph Libonati

chief business officer– u . s . a d v e rt i s i n g r e v e n u e a n d g lo b a l v i d e o s a l e s

Craig Kostelic

executive vice president–revenue

Monica Ray

Chairman of the Board Jonathan Newhouse

Condé Nast is a global media company producing premium content with a footprint of more than 1 billion consumers IS I in 32 markets. condenast.com M A G A Z Published at 1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007. Subscription inquiries: visit subscribe.gq.com, condenast .com/contact-us, or call (800) 289-2347.

For permissions and reprint requests: (212) 630-5656; fax: (212) 630-5883. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, 1 World Trade Center, New York NY 10007.

E

A

S E

R E C

L E

c o n t e n t p r oj e ct m a n a g e r , b e s t s t u f f b ox

c o m m u n i c at i o n s m a n a g e r

Sanjay Bhakta

Australia: GQ, Vogue, Vogue Living Bulgaria: Glamour China: AD, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, GQ Lab, GQ Style, Vogue, Vogue Café Beijing, Vogue Film, Vogue Me, Vogue Business in China Czech Republic and Slovakia: La Cucina Italiana, Vogue Germany: GQ Bar Berlin Greece: Vogue Hong Kong: Vogue, Vogue Man Hungary: Glamour Korea: Allure, GQ, Vogue, Wired Malaysia: Vogue Lounge Kuala Lumpur Middle East: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vogue, Vogue Café Riyadh, Wired Poland: Glamour, Vogue Portugal: GQ, Vogue, Vogue Café Porto Romania: Glamour Russia: Vogue Café Moscow Scandinavia: Vogue Serbia: La Cucina Italiana Singapore: Vogue South Africa: Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, House & Garden Thailand: GQ, Vogue The Netherlands: Glamour, Vogue, Vogue Living, Vogue Man, Vogue The Book Turkey: GQ, Vogue, Vogue Restaurant Istanbul Ukraine: Vogue, Vogue Man

H

Martin Mulkeen

c o m m u n i c at i o n s

Rachel Janc

Jamie Jouning

c h i e f p r o d u ct & t e c h n o lo gy o f f i c e r

published under license o r c o p y r i g h t c o o p e r at i o n

T

g q / fa s h i o n

a s s o c i at e d i r e cto r ,

chief client officer

Brazil: Casa Vogue, Glamour, GQ, Vogue Russia: AD, Glamour, Glamour Style Book, GQ, GQ Style, Tatler, Vogue

C

g lo b a l c o m m e r c e c at e g o ry d i r e cto r ,

Carly Holden

c h i e f d ata o f f i c e r

published under joint venture

Y

Commerce

c h i e f o f s ta f f

Samantha Morgan

Matthew Henson, Simon Rasmussen

Joel Pavelski

Danielle Carrig

Mary Marge Locker

Courtney Spitznagel

g lo b a l s e n i o r d i r e cto r o f

n a s t e n t e rta i n m e n t

Jackie Marks

contributing st ylists

fa s h i o n a s s i s ta n t

Anna Wintour president, condé Agnes Chu

chief marketing officer

Jim Moore

Haley Gilbreath

chief content officer

copy manager

c r e at i v e d i r e cto r – at – l a r g e

a s s o c i at e fa s h i o n e d i to r

Pamela Drucker Mann

chief financial officer

Contributors

Miles Pope

chief executive officer

Laura L. Vitale

Lucas Zaleski

Jon Tietz

s e n i o r b u s i n e s s d i r e cto r

c o p y d i r e cto r

research manager

Fashion

e n t e rta i n m e n t

Bill Mulvihill

France: AD, AD Collector, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Vogue Collections, Vogue Hommes Germany: AD, Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, Vogue India: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, GQ, Vogue Italy: AD, Condé Nast Traveller, Experience Is, GQ, La Cucina Italiana, L’Uomo Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired Japan: GQ, Rumor Me, Vogue, Vogue Girl, Vogue Wedding, Wired Mexico and Latin America: AD Mexico and Latin America, Condé Nast College Américas, Glamour Mexico and Latin America, GQ Mexico and Latin America, Vogue Mexico and Latin America Spain: AD, Condé Nast College Spain, Condé Nast Traveler, Glamour, GQ, Vanity Fair, Vogue Taiwan: GQ, Vogue United Kingdom: London: HQ, Condé Nast College of Fashion and Design, Vogue Business; Britain: Condé Nast Johansens, Condé Nast Traveller, Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, House & Garden, LOVE, Tatler, The World of Interiors, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired United States: Allure, Architectural Digest, Ars Technica, basically, Bon Appétit, Clever, Condé Nast Traveler, epicurious, Glamour, GQ, GQ Style, healthyish, HIVE, La Cucina Italiana, LOVE, Pitchfork, Self, Teen Vogue, them., The New Yorker, The Scene, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Wired

E

Will Welch

worldwide editions

N

Global Editorial Director

Kimberly Fasting-Berg h e a d o f s a l e s , fa s h i o n & lu x u ry David Stuckey he ad of sales, be aut y Lucy Kriz h e a d o f s a l e s , a u to & m e d i a /

P L

head of marketing

®

MEMBERSHIP INCLUDES .Exclusive, must-read industry and market news .Trend reports and the best new product sources .Effective tools and events to grow your business .Searchable AD archive spanning 100 years of magazine issues .More essential resources that only AD has access to Join now and save 20% off your annual membership ARCHDIGEST.COM / JOINNOW

PHOTO BY PAUL RAESIDE

Created by the editors of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST, AD PRO is the members-only resource for design industry professionals

sign rai s or O P E N I N G P H OTO G R A P H : P R O P ST Y L I ST, L I Z S E R W I N AT J U DY C A S E Y, I N C .

OT H E R P H OTO G R A P H S : S E E A D D I T I O N A L C R E D I T S , PA G E 87.

By SAMUEL HINE

om

ou ART-LEVEL VASES When the king of slow home goods, Tyler Hays, was renovating BDDW’s Philadelphia ceramics studio, he unearthed 20 bathtubs’ worth of raw clay, a chunk of which was used to create this forest of one-of-a-kind hand-shaped vases.

Expand your personal-style frontier from your closet to your entire crib.

$1,400–$2,200,

by BDDW.

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

M A R T I N

B R O W N

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

1 7

TELESPAR RACK Black Helmut was founded by industrial designers Chase Young and Curtis Felten, whose grandfather invented Telespar (you know, stop sign posts). Now the ubiquitous industrial product appears in the duo’s functional furnishings, like this discreet utility rack ($30).

PLAID POUF The only thing better than having a closet full of Missoni sweaters is a home full of Missoni blankets, pillows, and stools. This one’s upholstered with a watercolor jacquard that mimics the house’s iconic woven patchwork sportswear ($819).

LUXURY LEASH Not only did Hermès invent hype (see page 26 for that story), it also crafts bridle-leather accessories for man’s best friend (leash, $760, and collar, $630).

MEDUSA-CLAD TEAPOT The delicate print on this porcelain vessel is inspired by J.Lo’s iconic jungle dress, so you can

WILLY WONKA– WORTHY VASE What appears, at first glance, to be a Murano glass vase is in fact a wiggly creation from the mind of legendary Italian architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, who developed colorful, pliable resins for use in decorative objects in the mid-’90s ($450, at Coming Soon).

IG-READY TOWEL With a suite of strong patterns and clashing colors, Dusen Dusen has become the official towel of aesthetically adventurous Brooklyn bathrooms ($44, at MoMA Design Store).

VIBEY SCULPTURE Artist Casey McCafferty lets the natural materials he uses guide his carving process.

This piece—featuring charred ash, limestone, and a walnut base— is meant to evoke a sense of togetherness amidst the COVID-19 pandemic ($15,000).

PAPER LANTERN Buzzy young interior design firm Charlap Hyman & Herrero collaborated with painter Pilar Almon on a series of limited-edition rice paper lanterns, each featuring Almon’s hand-painted garden of flora and fauna ($5,800).

OTHERWORLDLY GOBLETS Experimental ceramic sculptor Francesca Dimattio’s porcelain vases and figures— like these rococo gem-encrusted goblets— are fascinating worlds unto themselves ($1,200 for pair, at Exhibition A).

ICONIC LOUNGE CHAIR This year Herman Miller reissued one of the all-time great midcentury loungers, George Nelson’s Coconut Chair, which is now available in a suite of groovy upholstery options ($3,495).

KNOTTY CUSHIONS What if your throw pillows were…sexy?

That’s the question posed by Jiu Jie’s slinky NYC-made pillows, designed to be knotted and intertwined into sensual velvet forms ($110 each).

ENLIGHTENED WATERING CAN Simple Italian food and rustic, natural agriculture are abiding passions of Brunello Cucinelli’s.

Get in on the lifestyle with his line of luxe gardening tools ($745).

THE DESIGNER DECANTER If the ultimate flex in fashion is a Dior Men saddle bag, the ultimate flex in entertaining is a Dior Maison decanter ($600).

BODEGA-RUN BATHROBE Scandinavian homewear brand Tekla was founded by an Acne Studios alum, so the bathrobes aren’t just plush—they also have a perfectly oversized, extra-long fit and a killer color palette ($205).

THE ELEGANT SMOKER’S CHOICE The chicest way to light a cigarette, cigar, or candle is with matches, and the chicest matchbook, made out of sterling silver and lizard, is by Celine by

DUMBBELL OR DOORSTOP? Do you really want a kettlebell in your apartment? Saint Laurent’s brassy dumbbells, on the other hand, deserve pride of place in your COVID-era home gym ($1,400).

ONE COOL STOOL Lagos-based industrial designer Nifemi Marcus-Bello worked with a local factory that manufactures metal casings for generators to produce this delicately proportioned stool, which is finally available Stateside thanks to essential East Williamsburg furniture boutique Lichen ($699).

“THE CHAIR? IT’S GUCCI.” After your wardrobe has been thoroughly Gucci-fied, it’s time to bring Alessandro Michele’s modern maximalism into the home, starting with this Italian-made beechwood chair ($2,600).

SUPER CHILL AND COOL ASHTRAY Known on Instagram as @superchillandcool420, ceramist Dean Roper makes custom arts-andcraftsy bongs and hand-pinched-andpainted ashtrays covered in heady logos. DM him for a commission ($250).

MUSCULAR INCENSE Like the brand itself, Chrome Hearts’ incense has a strong personality and an aura of mystery—and, of course, it’s luxe and limited.

Like Chrome’s signature jewelry, the holder is sterling ($200 for set).

FUN FUNGI Made of 100 percent cashmere in Los Angeles, this 13-inch-tall knit mushroom is The Elder Statesman sweater of stuffed toys ($635).

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

1 9

The F i x

Design

Green River Project is remodeling the city’s coolest hangouts and homes with modest materials and lots of antique hinges.

By SAMUEL HINE

2 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

I K E

E D E A N I

BEST

GE

/////////// /

STUFF

he /est /tuff /ox is a quarterly subscription box filled with our favorite things from upstart brands and labels we’ve always loved. Inside each one is more than $200-worth of menswear, style accessories, grooming products, and beyond. he best part: each Best tuff Box costs only $50.

$200+ VAL// / R NLY $50

Previous items include: Raen /unglasses /ombas /ocks /KR Water /ottle Koa /ace Wash House 99 Pomade

See what’s in the latest box at

gq com/beststuffbox

kitchen and open a cupboard.

You might notice how it swings as fluidly as a Tesla door. Fling it closed and it doesn’t slam shut—it glides back into place. This pillowy action is thanks to the ubiquitous soft-close hinge, which creates a user experience around cupboardopening that’s as smooth and e≠ortless as swiping open an iPhone.

Which is why Aaron Aujla and Benjamin Bloomstein of the New York design studio Green River Project despise the soft-close hinge.

It lacks the tactility they seek to achieve through their furniture and interior-design projects. Aujla and Bloomstein are artistic Renaissance men: They both have backgrounds in sculpture and painting, are adept at the Old World skills of woodworking and metalsmithing, and share an appreciation for earthy materials and darkly patinated wood. In 2017 they launched GRP with a deceptively simple armchair made out of a single pine board, finding a balance between form ALK INTO YOUR

The F i x

Design

W

and utility that would go on to define their practice. After being featured in presentations for Bode and The Row, GRP’s African-mahogany stools and daybeds, both upholstered in Bode fabrics, have become status symbols in New York City’s fashion and art circles. (Aujla and Bode designer Emily Bode are partners in life and frequent collaborators in work.)

Soon after, Aujla and Bloomstein started designing apartments for their friends. Instead of using o≠-theshelf fixtures and finishings, they doubled down on their radically artisanal world-building project, which they execute by hand. Thus, on cabinets in the GRP realm, you’ll encounter the humble piano hinge. With this mechanism, Bloomstein says, “there’s this tactile thing—the door drags on the way out. It’s actually not that good by a cabinetmaker’s standards, but it makes you automatically recall your experiences in older houses, rather than the present, where everything works really well.”

Over the past few years, Green River Project has designed some

Aujla (left) and Bloomstein in Green River Project’s new office, located in a Bed-Stuy warehouse.

of the most alluring spots in NYC, including the restaurant Dr. Clark and the Bode retail store, both of which have become ports of call for downtowners seeking refuge from the scourge of chic minimalism.

“I’ve never seen a vision like theirs,” says 26-year-old fashion and fineart photographer Tyler Mitchell, who hired GRP to renovate his new photo studio. “I feel like young people today have been sold the concept of the white box. But Green River is a total rejection of this Sex and the City apartment aesthetic, and it’s encouraging people to fill their home with rich material and rich history.”

New York has plenty of beautiful Japanese restaurants, but few are as unusual and captivating as Dr. Clark, which opened at the height of the city’s pandemic spring and fast became the scene-iest hang below Delancey Street. “It’s about not seeing materials that bring you back to today,” says Aujla. There isn’t a shred of white in the place: The walls are paneled with co≠ee-stained lauan, the furniture custom-built from Douglas fir and upholstered in dusty velvet.

The lighting—provided by sculptural sconces made in GRP’s upstate metal studio—is impossibly flattering.

Aujla, 35, and Bloomstein, 33, met at a gallery opening in 2010. Aujla, who hails from British Columbia, was painting and working as a studio assistant for the artist Nate Lowman.

Bloomstein, who learned woodworking as a kid at a Sufi school in an old Shaker village upstate, was a sculptor and an assistant to the artist Robert Gober. Aujla and Bloomstein agreed to share a studio in Bed-Stuy and then began working together on projects at their employers’ homes. That’s when the light bulb went on. “Artists who make their homes, they don’t know what they’re doing. They treat it like artwork,” says Aujla. Which, he and Bloomstein realized, is actually a good thing, citing Julian Schnabel’s outrageous Venetian-style Palazzo Chupi in the West Village.

Aujla and Bloomstein’s favorite spaces are fully immersive environments, like the Axel Vervoordt– designed penthouse in the Greenwich Hotel, or the painting studios of Cy Twombly and Alex Katz. “You can’t beat an interior that has been worked on for years and years, like the Alex Katz studio,” says Bloomstein.

“It’s never really done—it was never really started, and it was never really finished. It has a life, just like a person does.”

The natural surroundings of Bloomstein’s farm in upstate New

The office was designed to accommodate a collection of vintage Walter Gropius chairs.

“Our space has become a testing ground,” says Bloomstein.

York (Green River Project is named after a nearby waterway) drew the duo to organic forms and materials.

They like to hang dried tobacco and skeletal hydrangea from the ceiling and upholster stools and chairs with frizzy bundles of ra∞a. In 2018, when they opened a temporary storefront in the East Village, they covered the floor with 5,000 pounds of pebbles from the namesake river.

“In every project there’s a moment of doubt or fear where the client is like, ‘Oh boy, I feel like this is getting a little crazy,’ ” Bloomstein says, which is why his favorite customers are fellow artists. “The more creative the better,” says Aujla. “Writers, photographers, fashion designers, painters, sculptors, whatever—that’s when it’s really easy, because they get what we’re doing.” Along with Mitchell, some of New York’s most prominent creatives have become Green River patrons: GRP has designed Jeremy O. Harris’s home o∞ce and renovated parts of Frank Ocean’s Tribeca apartment.

Aujla and Bloomstein also just completed the Bode tailoring and co≠ee shop, located adjacent to the brand’s retail store on Hester Street, and a soon-to-open Chinatown bar, both of which will integrate GRP’s teak-wainscoted universe into the fabric of daily neighborhood life. A new style of American interior design has arrived: Pull up an Africanmahogany stool and stay awhile.

samuel hine is gq’s senior associate editor.

A custom raffia-upholstered chair in GRP’s finishing studio, located beneath the office.

GRP’s fixtures, from ebony cabinet pulls to perforated steel sconces, are rendered as sculptural forms.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

2 3

The F i x

BY OUR MONTHLY WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

Watches

How the Royal Oak Launched the Modern Era of Watchmaking Almost 50 years after its release, the first luxury steel sport watch is as important as ever.

HAT DO KARL LAGERFELD,

Ari Gold, and Prince Michael of Kent all have in common, besides an unwavering commitment to epically flamboyant personal style? A welldocumented love for one very particular type of wristwatch. And it’s not a Rolex, nor is it even round. It’s the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, an octagonal token of luxury that was once the most expensive stainless steel wristwatch on earth.

The Royal Oak was conceived in 1970 by a Swiss industrial designer named Gérald Genta, who claimed to have sketched the case during the course of an evening after getting a call from Audemars Piguet, the century-old luxury watchmaker that was staring obsolescence in the face due to the quartz-watch wave enveloping the luxury-timepiece industry. Genta’s legend would only grow in the ensuing years, when he would go on to make now iconic watches for the likes of Cartier, Bulgari, and Patek Philippe. But the Royal Oak remains his most radical masterpiece.

When the Royal Oak was released, in 1972, the most desirable Swiss watches

W

2 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

were rather antique: small, dressy, and made of precious metals. The steel R.O., on the other hand, was futuristic, with architectural proportions, razor-sharp finishing, an incredibly slim movement, and a bracelet that looked downright industrial compared with those of popular watches. Most shocking was the price, which was considered extortionate: some $3,600, or about 10 times what a Rolex Submariner then cost. Rather than try to be an affordable alternative to cheap quartz watches, the R.O. was the first steel sports watch priced like a luxury timepiece.

And it worked. The initial order of 1,000 Royal Oaks sold out, and since then it’s been in constant production—and a generation of collectors have been raised on steel sport watches. Audemars Piguet has flourished, too, growing into one of the most valuable watch brands in the world.

Along the way, the Royal Oak family tree has sprouted several branches. The white-gold 15202BC (center) marries the 39-mm proportions of the first R.O. with modern production and a sublime salmon dial. There are 41-mm steel R.O.s with a full suite of complications to choose from:

chronographs, tourbillons, and perpetual calendars. And then there are 38-mm chronos in steel and every shade of gold— among the most coveted recent releases is a limited-edition white-gold version with a perfect baby blue dial (right). Rather than distract from the essential appeal of the pure design, the many iterations speak to the shocking adaptability of the unique octagonal bezel.

But as with so many pieces of design, there’s nothing more appealing than the archetype. This two-tone example (left, from 1977)—the same model worn by Prince Michael—has its fair share of dings and scratches, but ask any serious R.O.-head and they’d say it’s among the most beautiful models ever made. That said, the R.O. isn’t for everyone. Casual customers might not want eight white-gold screws on their extremely expensive bezel.

But for those who know, the historical oddity that is the Royal Oak—dreamed up by a nomadic designer-for-hire at an inflection point for a legacy house—will never go out of style. It helped bring the watch world into the modern era, after all.

And we’re damn thankful it did.

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

E V A N

A N G E L A S T R O

is a synonym for luxury, but the 184-year-old French house is very particular about words. In fact, when I ask the label’s men’s artistic director, the warm and sophisticated Véronique Nichanian, what she thinks about the word luxury, she practically rolls her eyes. “For me, that does not mean anything—luxury,” says Nichanian, who has helmed the house’s menswear maison for nearly 32 years.

She describes her pieces as “vêtementsobjets”—something akin to clothes as objects—and adds, “I’m not doing fashion.”

I

2 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

create—with its Birkin bags, crocodileskin peacoats, and highly sought-after scarves—are not merely products. And you don’t really buy these objects; you collect them. If shopping can seem like an act of mindless consumerism, Hermès makes the process of welcoming new things into your life a pursuit of connoisseurship.

As anyone who has held an Hermès object in their hand knows, it’s not merely price that sets Hermès apart, but something more intangible. “For the past five years, everybody talks about luxury in terms of price,” Nichanian says. “For me,

working with your hand, it’s attention, it’s beautiful material. It takes time; you can repair it. Maybe at the end it’s costly, but it’s not the point.”

The Hermès ethos resonates far beyond the confines of the runway. As the world financial markets went into free fall last year, people often joked that an Hermès bag was a wiser investment than stocks and bonds. Enough consumers seemed to believe the notion that, soon after lockdown lifted in China in April of last year, Hermès reportedly pulled in a record $2.7 million in a single day at one of its flagships. As many

P H O T O G R A P H S

B Y

M A R T I N

B R O W N

FOR SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS, SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 87

The wild world of Hermès: hip-hop superstars, British royalty, and backgammon.

other European houses laid off staff, the label retained all its employees because, in a rare show of corporate noblesse oblige, the company’s board members opted to forgo bonuses. In fact, Hermès ended the fashion industry’s worst year in history—the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company projected an overall 93 percent earnings decline from 2019—with a profit.

What separates Hermès from its peers is its thoughtfulness—Nichanian, for example, is as existential as a French philosopher and as inquisitive as a Silicon Valley iconoclast. Indeed, aspects of Hermès warrant comparison to technology giants known for disruptive thinking, like Google or Apple—its interrogation of consumer culture, its obsessiveness over progress and perfection, and a looming, cult-like reputation. But unlike those companies, Hermès has become enormously popular for its archive while simultaneously being adored for what it’s creating in the moment.

It seems that by remaining rooted in tradition, Hermès has fashioned itself as the most modern luxury brand in the world. making what the poet Frederick Seidel once described as “flawless leather luxury made for horses out of cows.” It still produces equestrian goods, but the universe (in Hermès parlance) contains 15 other métiers that create, in addition to Nichanian’s sublime menswear, porcelain, watches, perfumes, and textiles, just to name a few. There’s also Hermès Horizons (a.k.a. Sur-Mesure), which tends to such bespoke client whims as private-jet interiors and a lambskin carrying case for a single apple.

Arguably, the vogue for expanding a fashion brand into what is often called a lifestyle brand began with Hermès. Those Supreme ashtrays and Saint Laurent marble arcade machines have a clear predecessor. The difference is that Hermès is a workshop of artisans, from Nichanian and Nadège Vanhée-Cybulski, the current director of women’s ready-to-wear, to its coterie of scarf designers and its renowned window dresser, the late Leïla Menchari.

“They’re very careful about who they work with and what they do,” says Brian Procell, HERMÈS BEGAN IN 1837,

2 8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

who, with his partner, Jess Gonsalves, consults for luxury brands and runs Procell, the influential New York City vintage store and archive. “It’s very calculated and well thought-out.” The house appointed womenswear designers like Martin Margiela and Jean Paul Gaultier long before it was common practice to install maverick creative heads at behemoth brands. Its output over the past 30 years includes everything from combs and place mats to some of the most exquisite work by the 20th century’s most significant fashion designers. “You don’t feel bad spending money for that caliber of product,” Procell says. “It always feels like an investment.”

Over the past five years, multiple vintage and archival fashion dealers told me that they have seen the market for almost anything that bears the name Hermès explode. “The one undeniable thing about Hermès is that it always conveyed aspirational fantasy luxury,” Gonsalves says. “That feeling has always been there for us, but maybe now some of the younger people can recognize that too.”

Procell traces the current wave of Hermès fanaticism in menswear to the positioning of the Birkin as hip-hop’s must-have bag, as when Drake revealed in 2017 that he was assembling a collection of

them for his future wife. Many of his peers seemed happy simply to collect them for their romantic partners (Offset, Quavo) or themselves (Young Thug). Meanwhile, A$AP Rocky appeared onstage that same year draped in an Hermès blanket.

The Hermès hype goes much deeper than bags and blankets, though. The recent fervor for Margiela has turned men into collectors of the designer’s cerebral womenswear for the house.

Then there’s Kermit Oliver, the famous painter–cum–letter carrier who is one of the only Americans to create the art for Hermès scarves.

Teo Griscom, owner of Santa Fe Vintage, has seen the Hermès vintage market soar over the past five years. The prices for Oliver’s exuberant Southwesternthemed designs, with their Native American motifs and giant turkeys, “have skyrocketed,” she says, to upwards of $5,000

for a single 35-by-35-inch square of silk.

“When you collect something that iconic,” Griscom says, “you want that story.”

The way Hermès devotees see it, the house converts clients into collectors by encouraging those who seek its most exclusive products to accumulate a portfolio of objects from other métiers first, not unlike the way Rolex dealers develop collectors of the brand’s watches. Bryan Yambao, who initially came to fame as the blogger Bryanboy and now consults for a number of luxury brands, has pillows, blankets, ponchos, and handbags (including five Birkins) and is also an enthusiast of the house’s porcelain. He is not alone: Young men are reportedly Hermès’s fastestgrowing customer demographic for that métier. “They’re unwavering,” Yambao says of the brand’s range. “They don’t compromise.” Though the Hermès ethos can occasionally clash with the millennial lifestyle: Yambao recently put his teacup in the microwave to reheat his coffee and it nearly exploded. “There’s real gold in there!” he said. “Hermès doesn’t fuck around!”

M A N Y F A S H I O N B R A N D S , given such a lauded

The Hermès hype, from Margiela-designed cardigans to decadent silk scarves, is many decades old.

back catalog, would be eager to plunder it for future collections. But Hermès rarely reintroduces its objects. That has made it both the ultimate archival brand and the house that resists looking back, in constant pursuit of innovation. “I don’t need to look at the archives,” Nichanian says.

She made the archive.

The distinct, frenzied desire cultivated by Hermès has also set the tone for the rest of the fashion world. Yambao believes the house invented the culture of hype that now dominates consumerism—“more than Supreme, more than [Dior designer] Kim Jones,” he says. “They’re great at creating these really limited things in a small way to create demand, and they sell it to the right people,” he says, adding that you usually need a relationship with the staff to make a significant purchase. “We live in a world where, when you cannot get something, the more you want it,” he says. “It’s this built-up desire—and they’re masters at it.

They pioneered it.” But rather than feeding the mindless cycle of hype, there remains a sense that you have to access Hermès, and its treasures cannot be unlocked with cash alone. While nearly every brand has introduced products for almost every level of consumer, from sweatshirts to wallets to logo-emblazoned outerwear, Hermès still stands, singularly, for aspiration.

“My work is doing beautiful clothes, because we are the most beautiful house in the world,” says Nichanian, with a somewhat beatific smile on her face.

“And in the end, if it’s luxury, I don’t know.

And I don’t care.”

Rachel Tashjian is a GQ staff writer.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

2 9

The F i x

Music

hours of March 3, 2020, found Tyler Mahan Coe huddled in the bathtub of his apartment in East Nashville. With him was his wife, Aileen, and a one-eyed French bulldog named Bill. Outside stalked death. A violent tornado was bashing its way through the city: across the Cumberland River, past the clubs and bars of Five Points they knew like the back of their hand, striding ever closer, like a thing with legs. Bill, whether out of anxiety or indi≠erence, fell fast asleep. Finally, there was an overwhelming roar, like a jet engine, and it had passed, missing them by blocks.

When the Coes emerged the next morning, they learned that the roof over the bedroom of Tyler’s old apartment, the place they had slept until just a few months earlier, had been ripped o≠ by the storm. The pinball bar where they had spent countless evenings was obliterated. Within a week, the Nashville tornado was forgotten as COVID-19 swept across the nation, but it lingered for Tyler Mahan Coe, and not just because of the close physical reminders of the devastation. For him, the near miss was a sign that it was time to get serious about the work in front of him—specifically, producing season two of Cocaine & Rhinestones, his acclaimed podcast about the history of 20th-century country music.

“It was like, if there’s a reason I’m alive, this is it,” he says. “I need to get this work done.”

Coe had made season one of Cocaine & Rhinestones entirely by himself, three years earlier. It was a surprise hit, despite him coming to the project with zero experience in podcasts, history, or long-form storytelling. What he had was an abundance of intelligence, confidence, and charisma, an intuitive knack for self-branding, and a deeply steeped knowledge of his subject matter—all of which are at least in part the complicated inheritance from a profoundly complicated man: David Allan Coe, country star, outlaw icon, and Tyler’s estranged but inescapable father.

Cocaine & Rhinestones debuted in October 2017 and was everything you love about podcasts, especially in those days before consolidation and professionalism began to set in. It was brash, idiosyncratic, THE EARLY MORNING

3 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

MEET THE KEEPER OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S

TAL TALES AND SECRET

HISTORIES

Tyler Mahan Coe created a sensation with his podcast Cocaine & Rhinestones.

Now the son of Nashville outlaw David Allan Coe returns with a story that goes even deeper. B y B R E T T M A R T I N P H O T O G R A P H S

and a little scru≠y around the edges.

If it felt at times that Coe could have benefited from an editor, that feeling was outweighed by the thrill of discovering something that could not have been done by anybody else in quite the same way. The style was in the mold of Karina Longworth’s podcast about Hollywood, You Must Remember This: deep-dive narrative history delivered by a single storyteller. In a medium that has shown a genetic weakness for cherry-picking information to support its theses, Coe was a fact-checker’s dream; he included an extensive set of annotative “liner notes” at the end of each episode. By early this year, the show had racked up some 3 million listens and in the neighborhood of 150,000 subscribers, all without the help of a supporting network.

“The numbers of people Tyler has reached can’t be argued,” says Peter Cooper, the longtime music writer for The Tennessean and now writer, editor, and producer at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

“He’s finding an audience that never cared about this kind of music, and he’s doing it by telling stories about artists who were dead before they were even alive.”

When Coe’s sisters first heard Cocaine & Rhinestones, they each said the same thing: “Why are you talking that way?” He got better. One of the pleasures of the show was listening to Coe figure out how to make it as he went along, hitting his stride around episode six, about the ethereal and tragic Louvin Brothers, and rolling forward with installments on such topics as the novelty megahit “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” the friendship of Buck Owens and Don Rich, and the saga of Bobbie Gentry and her mysterious masterpiece, “Ode to Billie Joe.” As these may suggest, there was nothing winking or ironic about the country music that was Coe’s subject. This was not the counterculture-sanctioned country of Willie Nelson or Johnny Cash. It was not “Americana.” It was country. For serious fans, the show provided controversial takes on legendary stories and textual rabbit holes deep and winding enough to get lost in for days. For dilettantes, it suggested a vast shelf of American culture that had been sitting there, just outside

B Y

W H I T T E N

S A B B A T I N I

The F i x

Music

their peripheral vision, all their lives.

The New Yorker declared Cocaine & Rhinestones “addictive” and “sparkling.” The Country Music Hall of Fame called to o≠er use of its library and put Coe’s face on a billboard.

Speaking at the Hall, Wynonna Judd gave her endorsement. “I literally sat there and wept,” she told an audience about listening to the episode about her dysfunctional family.

“Because I heard things about myself that I’d forgotten.”

Coe likes to say that there are more bad books about Bob Dylan than there are good ones about the entirety of country music. This despite the indisputable fact that it is as uniquely American a form as jazz, or blues, or rock and roll—not just because it has its roots in the deepest, most turbulent humus of this nation’s history but because, like all the best art America produces, it sits in the crucible of creativity and capitalism, beholden equally to the spark of genius and the grinding gears of the culture-manufacturing machine.

(Not unlike podcasting.)

Cocaine & Rhinestones anticipated a wave of recent interest in country that has ranged high and low across the cultural spectrum, from Ken Burns’s 16-hour PBS documentary and Mike Judge’s animated series “Tales From the Tour Bus” to Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”—a song that Cocaine & Rhinestones listeners would recognize as only the latest feint in a pas de deux between country and mainstream that has spanned the life of the genre.

Soon after the conclusion of season one, Coe addressed the matter of a follow-up, which, he would later reveal, would be devoted to the life and music of George Jones, who was, for several generations, the very embodiment of country music. As to when it might appear, Coe demurred. “I’ve never made the first season of a podcast before, which took me seven months,” he pointed out. “And I’ve never made the second season of a podcast before, which I don’t expect to take as long.”

That was three years ago.

last spring and summer, through the surreal months of COVID lockdown, I had regular Mondaynight phone conversations with Tyler Mahan Coe. Since the onset FOR MUCH OF

3 2

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

↑ Tyler Mahan Coe at the grave of George Jones, the subject of the new season of Coe’s acclaimed podcast.

of the pandemic, he had adopted a nocturnal lifestyle, working through the night and then sleeping all day.

Somebody had stolen his neighbor’s car from their shared driveway, which heightened his sense of evening paranoia. So we would sit in our respective quarantines, me opening a beer in New Orleans while he poured co≠ee in Nashville.

Coe had not been idle since the conclusion of Cocaine & Rhinestones’ first season. There was, for one thing, his other podcast, Your Favorite Band Sucks, on which he and a friend, Mark Mosley, crack themselves up by elaborately shitting on popular music of all stripes. He was, to say the least, active on Twitter, an opinionated, often enlightening, but also increasingly pugnacious presence. And he’d become something of a celebrity in cool country music circles, showing up at the debut of the Hall of Fame’s exhibit about the outlaw country movement of the 1970s, DJ’ing sets at Billy Reid’s annual Shindig,

in Florence, Alabama, and on the Outlaw Country Cruise.

None of that accounted for the delay of season two, though. Nor, he told me, was he su≠ering from the anxiety of producing a follow-up to what had been a surprise hit. He was working on the George Jones story, he said. Constantly, in fact. It had just, um, grown.

There would have to be, for instance, episodes tracing the ways in which Jones’s epic career encompassed a century’s worth of country history: the rise and fall of regional record labels and of the Nashville Sound—that attempt to sell country as the adult, pop answer to rock and roll by way of lush orchestration— and its descendant “countrypolitan”; the so-called Nashville A-Team, the group of session players that was the bedrock of Nashville recording; and of course the tumult of Jones’s life, from his grief-and-abuse-soaked childhood in the backwoods of East Texas through his disastrous

TRY IT

Want to look and smell your very best? Be the first to try new grooming products for your hair, skin, and beard by signing up for GQ’s new Try It Program. We’ll send you samples that match up with your own grooming routine.

Just fill out a grooming profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit *Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.

The F i x

Music

marriage to Tammy Wynette and beyond. His slide into drug and alcohol addiction so deep that it stands out even in the history of country music, which is not notably a chronicle of teetotalism. (There was very little actual cocaine in Cocaine & Rhinestones’ first season, but there is sure to be plenty in season two.)

All that was to be expected. But, Coe said, the story would also need to delve into the history of bullfighting.

And of Catherine de’ Medici. Plus the invention of pinball and the piano and artificial ice. And, well, there would have to be a fair amount about

The final product, he said, would be about Jones “the way Moby-Dick is about a whale.”

Inevitably, inexorably, our conversations would drift toward David Allan Coe. The elder Coe, DAC, is a legendary figure whose inspired moments—from writing such classics as “Take This Job and Shove It” and “Would You Lay With Me (in a Field of Stone)” to his iconic performance of “You Never Even Called Me by My Name”—have more recently been overshadowed by a calamitous public persona, especially around issues of race. Tyler dropped out of high

“It hit me with the most nauseating feeling of fear in my life,” Coe says of first imagining the podcast. “I do believe I was made to do this.” the origin of the “brass ring,” moving from medieval jousting to the popularization of the carousel.

“There are going to be people who are like, ‘Why can’t you just talk about country music, man?’ But I am. I fucking am. I do not believe it is possible to fully appreciate or understand how good a country music singer George Jones is unless you understand Spanish bullfighting. I just don’t.”

3 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

school at 14 to join David Allan Coe on tour, becoming his band leader. He held that position until 2013, when DAC summarily dismissed the band and formed a new one. Father and son have not spoken since.

Tyler talked about his father (who declined to be interviewed for this story) with the same balance of empathy and unsparing analysis that he brings to the subjects of Cocaine & Rhinestones. He described him as needy, easily wounded, selfsabotaging, and fueled by resentment, a compulsive fabulist who, above all, feared embarrassment and abandonment. Without apologizing, Tyler also explained to me some of what had made his father this way, foremost a brutal childhood, spent almost entirely in increasingly severe levels of the penal system. To be angry with him, he said, “almost feels like being mad at a dog. Of course he shit on your floor.”

People expected him to be broken up over the rift, Tyler said. “But it wasn’t a relationship that was ever there. It hurt, but it’s not a new hurt.

I could probably count on one hand the number of times that my father has said useful life things to me.”

I asked what things he was thinking of. There had been a time, he said, when he was especially struggling.

He had lost a friend tragically and su≠ered an equally intense heartbreak. “I was just really hurting,” he said, so much so that he asked his father for advice.

“And what he said… He didn’t say it in a cold way. I could see how it would

come across that way. But what he said was this: ‘The only thing I can tell you is that no one else can feel your pain.’ ” David. Tyler. George. A Father, a Son, and an Unholy Ghost. On the phone, those summer nights, the edges of their stories would start to blur into one tangled knot of family and trauma, abandonment and exile, addiction, compulsion, art, self-invention, reinvention, genius, and trouble.

Cocaine & Rhinestones is about the perils of fame. It is about the ways in which the women in and around country music have been denied agency over their careers and lives, about what happens when the meaning of a work of art is taken out of its creator’s hands. Toxic familial bonds weave through the podcast like vines. Tyler Coe’s own family appears only in passing. Yet the more he and I talked, the more it seemed clear that Cocaine & Rhinestones was, in addition to everything else, a shadow telling of his own strange American story.

that story belongs to a 22-year-old girl and an orange Camaro. This is 1983. Jody Lynn Benham has that gleaming sports car, the color of a Popsicle, a cat named John Wayne that she walks on a leash, and a burning desire to get the hell out of Michigan. The notion occurs to her that she will go to Nashville and she will marry either Merle Haggard or David Allan Coe, who is already as famous for being a supposed polygamist and member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang as he is as an artist.

“It was really just something to say,” as she tells it now. “Just being young and silly.”

So Jody hits the road, eventually making it to the Music City, where she takes a job cleaning rooms at, where else, the hotel at Opryland USA. It isn’t long before a fellow housekeeper invites her to meet David Allan Coe at a recording studio. She waits in the lobby until he appears: a big, tall, magnetic figure coming down the stairs, flanked by the producer Billy Sherrill and the singer Charlie Rich.

A member of Coe’s entourage introduces them: “This is Jody. She wanted to meet you.” Coe looks at Jody. He takes her hand and says, “Let’s go.”

“I don’t hold hands in public,” says Jody.

“You do now,” says Coe. Before the night’s over, Coe tells Jody he’s about to go on the road and wants her to come with him.

“Couldn’t we just, um, date?” she asks him. That’s not how he does things, says Coe: “You’re either with me or you’re not.” (continued on page 82) THE BEGINNING OF

HEALTH

Smarten Up To Shrink Your Gut

Protein Shake Can Help You Lose Weight

By Chris Hansen

Being a trainer, bodybuilder, and nutrition expert means that companies frequently send me their products and ask for my stamp of approval.

Most of the time I dive into research, test the product out, and send the company honest feedback.

Sometimes, however, I refuse to give the product a try, because frankly, the ingredients inside aren’t real food. And I’d rather drink diesel fuel than torture my body with a chemical concoction.

Like my father always said, “What you put inside your body always shows up on the outside.”

One protein shake that I received, that will remain nameless, was touted as ‘the next big shake’ but really had a list of gut destroying ingredients. Everywhere I read I saw harmful artificial ingredients, added sugars, synthetic dyes, preservatives and cheap proteins; the kind of proteins that keep you fat no matter how hard you hit the gym, sap your energy and do nothing for your muscles.

Disappointed after reviewing this “new” shake, I hit the gym and bumped into my favorite bodybuilding coach. This guy is pushing 50, has the energy of a college kid, and is ripped. So are his clients.

While I firmly believe that the gym is a notalk focus zone, I had to ask, “Hey Zee, what protein shake are you recommending to your clients these days?”

Zee looked at me, and shook his head. “Protein shakes are old news and loaded with junk.

I don’t recommend protein shakes, I tell my clients to drink INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake because it’s the only all natural meal replacement that works and has a taste so good that it’s addicting.”

Being skeptical of what Zee told me, I decided to investigate this superfood shake called INVIGOR8.

Turns out INVIGOR8 Superfood Shake has

a near 5-star rating on Amazon. The creators are actual scientists and personal trainers who set out to create a complete meal replacement shake chocked full of superfoods that—get this— actually accelerate how quickly and easily you lose belly fat and builds even more lean, calorie burning muscle.

We all know that the more muscle you build, the more calories you burn. The more fat you melt away the more definition you get in your arms, pecs and abs.

The makers of INVIGOR8 were determined to make the first complete, natural, non-GMO superfood shake that helps you lose fat and build lean muscle. The result is a shake that contains 100% grass-fed whey that has a superior nutrient profile to the grain-fed whey found in most shakes, metabolism boosting raw coconut oil, hormone free colostrum to promote a healthy immune system, Omega 3, 6, 9-rich chia and flaxseeds, superfood greens like kale, spinach, broccoli, alfalfa, and chlorella, and clinically tested cognitive enhancers for improved mood and brain function. The company even went a step further by including a balance of pre and probiotics for regularity in optimal digestive health, and digestive enzymes so your body absorbs the high-caliber nutrition you get from INVIGOR8.

While there are over 2200 testimonials on Amazon about how INVIGOR8 “gave me more energy and stamina” and “melts away abdominal fat like butter on a hot sidewalk”, what really impressed me was how many customers raved about the taste. So I had to give it a try.

When it arrived I gave it the sniff test. Unlike most meal replacement shakes it smelled like whole food, not a chemical factory. So far so good. Still INVIGOR8 had to pass the most important test, the taste test.

And INVIGOR8 was good. Better than good. I could see what Zee meant when he said his clients found the taste addicting.

I also wanted to see if Invigor8 would help me burn that body fat I’d tried to shave off for years to achieve total definition.

Just a few weeks later I’m pleased to say, shaving that last abdominal fat from my midsection wasn’t just easy. It was delicious.

Considering all the shakes I’ve tried I can honestly say that the results I’ve experienced from INVIGOR8 are nothing short of astonishing.

A company spokesperson confirmed an exclusive offer for GQ readers: if you order INVIGOR8 this month, you’ll receive $10 off your first order by using promo code “GQ10” at checkout.

If you’re in a rush to burn fat, restore lean muscle and boost your stamina and energy you can order INVIGOR8 today at drinkInvigor8.com or by calling 1-800-958-3392.

3 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

He made every mistake a child star can make, including the ones that nearly destroyed him.

Now—fortified by God, marriage,

and a new album, Justice— Justin Bieber is putting his life back together, one positive, deliberate step at a time.

By Zach Baron Photographs by Ryan McGinley Styled by Karla Welch

have just met when I ask him something and he talks and talks—for 10 illuminating and uninterrupted minutes he talks. He talks about God and faith and castles in Ireland, about shame and drugs and marriage. He talks about what it is to feel empty inside, and what it is to feel full. At one point he says, “I’m going to wrap it up here,” but he doesn’t, he just keeps going, and that is what it is like to talk to Justin Bieber now. Like you’re in the confessional booth with him. Like whatever rules about “privacy” or the thick opaque wall of massive celebrity that people like Bieber are supposed to follow don’t apply.

He has lived a well-documented life—maybe among the more well-documented lives in the history of this decaying planet. But to my knowledge, there is not one example of him speaking this way—in a moving but unprompted, unselfconscious torrent of words—in public prior to this moment. I will admit to being disoriented. If I’m being honest, I had been expecting someone else entirely—someone more monosyllabic; someone more distracted, more unhappy; someone more like the guy I’m pretty sure Justin Bieber was not all that long ago—and now I am so thrown that the best I can do is stammer out some tortured version of… How did you become this person? By which I mean: seemingly guileless. Bursting with the desire to connect, to tell his own story, in case it might be of use to anyone else.

It’s a question that’s not even a question, really. But what Bieber gently says in response is: “That’s okay.”

He knows approximately what I’m asking—how he got from wherever he was to here, to becoming the man in front of me, clear-eyed on a computer screen from an undisclosed location in Los Angeles. His hair, under a Vetements hat, is long in the back; he is in no particular hurry. He is married to a woman—Hailey Baldwin Bieber—who cares for him like no one has ever cared for him, he says. He is happy. He is currently renovating the house in which he will live happily with his wife. He’s spent the past several months piecing together a new record, Justice, which is dense with love songs and ’80s-style anthems—interspersed with some well-intentioned, if not totally well-advised, interludes featuring the voice of Martin Luther King Jr.—that are bluntly honest about his bad past and equally optimistic about his future. (“Everybody saw me sick, and it felt like no one gave a shit,” he sings on the cathartic last song on the record, “Lonely.”) He is, if anything, the empathetic professional in this interaction too as he goes about trying to help me understand how he’s arrived at where he’s arrived.

“I’ll answer as best I can,” he says, nodding. As for who he was in the not-so-distant past: “Hurt people hurt people—you know? And there’s a quote; I’m trying to remember it. I don’t know if it’s biblical, if it’s in the Bible. But I do remember this quote: The comforted become the comforters. I don’t know if you’ve heard that before. But I really do feel comforted. I have a wife who I adore, who I feel comforted by. I feel safe. I feel like my relationship with God is wonderful. And I have this outpouring of love that I want to be able to share with people, you know?”

BIEBER AND I

←← OPENING PAGES

shirt $890 Celine Homme by Hedi Slimane tank top $42 for pack of three Calvin Klein Underwear jeans $198 Levi’s Authorized Vintage socks $129 Paul Stuart hat $21 x Karla bracelet (chain) $8,500 Tiffany & Co. bracelet (cuff) $45,500 Cartier ring (throughout), his own → OPPOSITE PAGE

jeans $198 Levi’s Authorized Vintage his own underwear Calvin Klein Underwear sneakers $120 Nike x Sacai socks $14 American Trench

3 8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

He is aware that people have perceived him at times as anything but full of love. But today, he says, he thinks of himself as a comforter, in part because he knows what it is to have been the person who needed comfort so badly. He asks himself now: How can I be of service?

The new music, the inspirational messages he posts on Instagram, the deliberately calm manner in which he goes about his days—all of it is addressed in some ways to his younger self, to the kid who was drowning and felt like he’d never be saved. Justin Bieber wants to save that kid now. He wants to talk to him.

He wants to tell him not all is lost.

“I don’t want to let my shame of my past dictate what I’m able to do now for people,” Bieber says. “A lot of people let their past weigh them down, and they never do what they want to do because they think that they’re not good enough. But I’m just like: ‘I did a bunch of stupid shit. That’s okay. I’m still available. I’m still available to help. And I’m still worthy of helping.’ ” to him during a pandemic, one must first get through his private medical team. A nurse is on call at the house and at the studio. Collaborators, friends, managers, producers, songwriters, engineers, all the disparate people one needs to gather together to again commence the work of being Justin Bieber—all are administered one rapid test and one PCR. “There’s so many di≠erent tests,” Bieber says. “They get kinda weird, but it’s important for us, since we’re operating on such a big level, with so many people, that we keep everyone safe.” Bieber and Hailey spent the first three or four months of the pandemic in Canada, where he was born, and then they came back to Los Angeles and they’ve been here ever since. He is 27, and this interlude at home represents probably the longest time he’s spent in one place since his childhood. “I’ve been moving since I was like 15 or 16,” he says.

He tells a story about a trip he took back to Toronto right after he signed his first recording contract, when he was still a boy TO GAIN ACCESS

t-shirt $49 x Karla necklace (left) $2,700 Tiffany & Co. necklace (right) $4,150 bracelet $46,200 Cartier

and already exhausted by what success was going to ask of him: “I was working so much as this young kid that I got really sad, and I missed my friends and I missed normalcy.

And so me and my friend hid my passport.

The record label is freaking out, saying, ‘You have to do the Today show next week and you can’t find your passport.’ It takes a certain amount of days to get a new passport. But I was just going to do anything to be able to just be normal at that time.” So he hid the passport, but then he ended up confessing that he hid the passport, and everyone was concerned, and they asked him if he was

4 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

okay, but then he went straight back into the machine. He did the Today show like he was supposed to. “I had this dream to become the biggest superstar in the world,” Bieber says now. He was just beginning to find out what accomplishing that dream might mean or what it might cost.

An aside here, a word, whatever. You do not need to feel sympathy for people like Justin Bieber: people who ask for attention, money, fame, as many people do, and actually receive all three, as most people don’t. Over the course of our conversations, I would occasionally think about a moment

in the 2011 documentary Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Bieber is young then, 15 or so, and learning what it is to become a person who can do literally anything—good, bad, or simply bizarre—and still count on people to cheer. At one point, the camera finds Bieber on a basketball court, putting up jump shots, and he misses one, and when he misses it, he turns to the camera and says, “You can edit that, right?” It is a portrait of a person who is beginning to believe, rightly or wrongly, that reality itself can be bent to his preferences.

And we as a society are all too familiar with what happens next to kids like Justin

Bieber. We are particularly familiar with what happened to Bieber himself—the litany of distasteful and sometimes dangerous stu≠ he did that he won’t defend, the equally unkind things people said about him as he did that stu≠, etc. But I will share a personal view: Being famous breaks something in your brain. Especially when your fame comes as a result of your talent, from the thing you’ve loved and nurtured and worked at since you were young. Bieber earned his success while he was still a child; then his gift turned into a snake and bit him. How do you become a good or well-adjusted or

normal person when you don’t have access to a single normal thing in your entire life?

You can’t. You don’t.

And while maybe you don’t care if Justin Bieber ever does make his way back to a kind of normalcy, perhaps you can admit there is at least something admirable, in the abstract, about someone finding a way to survive, and even to become kind, when all they’ve been taught since a young age, by millions of adoring people, is that there is no need for them to be kind at all. And if that doesn’t move you, then maybe you can at least find sociological interest in the process that Bieber is about to recount here, which is how you turn into someone you don’t want to be, and what you do about it once you decide you want to be someone else. Someone better, even.

Sorry about the aside. Anyway…

If you ask Bieber what he would’ve been doing five years ago, should the world have shut down and locked him in his home, he will say that five years ago things were pretty dark in general. “I was surrounded by a lot of people, and we were all kind of just escaping our real life,” Bieber says. “I think we just weren’t living in reality.” Which is to say: “I think it would have probably resulted in just a lot of doing drugs and being posted up, to be honest.”

His friend Chance the Rapper remembers those days well. “We were both young,” Chance says, “with a lot of influence and a lot more money than somebody our age should probably have. And we were both living in L.A. and just kind of… I don’t even know how to describe it without making it sound bad.”

Bieber was 21, 22 years old at the time, at a low point in what was supposed to be a charmed life; at night, he says, his security guards began to slip into his room and check his pulse to make sure he was still alive. “There was a sense of still yearning for more,” he says now. “It was like I had all this success and it was still like: I’m still sad, and I’m still in pain. And I still have these unresolved issues. And I thought all the success was going to make everything good. And so for me, the drugs were a numbing agent to just continue to get through.”

Today, Bieber can describe rock bottom with the clarity of someone who had to retrace every single step to hoist himself back out of it. “I just lost control of my vision for my career,” he says. “There’s all these opinions. And in this industry, you’ve got people that unfortunately prey on people’s insecurities and use that to their benefit. And so when that happens, obviously that makes you angry. And then you’re this young angry person who had these big dreams, and then the world just jades you and makes you into this person that you don’t want to be. And then you wake up one day and your relationships are fucked up and you’re unhappy and you

“You wake up one day and…you’re unhappy and you have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside?” have all this success in the world, but you’re just like: Well, what is this worth if I’m still feeling empty inside? ” Josh Gudwin, Bieber’s engineer and sometime producer, says: “When you’re younger in your career, you don’t understand how things work. The people around you understand how things work, so they’re the ones putting things together.” And though Bieber is now sure enough about what he wants that he finished most of the vocals for Justice in less than 45 minutes per song, Gudwin says, things were di≠erent when he was younger.

Ryan Good, one of Bieber’s oldest friends, remembers Bieber struggling. “He was disappointed with himself,” Good says. “Most people would numb themselves to that. And I think he probably went through that stage, like, ‘I’m so disappointed in myself, I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I don’t want to feel disappointed in myself anymore.’ And at a certain point, I think he got to the point where he was like, ‘No, I want to live my life and not be numb. And so I’m going to work on it. I’m going to be who I know I am.’ ” What had all of it been for? Singing, Bieber says, “was supposed to bring such joy. Like, this is what I feel called to do. And my purpose in my life. I know that when I open my mouth, people love to hear me sing.

I literally started singing on the streets and crowds would form around me to where I’m like, Okay, this could be something. There’s this reciprocation of: I’m using my gifts to serve people. That’s what I loved so much.

And I just think more and more as you’re a kid and you don’t have an identity yet, and you’re trying to figure out who you are, and to have everyone saying how good you are, how incredible you are? You just start to believe that stu≠. And ego sets in. And then that’s where insecurities come in. And

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 1

then you start treating people a certain way and feeling superior and above people. And then there’s this whole dynamic shift. I just woke up one day and I’m just like, Who am I? I didn’t know. And that was scary to me.”

This was around 2017, the year he canceled the final dates of a world tour from which he stood to make, in his words, a “huge amount of money—money that people would never turn down.” But he was also positive he was miserable, that he had found too many ways to push his friends and family away, that he was gradually building himself a cage out of his own bad behavior that might eventually imprison him forever. He asked himself: “Am I ever going to be able to live a normal life?

Am I going to be too self-centered and egodriven that I just, you know, make all this money and do all these things, but then I’m left at the end of my life alone? Who wants to live that way?”

Toward the end of that tour, before he called o≠ the rest of it, he found himself in an actual castle in Ireland: “This old castle.

Just like the most beautiful estate. With the trimmed hedges that are completely immaculate.” He gestures, shapes the hedges with his hands, like he can still see them, perfectly vividly, today. “It’s over this beautiful body of water. And I was there. And I was alone. And I was sad inside.” He couldn’t enjoy the opulence or the beauty of it. In fact, he couldn’t feel anything at all.

So began a process in which Justin Bieber tried to find out what was wrong with him and how to fix it. “He didn’t try to medicate himself,” Good says. “He didn’t try to fast-forward through that season of life.

He just went through it. And he was really spending a lot of time asking, ‘How do I get better?’ ” Gudwin says, “Justin has done more work on himself than most people

you’ve ever known. Most people who are like, ‘I’m working on myself ’? They’re not really working on themselves. Because they’ve never gotten to the point where you fucking have to work on yourself to get through it.

Justin’s gotten to the point where he’s had to work on himself to get through it.”

In Seasons, a YouTube documentary series from last year, many theories are floated about why Bieber can’t feel joy, why he struggles to get out of bed in the morning, let alone be a functioning human. “No one’s ever grown up in the history of humanity like Justin Bieber—no one’s ever been that famous,” his manager, Scooter Braun, says in one episode. After Bieber’s years of being onstage, “standard levels of dopamine just don’t get you excited anymore,” Good opines.

Hailey is seen zipping her husband into and out of a hyperbaric chamber, in the hope that more oxygen might help. Two di≠erent brain doctors appear, to talk about Bieber’s elevated cortisol levels and how the way Bieber was raised—by two unreliable and overwhelmed parents who split up when he was young— left him without the model, or the tools, to seek out a quieter or more peaceful life for himself. He’s given antidepressants, IVs; he is diagnosed with Lyme disease and mono.

But if you ask him about this now—these many diagnoses, this long search for the physical root causes of why he felt so fucking bad every day—what he says is simple: “To be honest, I am a lot healthier, and I did have a lot of things going on. I did have mono, and I do have Lyme disease. But I was also navigating a lot of emotional terrain, which had a lot to do with it. And we like to blame a lot of things on other things. Sometimes… It’s a lot of times just your own stu≠.”

Justin Bieber back, ultimately: his marriage and his faith. What they had in common was that they were value systems that didn’t depend on him performing in exchange for money. Bieber talks a lot about “have to” versus “want to”—his life has been mostly shaped by the former, in the sense that from a young age, he was brought up primarily not by his parents but by managers and bodyguards and label executives, whose purpose and presence, however benevolent, was to keep the business on track. What he wanted, beyond money and further success—for instance, to stay in Toronto with his friends instead of performing on the Today show—was something he learned not to think about too much.

But he was always someone who was “compelled” to marry, he says. “I just felt like that was my calling. Just to get married and have babies and do that whole thing.” (On the “babies” part of that: “Not this second, but we will eventually.”) If you talk to people in his circle, almost all of them will point toward TWO THINGS BROUGHT

← OPPOSITE PAGE

cardigan and pants (prices upon request) Louis Vuitton Men’s sandals $110 Birkenstock socks $14 American Trench necklace (top) $4,150 Cartier necklace (bottom) $2,700 Tiffany & Co. THIS PAGE

jacket $3,990 Lanvin t-shirt $49 x Karla pants $1,190 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello sandals $170 Birkenstock necklace (left) $2,700 Tiffany & Co. necklace (right) $4,150 Cartier

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 3

coat $6,900 jacket $1,560 pants $1,350 Prada

4 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

Hailey as the first piece of his redemption. “She is just a strong, consistent, stabilizing force in his life,” Good says. “And that was something he was missing all those years.” Bieber is honest about the fact that his marriage has not always been easy. “The first year of marriage was really tough,” he says, “because there was a lot, going back to the trauma stu≠. There was just lack of trust. There was all these things that you don’t want to admit to the person that you’re with, because it’s scary. You don’t want to scare them o≠ by saying, ‘I’m scared.’ ” He spent the first year as a husband “on eggshells,” he says, but at some point he started to actually believe. Now, with his marriage to Hailey, he says, “we’re just creating these moments for us as a couple, as a family, that we’re building these memories. And it’s beautiful that we have that to look forward to. Before, I didn’t have that to look forward to in my life. My home life was unstable. Like, my home life was not existing. I didn’t have a significant other. I didn’t have someone to love. I didn’t have someone to pour into. But now I have that.”

And then there is God. If you ask Chance the Rapper why he and his friend seem so happy in an industry that tends to grind people to dust, he will answer without hesitation. “Both of us, our secret sauce is Jesus,” Chance says. “Justin doesn’t fake the funk. He goes to Jesus with his problems, he goes to Jesus with his successes.

He calls me just to talk about Jesus.”

It is beautiful to hear Justin Bieber talk about God. “He is grace,” he says. “Every time we mess up, He’s picking us back up every single time. That’s how I view it. And so it’s like, ‘I made a mistake. I won’t dwell in it.

I don’t sit in shame. But it actually makes me want to do better.’ ” (And perhaps this is

“Before, I didn’t have that to look forward to in my life. My home life was unstable.

I didn’t have someone to love. I didn’t have someone to pour into. But now I have that.”

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 5

convenient: Bieber has done a lot in his life that needs forgiving, and an ethos of total acceptance can be alarmingly close to an ethos of total impunity, of being right in your deeds, no matter how bad or dark or selfish they are.

But hear him out.) I am not a believer myself.

Bieber doesn’t care about this. “My goal isn’t to try and persuade anybody to believe in what I believe or condemn anybody for not believing what I believe,” he says. “If it can help someone, great. If someone’s like, ‘Hey, I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s true,’ by all means, that’s their prerogative.”

Bieber has been around di≠erent churches—he is a former attendee of Hillsong, the church once closely associated with the now disgraced pastor Carl Lentz, who was fired for “moral failures” last year.

Bieber doesn’t mention Lentz by name, or even indirectly, but he says he has seen firsthand how faith, in its various institutional forms, can morph into just another kind of celebrity worship. “I think so many pastors put themselves on this pedestal,” he says.

“And it’s basically, church can be surrounded around the man, the pastor, the guy, and it’s like, ‘This guy has this ultimate relationship with God that we all want but we can’t get because we’re not this guy.’ That’s not the reality, though. The reality is, every human being has the same access to God.” When Bieber was about 15, he met a pastor named Judah Smith, who runs a church called Churchome with his wife. Bieber meets a lot of people; most of them want something from him. Years went by as Bieber did whatever he was doing, and Smith remained in his life, if not particularly closely. When Bieber finally began to emerge from his bad years and to seek guidance, Smith was still there.

And Bieber noticed that, in retrospect, Smith had never asked him for anything. “He put our relationship first,” Bieber says. And then he started to notice other things, too, like the way Smith’s family seemed to care for one another. “It was something I always dreamed of because my family was broken,” Bieber says.

“My whole life, I had a broken family. And so I was just attracted to a family that eats dinners together, laughs together, talks together.”

That sense of belonging, of care, of stability— Bieber came to recognize it as the thing he wanted but had never had. “I came to a place,” he says, “where I just was like, ‘God, if you’re real, I need you to help me, because I can’t do this on my own. Like, I’m struggling so hard.

Every decision I make is out of my own selfish ego.’ So I’m just like, ‘What is it that you want from me? You put all these desires in my heart for me to sing and perform and to make music—where are these coming from? Why is this in my heart? What do you want me to do with it? What’s the point? What is the point of everything? What is the point of me being on this planet?’ ”

4 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

And what happened, when Bieber asked for help, is that someone or something answered. He suddenly had a certainty: “If God forgives me and He loves me and He set these things in motion, if He put these desires in my heart, then I’m going to trust Him.” And Smith, he says, helped him make sense of the relationship: What God could be for him.

What he could be for God. “Justin is blessed,” Chance says. “I think sometimes when we think of the word blessed, we think of somebody that’s had it easy or somebody that’s got a lot of money or they recently attained a goal. But the way I’m talking about it is, there are people that

are blessed that don’t have anything, but you can feel it o≠ them. It’s like an aura, to be touched by God. And I feel like, me and Justin, the thing that attracted a lot of people to us is that we’ve been blessed. We’ve been anointed. But the most successes usually come out of you when you use those talents for God.” That’s what Bieber has tried to do. “I just kept trusting what He said and what He’s saying to me,” Bieber says. “And I just believe He speaks to me. It’s not audible. I don’t hear His audible voice. I don’t know if people do.

I know people have said it, and in the Bible it talks about that, but I just never heard it.

“Justin is blessed. There are people that are blessed that don’t have anything, but you can feel it off them. It’s like an aura, to be touched by God.” —CHANCE THE RAPPER

It’s more like nudges: Don’t do this. Or: Set these boundaries.” The voice in his head, the voice that we all have, telling us we are less than, or not good enough, or that our mistakes have rendered us beyond redemption?

He says that voice spoke up and it said: You are forgiven.

H E I S C A R E F U L now about his time, his routine, his schedule. He has rules. Sets the aforementioned boundaries. Builds in breaks.

He won’t work after 6 p.m.—the other day he tried to head to the studio at 5:30, to work on finishing Justice, and Hailey stopped him at the door, made him stay home. “We had dinner

together and we talked,” he says. “We didn’t talk about any work shit. We just laughed and watched funny videos. And, like, I’m reminded of who I am, not what I do, you know?”

He is embracing the mundane things that make a well-ordered, even boring, life.

“I have meetings now, which I was never very good at,” he says. “But now I’m like, ‘Okay, in order to be a healthy individual, this is what healthy adults do. They have schedules, they have calendars, they go by their calendar,’ and it’s beneficial, right? It’s not that it’s rocket science. But for me it’s like I lived this crazy lifestyle and this was just not the norm.”

He tries to mentor younger artists—to be the solid person for them that he wishes he’d had for himself. There is a moment in the recent Billie Eilish documentary—I encourage you to seek it out—in which Eilish and Bieber meet for the first time, at Coachella.

It’s in front of a bunch of people. Eilish is a lifelong fan. She is overwhelmed. Totally overwhelmed. And Bieber just stands there, radiating warmth and patience and understanding, until Eilish comes back down to earth enough to continue, and then Bieber gives her a hug.

He makes her feel safe. And Bieber was struggling then too. “In that moment, he’s still going through a lot himself,” Ryan Good says.

But he is there for her, like he tries to be now for anyone else who might possibly turn into Justin Bieber. “I was just having a conversation with a friend this morning,” Bieber says, “and he’s this kid, and he’s an aspiring musician, and he’s just got signed, and he’s at the beginning of his career, and he’s exhausted, and he’s not enjoying it. He’s a handsome, young, very talented kid. And he’s a man—he’s 19—and he’s right at the brink of all this success. And they have him just in the studio nonstop. And I told him, ‘Bro, you’re going to get to a point where you get the success but your relationships are so far removed that you don’t have connection. And you’re not the person that you know you are, because you’re so distracted by your success that you miss out on the people who are right in front of you, who love you, you know?’ ” He allows himself to be so open now, in daily life, that at one point when we speak, he cries. It’s a gentle cry, more like the rush of emotion that precedes tears than tears themselves. It’s just—he gets thinking about God and the world and his place in it, and sometimes he gets overwhelmed. I’d just asked if he’d (text continued on page 50)

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

4 7

←← PREVIOUS PAGES AND THESE PAGES

t-shirt $49 x Karla

pants $1,295 Giorgio Armani sneakers $120 Nike watch $8,100 Cartier necklace $1,700 Tiffany & Co.

4 8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

fully reckoned yet with his younger self—if he still related to that person. If he’d forgiven that person.

“A lot of people will never do what they want to do, because they’re afraid and they have shame,” he starts. “They don’t feel enough to accomplish what’s in their heart, or there’s a cause they’ve always wanted to help, but they’re just like, ‘Aw, man, like, who am I? Who am I to be able to do this? Because look what I’ve done. Look at my past.’ And that was me for a long time. And I always felt like I was a good encourager. I always felt like I could encourage people and that my words held weight. But when you start living in shame, you start to devalue what shouldn’t have lost that value. And that’s why…”

He puts his head down and is silent. For 20, 30 long seconds, he says nothing. I can’t even see his face. And then he picks his head up and continues, and his voice is thick and choked.

“It’s just rewarding to be all that you were designed to be. And I believe that, at this point in my life, I’m right where I’m supposed to be, doing what I believe that God wants me to do. And there’s nothing more fulfilling.”

Can I ask what you were thinking about just now, in that pause?

“Yeah. Uh. I just got, I just got kind of emotional because, you know, even this interview, it’s like: It matters. You had this desire in your heart to do what you’re doing, and you’re doing it. And now I am sharing what I believe God put in my heart and you are asking the questions in your brain, getting this out of me, and it’s beautiful. You’re like me. We’re all miracles, really.”

His voice is as quiet as it’s been the entire time we’ve spoken. But, as he does these days, he keeps going. “You know, the fact that you are here and you made it through all the stu≠ that you’ve been through, you know—just because you weren’t in my position, I mean, I don’t know your story. I don’t know where you come from. I don’t know your history.

I don’t know what you’ve been through. But I know you haven’t had it all peaches and cream, you know? Like some shit has probably made you not want to do things at times and not let your guard down and not do what you feel led and called to do. But you are here.

And that’s a miracle.”

Bieber wants to tell you that you’re a miracle too. He asks himself: “What can I do to be an encouragement?” He wants to say: “You can do it. You are valuable. Whatever you are saying about yourself or believing about yourself is not necessarily true. It’s just not.”

“I don’t know if that gives you clarity,” Bieber says, out of words at last. He is trying to be less focused on the outcomes of things.

So either way, ultimately, is fine. He grins.

“This is just therapy for me.”

zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.

5 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

pants $1,295 Giorgio Armani necklace $1,700 Tiffany & Co.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

5 1

Twenty-five years after last working with Spike Lee, the consummate character actor took a role that changed his career. Here the star of Da 5 Bloods goes deep on his difficult reputation, his abiding self-belief, and his rise to the ranks of great leading men.

By Mosi Secret Photographs

By Paola Kudacki Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

5 3

for Delroy Lindo in the early summer of 2019.

He had just spent nearly three months in Vietnam and the jungles of Thailand becoming Paul, a Black veteran of the Vietnam War and a man wrestling with ghosts, guarding secrets, spitting hate, hiding wounds, believing in Trump, and dancing ever so close to the edge of sanity. The torrents of Paul’s emotions, and of Lindo’s own emotions while performing, seemed to sync with the sublime thunderstorms that swept through the forests. He had joined a cast of actors, many of them African American men, many of them erstwhile theater actors like himself, in presenting the stories of so-called Bloods, the Black U.S. soldiers of the Vietnam War, who fought in disproportionate numbers but whose perspective had been all but left out of the American war-movie canon.

The experience was especially exhilarating for Lindo, who had delivered an indelible performance at a time in his career when many in the film industry had written him o≠.

Before the movie was cut, and before audiences knew it as Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods— before anyone knew that the film would be released during a summer of upheaval—he had a certain feeling. It was a kind of guiding intuition that the fine acting he’d done would transcend the film itself. He felt it was the beginning of what he calls his “faith walk”—a journey toward a new phase in his career.

“I had to have faith in the strength of the work,” he explains to me during a recent Zoom call, “and the fact that even though it’s not a meritocracy, that the work would shift my position as a creative worker to a place that it would mean something beyond itself.”

It had been a long time since a role had stirred such feelings in him. And a long time— 25 years, to be precise—since he last worked with Spike Lee, the director who launched his film career. In 1991, Lee cast Lindo in Malcolm X as West Indian Archie, the natty Harlem gangster and numbers runner who lured Malcolm deeper into a life of crime.

That was soon followed by roles in Crooklyn (1994), as a tenderhearted father and struggling jazz musician in 1970s Brooklyn, and Clockers (1996), as a ruthless drug kingpin ruling over a 1990s housing project.

5 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves, thought by some to be the basis for the Lone Ranger. “To the extent that Da 5 Bloods is what I consider to be a historical corrective to Vietnam-era narratives that have pretty much excluded brothers, I consider The Harder They Fall to be a similar historical corrective,” Lindo says.

“It’s a tale of the Old West told very squarely through the prism of the Black people who were there.”

It’s appropriate that two films reimagining the conventions of well-trod Hollywood genres are the vehicles through which Lindo is reinvigorating his career. He’s also thinking about his first directorial project, which he’s tight-lipped about but says he will begin filming this year. Yet for all that lies ahead, sometimes he still thinks about that di∞cult stretch he endured, a decade ago, when he was taking on work he wouldn’t have considered in his better days. When he reflects on that time, he slips into the present tense.

“I’m in a little bit of an excruciating fucking circumstance,” he says, “but I’m still believing in myself, man. I am. I’m not being defined by my circumstances.”

The performances established Lindo, for Black audiences especially, as a nimble character actor who brought redeeming and deeply felt expression to a range of experiences.

Yet Lindo didn’t remain a regular player in Lee’s famously tight-knit ensemble.

He had to pass up a role in Get on the Bus, the director’s 1996 film about the Million Man March, and later walked away from a project Lee was coproducing, deciding the script was unworkable. There was no falling-out between them, he says, but Lee stopped o≠ering him roles, a move that changed the tenor of his career. For a time, I T ’ S A B L U S T E R Y day in February when in the late ’90s and early aughts, Lindo Lindo and I meet in person at the Schomburg became known as a quintessential tough guy Center for Research in Black Culture, in for other filmmakers—a feckless wannabe Harlem, a pandemic-emptied institution gangster in Get Shorty; the hard-boiled cop that’s part of the New York Public Library in Gone in 60 Seconds; a jewel thief in Heist. (and where Lindo’s wife worked in the ’90s).

But by the mid-aughts, things had slowed Lindo arrives in a beige suede shearling coat and his career entered a fallow period, years over black sweatpants, a black knit shirt, and marked by more workmanlike fare—a guest a surgical mask. At six feet two, he’s a big man, appearance on Law & Order here, a made- broad in the chest and shoulders, with dark for-TV movie there. “That period had to do brown skin, large, intense eyes, a shaved head, with these various missteps that I made,” and a boxer’s chin. His size would make it easy Lindo admits, “which resulted in perhaps for Hollywood to typecast him, which is largely being seen as less viable as a film actor, less why he initially pursued theater rather than desirable. You know: ‘We’re not going to go film. At one point an agent told him that a new with that guy. We’ll go with this TV show was being cast, and one guy.’ And was that frustrating of the characters was described as ←← and painful? Absolutely. I was OPENING PAGES, LEF T “a big, brutish Delroy Lindo type.” vest and pants playing catch-up.”

The perception accounts for many $4,995 That game of catch-up would of those tough-guy roles. But (for suit) Lindo believes that he has more be complete only when he reconshirt $395 nected with Lee and took on the subtle characteristics to o≠er.

Dolce & Gabbana role of Paul, a character he saw “He has a big presence,” says shoes $950 as having Shakespearean dimen- Christian Louboutin Jonathan Majors, one of Lindo’s sions. He had been doing good costars in Da 5 Bloods. “And he hat, stylist’s own work again, most notably as the does something that I think is sunglasses attorney Adrian Boseman on very di∞cult for us to do, as Black and earring the CBS series The Good Fight, men. It’s to live in your size, com(throughout), but Paul unlocked something pletely live in it, not to shy away his own inside him, set him on a trajecfrom it.” Majors’s nickname for necklace Lindo on the shoot was Giant. tory toward work of the scope (throughout) $980 V. Bellan and ambition he’d been hungerAt the Schomburg Center, we walk upstairs to view an ing for. Last fall, in Santa Fe, he OPENING PAGES, exhibit called “Traveling While finished filming a new Netflix RIGHT Black,” about the movement of project, The Harder They Fall, an sherwani $795 Vintage India NYC Black people in the diaspora, all-Black Western produced by their displacement and their Jay-Z and costarring Idris Elba hat, stylist’s own Missoni pursuit of pleasure. Lindo asks and Jonathan Majors. Lindo plays

suit $4,095 sweater $345 Giorgio Armani scarf $295 Paul Stuart watch $7,400 Zenith ring $2,800 Fabergé

someone to bring up a large table to place between us—to keep us socially distanced, I guess—and he looks around the room while we wait. There are handwritten postcards that Malcolm X sent to Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee while he was on his pilgrimage in Mecca and original copies of The Negro Motorist Green Book.

The exhibit becomes an unexpected and helpful tool for Lindo to loosen his grip on the details of his life. At various times over the course of his 45-year career, he has politely declined to reveal his age (he’s 68), talk about his childhood or family, or speak in any depth about how a man born in London, as he was, made his way to the United States. It becomes clear that his guardedness is more complicated than that of a famous person simply seeking to maintain a semblance of privacy. It is also a guarding of wounds, in order to protect himself and to enrich his craft. “The job of work is to, on some level, expose a character in order that I share that with the audience as fully as possible,” he tells me. “In one’s own life, one does not necessarily have that same investment or desire. I don’t need to be known by folks. I prefer not to be known.”

Perhaps his inclinations toward inscrutability derive from his family history. In the early 1950s, before Lindo was born, his mother, in search of opportunity, moved from her native Jamaica to London, as a part of the tide of migration to the United Kingdom from Caribbean countries in the aftermath of World War II. The immigrants, who would eventually number more than 100,000, were subsequently labeled the Windrush generation, after the ship that brought one of the first groups in 1948, the Empire Windrush.

“Many young Caribbean women were recruited as nurses, and my mom was one of them,” Lindo tells me. He was born in the South London borough of Lewisham a year after she arrived.

As he relates her story, Lindo scans the room with the eyes of a man enlightened to colonialism’s reach into his own personal history. He’d only learned about the Windrush generation in 2002, when, after living in the States for decades, he returned to England to shoot a movie in which he played a Jamaican immigrant in 1960s South London. His research shifted his self-understanding so much that at NYU in 2014 he completed a master’s degree exploring that history, and he is now working on a screenplay about his mother’s life.

When Lindo was five years old and his mother was still in nursing school, she sent him to live with a white family, the Craigs, because she wasn’t allowed to have a child with her on campus. One of the Craigs’ daughters was married to a Jamaican man who was an acquaintance of Lindo’s father, or so the

5 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

story goes. Lindo, who didn’t grow up around his father, was uncertain of the details.

“So here is this little Black kid who all of a sudden is in school with these white kids, and the parents of those kids are looking at this little Black kid,” he says. “What the fuck?

And remember, it’s a specific ‘What the fuck?’ and there’s a larger cultural ‘What the fuck?’

The larger cultural ‘What the fuck?’ is that the white people are having to adjust and adapt to these Black people coming in their midst.”

Still, he says that the Craigs, with whom he lived until he was 12, embraced him, loved him. “But I was still, on many levels, apart and separate from them,” he says. “And there were certain very harsh realities that they could not protect me from.”

He was the only Black student in his elementary school—a big part of the trauma, he says. “I’m just a complete oddball,” he tells me. “I’m playing catch-up because I want to be part of it. I don’t know how to do it. I’m just a kid, man.” The memories are fresh, and they inform how Lindo thinks of himself today: an outsider, playing catch-up; a loner.

One encounter in particular still lingers: “My little buddy at school, a little white kid, he had my garment, using it as a cape, and I had his garment. We were Superman. All of a sudden, this car pulls up, the kid runs over to the car, and he runs back towards me with this mortified look on his face. He throws my garment at me and yanks from me his garment and runs to the car. He can’t play with me anymore.” That was the end of that friendship.

Lindo remembers kids who would torment him in strange ways and how he learned as an adult that the family next door to the Craigs moved out after he arrived. “That’s a lot,” he says. “But I will tell you this—that’s my shit, that’s my gold. That’s in my arsenal.” And that is one of Lindo’s great skills: channeling these deep reserves into his craft as an actor.

As he’s sharing these memories, Lindo stands up and paces around the room.

His tone has been measured until this moment, instructive, deliberate; he’s been feeling the words between his fingers before he utters them. But once he’s on his feet, something else sparks. His words and body language become more spontaneous, more theatrical, and suddenly I realize, “Oh, this is Delroy.” In his black sweat suit, moving fluidly, he could have easily slipped into a dramatic monologue. It reveals something of him, even if, paradoxically, Delroy in character is di≠erent from Delroy as Delroy.

“I’m really possessive of my pain,” he tells me. “One, because I’m not about the business of discussing my pain. But two: My pain, my insecurity, my neurosis, all of that, I value, because that’s part of my toolbox.”

He brings the conversation back to the anguish of Paul from (continued on page 81)

blazer $3,295 pants $1,200 Brunello Cucinelli shirt $695 Canali scarf $175 Paul Smith watch $31,800 Parmigiani Fleurier bracelet, his own ring (on left hand) $2,800 Fabergé ring (on right hand) $1,800 Tiffany & Co. grooming by natalie young

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

5 7

Master criminal Rédoine Faïd loved the movies, and his crew’s greatest robberies were laced with tributes: to Point Break, Heat, and Reservoir Dogs.

When he landed in a maximum-security prison, cinema provided inspiration once again.

By Adam Leith Gollner Illustrations by Nicole Rifkin

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

5 9

Rédoine Faïd can see far off into the cloudless sky. It’s early on a sunny Sunday in July 2018, and for now, the morning is quiet and ordinary at the Réau penitentiary, 25 miles southeast of Paris. But Faïd can envision what’s coming—he can see it all unfold like the movie he’s been scripting for months in his mind.

Outside his cell, two guards approach.

These are the solitary confinement quarters: a controlled unit within the maximum-security prison where notable or potentially dangerous criminals are held. Few prisoners in France are as notable as the 46-year-old Faïd, who officially ranks among the country’s highest-risk inmates. A notorious thief—the architect of a flurry of dazzling heists and blockbuster robberies in the 1990s that targeted banks, jewelry stores, and armored cars—Faïd became more infamous still in 2013, when he blasted out of the Sequedin prison, near Lille, where he’d been serving time after a botched robbery, using smuggled explosives. That dramatic escape embarrassed the top echelons of the French justice system, and since Faïd’s recapture six weeks later, he’s been under stringent restrictions.

The officers have come to escort Faïd to a visit with his brother. After unlocking his door, they pat down the prisoner. He’s a slim, bald man with a charming smile; he’s wearing an orange Hugo Boss T-shirt and has a dark suit jacket draped over his arm. As they search his pockets, they find something hard.

A makeshift weapon? No, just a pack of candy.

He’s a known sugar freak, with a love of mint Hollywood chewing gum.

Unperturbed by the candy, the guards ultimately detect nothing else of note.

They’re used to keeping careful watch over him. “When he goes to use the telephone, the whole ward gets blocked off,” one of the guards tells France TV. “He’s the only detainee in France I’ve seen for whom even the staff get blocked off. He passes by with two supervisors and a guard from the solitary

6 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

confinement wing. Like a star. He’s made into a star. Everybody watches him.”

Faïd had always wanted to become a reallife fictional character. The son of Algerian immigrants, he came of age with a crew of petty thieves and graduated from the projects of Creil—a hardscrabble Paris suburb— into a gangster who bedeviled police and enchanted his fellow criminals. It wasn’t just his flair that set him apart. An obsessive cinephile, Faïd envisioned himself from a young age as the protagonist of his own movie—and in his holdups he emulated exploits he had seen in the films of Quentin Tarantino and Kathryn Bigelow and his idol Michael Mann.

To him, life itself became celluloid.

Even now, from Réau’s isolation ward, Faïd sees no reason why he can’t escape the truth of his past by authoring a different kind of movie for his future. Yes, he might be in solitary confinement, but he’s also certain that his greatest scene still lies ahead of him.

For this story, Faïd has agreed to a rare interview in which my questions, and his answers, are relayed via email by one of his relatives. In addition, he has shared with me an unpublished autobiographical account of his daring escapes, titled Spiral, in which he describes the steps it takes to mentally prepare himself for a jailbreak. “There’s a deathly silence in the cell,” he writes. “I can’t hear a thing anymore. If I’m breaking out this morning, it’s to leave that silence behind. I worked hard these past months to get my spirit as clear and concentrated as it needs to be to make it to the top on this day.”

Despite the scrutiny he receives, Faïd seems to have been scanning for weaknesses and opportunities since the moment he arrived at Réau, as Régis Grava, a representative for the prison-workers’ union, will later recount. According to a fact sheet kept in his dossier by prison officials, Faïd is, on the surface, both polite and funny, someone who likes chatting with his jailers about everything and nothing. At the same time, the report notes, “He is exceptionally observant and gives the impression of constantly being in search of the slightest deficiencies within the detaining organization.”

Months earlier, authorities noticed something unusual: drones flying in strange patterns above the prison. They immediately wondered whether this could be related to their celebrity inmate Faïd, whom they seemed to suspect of having associates on the outside working to help spring him out.

In June 2018, officials urgently requested that he be transferred to another facility. The country’s central administration replied that the transfer would take place in September.

Such a delay was infuriating to those running the prison at Réau, officially known as Centre Pénitentiaire Sud Francilien (CPSF), one of whom called the decision “extremely dangerous for the CPSF, our personnel, and the public order.” For his part, Faïd had no intention of being available for a transfer: He’d been working on his own exit strategy, set for today, July 1.

As Faïd tells me, he regards moments like this the way a filmmaker might. “It’s a kind of mise-en-scène—soigné, efficient, precise,” he says. “You have to be able to stop time.”

And how does one go about pausing time?

“The situation itself freezes,” he replies.

“Time freezes, everything stops while you do what you need to do. The idea is to sense in advance where trouble might come from. You don’t want any problems. When you’ve eliminated all the paths, in the end there’s only one path left for you to take.”

As the guards lead him out of his cell, Faïd’s heart starts beating faster. Fear is just a sensation, he reminds himself. “It’s all good to train yourself to forge a mentality of tempered steel,” he writes, “but when faced with a situation this serious, your subconscious asserts itself and brings your focus back to the reality at hand. Because the threat of dying is real.”

“When he goes to use the telephone, the whole ward gets blocked off,” a prison guard tells France TV. “Like a star. He’s made into a star. Everybody watches him.”

a dark speck materializes on the horizon. A helicopter. Flying low toward the Réau prison. It sinks into the courtyard with delicate precision, like a slow-motion metalloid dragonfly. According to a report in Le Parisien, two inmates tasked with emptying trash cans into a dumpster in the adjacent yard stare up in openmouthed disbelief. Nobody else even seems to notice what’s happening.

In the cockpit of the hovering helicopter, the muzzle of a handgun is jammed into the neck of the pilot, Stéphane Buy, who later will share his stunned account of that morning with the press. He will describe how he’d been hired to give a touristy ride over the countryside outside Paris; he will explain how, just before takeoff, he found two Colts pointed at his head. “Don’t be an idiot,” he says he was told by one of the two hijackers. “Do this job properly,” one of the men ordered him, “or else your family is in danger.”

The men wore black ski masks and paramilitary combat gear and they rattled off Buy’s home address, the pilot later explains.

Another commando, they told him, was stationed outside his home. If he didn’t cooperate, both his partner and her daughter would pay the price. The 65-year-old pilot has been chosen purposefully. He is a flight instructor with decades of helicopter experience; his Instagram account bio features the line “OK = Zéro killed,” a military expression signaling casualty-free operations. It’s a motto that could change any minute now.

Buy’s Alouette II is a vintage model from the ’60s: reliable but finicky. Not long after lifting off with the two hijackers—investigators will later suggest they are Faïd’s brother and a nephew—Buy is told to land the chopper in a field and cut the engine as the third member of their unit arrives. After what sounds to Buy like the loading of weapons and equipment into the aircraft, they’re ready to resume.

Then, a nightmare scenario: The engine won’t turn over. The ignition is jammed.

The hijackers think Buy is messing with them. “Start it! Start the machine!” they yell. “Look, a red light comes on each time you activate the turbine,” cries Buy. He keeps trying; the light keeps flashing. Repeating their warnings about his family, they start pistol-whipping him. Buy desperately fiddles with the electromagnetic control panel on the cockpit’s exterior. The adjustments work. The blades spiral up.

As the helicopter approaches Réau, the hijackers clutch AK-47s and a heavy-duty Husqvarna angle grinder, a circular grinding saw strong enough to slice through concrete.

One of them points down at a narrow triangular courtyard near the prison’s main entrance.

“There,” he commands. “Toward that building with the red walls.”

SHORTLY AFTER 11 A.M.,

France has been the site of more successful helicopter jailbreaks than any other nation, and the prison isn’t unprepared for this morning’s attempt: On the walls of its watchtowers, posters featuring different helicopter models help patrollers identify unauthorized incoming aircraft, French journalist Brendan Kemmet notes in his book L’évasion du Siècle (The Escape of the Century). Most of the prison’s pentagonal airspace is crisscrossed with Kevlar cables to prevent aerial raids—except, it turns out, for the entry’s small three-sided courtyard.

An exception was made there because prisoners pass through it only as they enter and exit the facility, French justice minister Nicole Belloubet explained after the escape.

Plus, no modern-day helicopter could fit into such a tight space. Stéphane Buy’s midcentury chopper has rotor blades precisely short enough for the job.

A Réau warden hears what she thinks is a leaf blower outside. It doesn’t immediately register that there’s no maintenance work scheduled for the facility’s green spaces on Sundays.

It is now 11:18 a.m. As the helicopter descends into the prison yard, even the sentinels in the watchtowers are confused by what appears to be taking place. One of them radios the prison’s central command; the officer on the other end of the line responds that his team of administrators aren’t sure what’s happening, writes Kemmet. They’d taken so many precautions to prevent this very scenario. No one would be crazy enough to attempt it, would they?

The helicopter momentarily alights in the courtyard. Two of the hooded men pull on ski goggles and jump out, throwing smoke bombs and tear gas canisters at the surrounding buildings. As they race toward

the red prison structure, the third man remains in the cockpit, pistol pointed at the pilot, ordering him to hover above the ground. It’s policy at Réau that the armed guards in the surrounding watchtowers can’t fire on the helicopter; the risk of damage to the nearby buildings or harm to the pilot is too great. For the next seven and a half minutes, the machine quivers in place, hummingbird-like, propellers whirling dust into the air.

The masked marauders wear fluorescent “Police” armbands, intended to confuse prison officials. Using the power saw, they quickly shear the lock off a door leading into the prison building. One of the intruders secures the perimeter, assault rifle in firing position, while the other shreds his way through more barriers.

Faïd is in a securitized visitation chamber meeting with his brother Brahim. The piercing sound of metal being cut reaches their ears.

“They’re coming to get me,” Faïd tells Brahim. “Don’t move.”

Leaving his brother where he sits, Faïd and his rescuer make their way out of the building, quickly but cautiously, ensuring that no guards are lurking around any corners. None are. In fact, they encounter no obstacles at all.

Time has frozen—just as Faïd knew it would.

“The element of surprise is so important,” he writes in the unpublished memoir he shared with me, explaining the methodology behind a successful jailbreak. The idea is to create a sense of shock so profound that those in charge “won’t understand anything about the ‘movie’ they’re in.”

The movie this morning moves quickly.

Investigators will later note that the prison staff seem completely stupefied. The descriptor employed by the ministry of justice in its subsequent audit (continued on page 84)

IES

R

S

O T

R

SC

A

When Chadwick Boseman died, antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi decided to reveal the scars from his own colon-cancer surgery.

Here, alongside six other patients and survivors, he bares his wounds—and reckons with the disease’s lasting effects on his body and his spirit.

ESSAY BY IBRAM X. KENDI INTERVIEWS BY MIK AWAKE PHOTOGRAPHS BY DANA SCRUGGS

6 2

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

Ibram X. Kendi Age: 38

Diagnosis: stage IV colon cancer

Current status: cancer-free Kendi wants to highlight the rate at which colorectal cancer afflicts African American patients, who are 40 percent more likely to die of the disease than those of other races.

B O D Y S E N T me warnings throughout the fall of 2017. But I ignored them—the weight loss, the fatigue, the constant trips to the bathroom only for nothing to happen. As the symptoms got worse, so did my denial. When I started passing blood clots into the toilet after Thanksgiving, I somehow convinced myself it wasn’t anything serious. I was traveling the country giving lectures on racism and antiracism, and for a while, my intense schedule allowed me to hide what was happening. But my partner, Sadiqa, is a physician, and when she noticed the extent of my symptoms during a post-Christmas vacation, she scheduled a doctor’s appointment for as soon as we were home. And let’s just say it would have ended our marriage if I had not gone.

In January I went in for a colonoscopy and body scans. And I found out the worst: I had colon cancer. Stage IV. According to the American Cancer Society, only 14 percent of people receiving that diagnosis are likely to be alive five years later. I was 35 years old.

In two respects, my diagnosis fit larger patterns. Colon cancer is increasingly a±icting young people, with millennials twice as likely to develop the disease as those born in 1950. And African Americans are now 40 percent more likely to die from the disease than other racial groups.

Many people diagnosed with cancer ask themselves, “Why me?” I asked another question: “Why did I do this to myself ?” I felt, in those days, a kind of angelic glow radiating from Sadiqa, who had likely saved my life. At the same time, I started to resent myself for ignoring the disease’s early warning signs, which likely MY

6 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

the world.” —IBRAM X. KENDI allowed the cancer to spread, and for having never really taken my health—or my life—very seriously.

When I started chemotherapy, at the end of January, I wasn’t yet conscious of all this self-loathing. But looking back now, I suspect this might be why I kept the ordeal to myself—I was fighting for my life, but I never shared that fact publicly, and I didn’t so much as whimper to my caretakers. As I proceeded through the cycles of chemo, the side e≠ects compounded, but I refused to let my oncologist reduce the dosage. I wanted, if anything, more chemo, more pain. But my doctor and Sadiqa vetoed my requests.

I think my insistence on enduring the increasing pain had something to do with what I perceived as manly strength. And with my inclination to push through adversity for a greater good.

My career is rooted in struggle.

I combat the societal adversity that is racism—and personal adversity from people who’d rather turn me into the problem.

But there was more to my cancer battle. I realize now that I was also seeking punishment. I had deluded myself when the warning sirens were wailing. No more.

It was time for me to su≠er for allowing my body to su≠er.

And then, after six months of e≠ective chemotherapy, I looked

forward to surgery. Not just because the procedure could rid my body of the remaining cancer.

I also wanted the scars from the surgery—unmistakable, ugly, unchangeable—all over my chest.

They would function as humiliating symbols of my punishment.

I would hide them from the world, but I would never be able to hide them from myself, these permanent reminders of my folly.

Over time, though, I reflected on the absurdity of blaming myself. After all, it wasn’t as though I had the typical risk factors for colon cancer. I was not over 50, I had no history of polyps, had no inflammatory intestinal conditions, no family history

of colon cancer, did not eat a low-fiber, high-fat diet, was not sedentary, did not have diabetes, was not obese, did not smoke, did not drink heavily, had not undergone radiation therapy. My only risk factor for colon cancer was being African American.

The problem was not my ignorance. Americans are systematically made ignorant. We should have a public health system—and a media culture— that methodically educates us about the symptoms of di≠erent types of cancers in the way we are being instructed now on the symptoms of COVID-19.

How do we ensure that every single man and woman knows the symptoms of colorectal cancer?

A persistent change in bowel

habits, an inability to empty one’s bowels, rectal bleeding, chronic abdominal discomfort, fatigue, unexplained weight loss.

As I processed what had happened to my body, I began to forgive myself. We’re taught, particularly as men, to hide our emotions, our fears, our inner thoughts. We’re e≠ectively taught to hide our scars. We’re taught that this hiding is masculine when, in fact, it’s easy to hide. What takes courage is to be vulnerable, to bare our scars to the world.

I think about Sadiqa, who went under the knife to have her breast cancer removed in 2014.

And about her aunt Delores, who once, when Sadiqa was a little girl, showed her the scars on her

own chest. “You don’t have to be afraid of them,” she said. Aunt Delores would eventually die from breast cancer, but the memory of those healing words would always o≠er solace to Sadiqa.

What courageous women.

But what about men? Perhaps Chadwick Boseman’s heartrending death from colon cancer on August 28, 2020—exactly two years after my surgery—pushed me over the edge. Soon, my survivor’s guilt evolved into a survivor’s courage and a willingness to be vulnerable.

I decided to publicly reveal my scars. Other men, I soon realized, were ready and willing to do the same. Alongside these six patients and survivors—men who have undergone treatment at Boston

Medical Center and the DanaFarber Cancer Institute—I’m telling my story not only to raise awareness for colorectal cancer but also to encourage others to have a healthy relationship with the ways diseases have reshaped their bodies. We should see our scars as monuments to our cancer fights, as the most memorable tattoos on our bodies, as second birthmarks. And we should never hide them. I love that Sadiqa and my four-year-old daughter, Imani, can see my scars. Because that means I’m alive to see them too.

ibram x. kendi is the director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research and the best-selling author of ‘How to Be an Antiracist.’

Carlos Vega Age: 46

Diagnosis: stage IV colorectal cancer

Current status: undergoing treatment After undergoing surgery, Vega was left with scars on his belly—and a colostomy bag. He still works as an administrative police detective.

detective for the Chelsea Police Department. I try to last an eight-hour shift each day. Once that’s done, I come home and try to relax. A full day’s work puts a strain on my body.

In March 2016, I did five days of radiation, then took a week’s break before I had my colorectal-removal procedure. They had to remove my sphincter muscle—that’s why I have a colostomy bag. I had to get used to using it and making sure that certain foods didn’t give me bowel obstructions, which are pretty bad. If you try to eat corn, you’ll have to go to the E.R. They say radiation sometimes does more damage than good, and in my case, it did some damage. In February 2019, I had surgery to reconstruct my stomach—I couldn’t hold down any food. Now I have a good six-inch scar going down my stomach.

And they had to re-section a piece of my intestines. That’s all because of the radiation and the cancer.

We tend to go every day in our lives working, taking care of our family, always on the run, until you experience something like this and you’ve got to change your whole life.

My scars remind me of life’s uncertainties. If we don’t experience them, we don’t really get put to the test. — A S TO L D TO M I K A W A K E

I’M AN ADMINISTRATIVE

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

6 5

Jonathan Owens Age: 58

Diagnosis: stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer

Current status: undergoing treatment Having struggled with depression, Owens sees the need for recently diagnosed patients to undergo mental health therapy.

ON

VALENTINE’S

DAY

2014,

my wife, Nicole, came to give me a hug. That’s when she noticed that I had lumps in my neck.

I’d been complaining of a little nausea and a little pain in the middle of my stomach that day, and we were thinking it was like a cold or heartburn or something like that.

As the night went on, I was in bed staring at the ceiling and the stomach pain got harder and became more and more aggressive. I sat up in a chair, but it kept getting worse. I’m a guy who goes to the doctor regularly. I’ve had the same primary care physician for 23 years. I knew something was going on. I looked at my wife and said, “We need to go to the hospital.” And with that, we got dressed. But the pain kept coming harder and harder. By the time I got to the hospital, I couldn’t stand up.

So they put me in a wheelchair

ing March, I had an operation to remove the tumor. Three months later, the cancers came back, so I had to go back on chemo. Now I do three months on, three months o≠.

In the beginning, I didn’t take the diagnosis well. I was scared.

For three months, I was in a heavy state of depression, saying to myself, “Why me, God?” I was so lost. I wish there had been some therapy in the beginning. I needed someone to talk to. Someone telling me I was going to be all right.

I had just graduated from welding school. Throughout my life, I’ve worked a lot of labor

6 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

as battle scars, or tattoos. They’ve become a part of who I am.” —JONATHAN OWENS jobs: shipyards, hospitals. The Jonathan before was always trying to find a job, trying to make some money to take care of my family. But now I can’t do as many things as I used to do. I miss that: trying to provide a bit more for them. That’s about the hardest part about living with cancer.

In the beginning, I didn’t like the scars, but they grew on

me. They healed well. I think of them as battle scars, or tattoos.

They’ve become an everyday thing. An ordinary part of who I am. For the rest of my life, I’m a survivor.

It can be a really painful experience, but you need support. It takes a lot of support. My wife, Nicole, I don’t think I could have done it without her. I would’ve given up, honestly. It was that

hard. I talk to my wife, pray to God, keep my spirits up, talk to my relatives. And I’m mentally changed for the better. I certainly don’t want to die.

I’m currently on a break.

I went to the doctor today and he told me that my cancer is not really growing. The medicine is working. I’m getting better. I get to go on with my life.

— A S TO L D TO M . A .

Carl-Henry Desravines Age: 56

Diagnosis: stage IV rectal cancer

Current status: cancer-free Desravines says his Catholic faith helped him persevere.

led to my diagnosis, I was upset about being at the doctor. My wife, Myriam, is a nurse, and she had to come with me to make sure I kept the appointment. I remember the doctor said, “You are a boring patient.” Because I was always healthy. “Doctor,” my wife said, “the guy is 50. Why don’t you at least do a prostate test and colonoscopy?” So he did the prostate exam that day; then he sent me to another part of the hospital to make an appointment for the colonoscopy. It took four months.

I was at work when someone called me. I could tell she was trying to talk around it. She told me it was stage IV rectal cancer.

It was in my lymph nodes. I was lucky. For six months I did chemo

by IV. Then came the major surgery to remove the tumor.

Afterward I couldn’t go to work for three months, which was a THE DAY THAT

Paul Rawate Age: 45

Diagnosis: stage IV colorectal cancer

Current status: undergoing treatment Rawate sees his scars as badges of honor and external reminders to keep fighting the disease.

my intestine was so bad, they couldn’t even finish the colonoscopy.

To reduce the mass, they were talking about putting in a stent, just to make sure I could have my normal flow. But there was a specific cocktail treatment that I responded really well to. The mass in my colon was reduced enough that they could go in and take it out.

I don’t have a lot of scarring from the points my surgeon accessed, because he did such a great job. And I didn’t have any issues internally at first. I did so well after the surgery to remove the mass in my colon, I got up and I walked out of the hospital.

A week later, I almost had to be brought back in an ambulance because of a serious blood-clotting issue.

I have this port in me. It’s how I’m able to get treatment. It’s also how they do all the blood tests. I love having it, even though it was a gnarly surgery to get it into my body.

The big thing about the scars is that I have them as external reminders. The scar you can’t see is the blood clotting from the surgery that we’re still monitoring. So there is that internal reminder as well. They’re my motivation to continue with the areas in my life that matter most to me right now: being there for my eight-year-old, being a good husband, trying to do something for the community that’s sharing this struggle. And I need those reminders to keep pushing. For me, those external and internal reminders are all tied together. I think of them as badges of honor. — A S TO L D TO M . A .

THE TUMOR IN

problem for me. I’m a hardworking person—I got that from my mother, who raised nine of us in Haiti while my father was in the army. She’s my model. My oncologist liked that I stayed positive.

My body was sick, but mentally I was not. Through the whole treatment, I was never down.

That was four years ago. Now I’m cancer-free, by God’s grace.

To tell you the truth, I don’t even think about it anymore, but the scars remind me that I was sick.

They’re a part of me, a sign that I’m victorious. I’m still alive, watching my daughter grow up, spending time with Myriam. I’m a very religious guy—I grew up going to Catholic school. When I’m talking about staying positive, I’m talking about my religion. There are things that are not going to attack my spirit.

— A S TO L D TO M . A .

Kyle Vinson Age: 39

Diagnosis: stage IV colon cancer

Current status: undergoing treatment After undergoing four surgeries, including one that resulted in life-threatening internal bleeding, Vinson is making good progress, according to his doctor.

Jed Duggan Age: 30

Diagnosis: stage IV colon cancer and stage I thyroid cancer

Current status: cancer-free After a successful treatment, Duggan got a tattoo with the words “Never be ashamed of your scars” and a ribbon that commemorates all who have died of cancer or are still fighting the disease.

H A D A L L the symptoms of colon cancer—the bloody stool, the weight loss, the night sweats.

I just refused to go to the doctor, because I didn’t want to believe it.

One day, after I’d just gotten out of the shower, I had to sit down to catch my breath after walking maybe 20 steps. And I remember my dad looking at me and saying, “Look, we’ve got to figure out what’s wrong with you.”

At the hospital they found an oversized polyp in me, which they thought was causing everything.

I had surgery on July 11, 2016, and I woke up Tuesday morning on July 12 to find out I had stage III colon cancer. [Editor’s note: It would later progress to stage IV.] Twenty-five years old, you’re not expecting to hear that you have colon cancer, or any type I

of cancer. So when I heard that, I was in shock for a good half a day. My dad stayed with me the entire day. Eventually, I wrapped my head around it and said, “All right, recovery starts today. The fight starts today. Let’s go.”

After six months of chemo and then surgery for colon cancer, they found out that I also had thyroid cancer. I was diagnosed with MAP syndrome, a genetic mutation passed down from each parent. They’ve seen situations like mine, where you get colon cancer and you get another cancer, but they’ve also seen situations like my older sister’s, where she’s had no issues so far.

We were sitting on the hospital bed, me and my dad. And we were like, “We need to do something once we beat this.” So I got this tattoo: “Never be ashamed of your scars.” The ribbon’s the memory of everyone who’s lost their battle with cancer or is fighting cancer every day. I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I’ve been clean for four years. You see people every day who are diagnosed and then a couple months later they’re gone. When I was going through it, that was in the back of my mind.

Not everyone gets to beat cancer, so the scars are something to be proud of. I’m able to keep telling my story. — A S T O L D T O M . A .

“Eventually, I wrapped my head around it and said, ‘All right, recovery starts today.

The fight starts today.’ ” —JED DUGGAN 6 8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

I S T A R T E D H A V I N G pain in my shoulder, so I went to an urgent care, and they said I had a SLAP tear in my shoulder. But my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, she’s a nurse. And she said, “That doesn’t make any sense—you don’t have a SLAP tear.”

About five weeks later, I was having a lot of pain, so I went back to the urgent care, and then they ran a bunch of tests and sent me to the hospital. That’s when they took the CT scan and suggested I get a biopsy.

I went home for the weekend, and then I came back to the office—I believe it was on a Tuesday, February 4, 2020. That’s when I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. And it had spread to the liver.

I’ve been cut open a bunch of times, and there’s evidence of that. There were complications from my first procedure that resulted in life-threatening internal bleeding and three more surgeries. They actually put coils in. I have four scars total. The ones on my left side are pretty long, basically the size of my whole abdomen.

At first, they pissed me off. You see them and you just get upset. When you’re younger and more ignorant, you may see people like me and find their defects kinda gross.

I have scars like that now, and I’m starting to embrace them. They symbolize what I’ve been through.

Prior to the diagnosis, I golfed a few times a week at the country club I belong to. I picked it up back in high school. In the wintertime, I was a skier, so I’d take a bus every weekend to New Hampshire or Vermont. I was very active, but I didn’t really think about my body beyond having a physical every few years.

I’ve been successful in life—I work as a software developer in the financial-services industry, and I’ve been with my company for over a decade. Any challenge that I’m facing, I usually figure out a way to solve it. So I feel like this is just another challenge. I think I’ve been doing a pretty decent job so far.

I’m not sure what the road ahead is, but I do know that the doctor says, for all I’ve been through, that I’m still on pace for where they thought I would be a year ago. I go to the doctor every six weeks for a CT scan. We’re seeing real progress: The cancer’s not gone, but it’s not spreading like wildflowers. And at the end of this, I’ll have a story I’ll be able to tell and hopefully it can help people who are going through this. — A S TO L D TO M . A .

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

6 9

o

n

Ph

otog

y re raphs by T

a ll H

m

pt

Styled by Erica M

i laj o b o er with M

D

od w a

u

n he t d ht an g i — e, e tl r c o e i p h ic s ryw sN l e u v b e s u s p De s wa he e t l h p t wi from e Sta nd n c d n a o e i i t V t t a , s e ersa rne r retr year v e e p n t w p o a fe s e In , in c h e ch r r t ra a ow e f e o f H n . o f B l F life he k ng imse n h o n o p n o e e L cus o es de pers be. o e o g th o h t t s f ple into to sed a g o t n p i S sup grow he’s

ers, watches that cost more than my mother’s house. Just a world I never imagined I could take part in.

Fast-forward to 2021, and I’m in a much better place now. So when GQ reached out to see if I was interested in interviewing my guy Vince Staples, it was an easy yes.

I’ve known Vince since he was 25. The first time I met him, he was a guest on the show I cohost with The Kid Mero, Desus & Mero, and Vince and I ended up having these long, meandering conversations: about the di≠erence between L.A. shootings and NYC shootings

(drive-bys versus walk-ups), about his hometown of Long Beach, and a whole bunch of other hood stu≠ that ended up being cut when the episode actually aired, probably for legal purposes.

Vince is a bit younger than I am, but there’s something special about talking to him. His viewpoints are always so contrarian, and yet when you stop to think about what he just said, he always makes perfect sense. It’s like talking to a knucklehead nephew and an older, wiser, all-knowing uncle at the same time.

It’s been three years since Vince dropped a new album (2018’s FM!). For a minute he was everywhere—constantly on Twitter, grinding through viral videos, doing interviews—and then he took a little time o≠ to work on himself. It seems to have paid o≠. When I spoke with him in early March, Vince, now 27, seemed happier.

Excited about the future. We met over Zoom for several conversations and ended up talking about everything: his new self-titled LP, the influence of Nipsey Hussle, and not fucking around when it comes to raccoons. With another full-length album and a Netflix show bearing his name on the horizon, we’re going to get a whole lot of Vince Staples, and the world will be better for it.

DESUS NICE: The first track on the new album wasn’t poppy, but the beat was kind of upbeat. And then at one point, you’re just like, “I want to shoot a n-gga in the head.” And I was like, “Okay. All right.

This is Vince Staples.” Your lyrics are hardcore. There’s hardcore gangster rap, but it’s not over-the-top like your stuff, which still somehow feels light. How do you find that balance?

VINCE STAPLES : That whole verse is just based on feelings that I had when I was younger. Certain things that I’ve seen or that I’ve experienced where I grew up on the Northside. So it never comes across, to me, as showboaty or glorifying. It might seem like it’s stark, or that I’m trying to make it scary, but that’s not what it is. A lot of the time it comes from a positive space. From a then-and-now kind of perspective.

You’ve said that you do the same thing every day. Walk us through an average morning as Vince Staples. In the pandemic or out of the pandemic?

In the pandemic now. I wake up early.

I watch either First Take or Undisputed, depending on who I’m trying to hear.

I’m not watching live sports or anything like that right now. That’s all I need: First Take or Undisputed. Start making coffee.

I’m trying to get off the coffee, though, so sometimes I’ll make tea. I brush my teeth like a psychopath—to be honest, way too many times a day. It’s probably not healthy.

Then I’ll drink my coffee, go through these emails I try not to respond to, and brush my teeth again.

What was your gym schedule like?

Because I found that everybody I know, they were either people who were working out before the pandemic and they stopped

7 2

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

←← OPENING PAGES

jacket $2,290 shirt $490 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello pants $935 Louis Vuitton Men’s socks $115 Charvet watch (throughout) $5,450 Cartier necklace $7,900 David Yurman ← OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket $950 pants $495 Homme Plissé Issey Miyake t-shirt $7 H&M sneakers $60 Vans his own socks Uniqlo

necklace $7,900 David Yurman THIS PAGE

jacket $1,550 pants $730 Salvatore Ferragamo sweater $995 Ralph Lauren sneakers $60 Vans

the same, but I feel what you was trying to do.” On Call of Duty all day. People is crazy on Xbox.

You’re right. It’s toxicity. Do you ever interact with the people? Do you turn your mic on? I usually be in the party with the people I know. One of my homies, he has friends on Xbox that he’s had for 10 years. People who he’s never met in real life—they be talking about each other’s kids. It’s just an interesting thing. Just seeing how real stuff ties into social media now. We really have a digital life that we can live.

That’s like people’s new families. Yeah, it’s crazy.

It’s kind of like on Twitter. Sometimes you’ll see people on Twitter who had kids when it started, and now their kids are graduating and stuff. You never met them, but you’re like, Okay, that’s little Reggie. He’s in fourth grade now.

It’s crazy, because it’s the world now. The world’s changed so much that it’s to a point where, to a lot of people, social media and the internet almost hold more weight than real life. It’s just the way that we digest things. When I started making music, there wasn’t as much social media interaction. There wasn’t Instagram.

There wasn’t even streaming. It was uploading stuff on MediaFire, or trying to get DatPiff or 2DopeBoyz to write about you. For it to completely turn to where it’s in your hands in the span of, what, 10 years? It’s a crazy thing to just even think about. or people who started working out wild after the pandemic started. Which one were you? So, look, it’s going to sound crazy.

But it’s cool. We family. Before the pandemic I was doing six workouts a week. I was doing three days a week lifting. And I was on three days a week doing, like, boxing stuff—like karate-type shit. I’ve been doing that with my friends since we was kids. Boys & Girls Clubs kids. Your mama would make you go learn karate when you’re young. And then, when the pandemic happened, I couldn’t do that anymore, obviously. So I was trying to work out a little bit here and there, and I fell off a little bit.

I hear you. My friends had me on NBA 2K like a madman at the beginning of the pandemic. I couldn’t do it. I had to quit.

Are you a PlayStation person or an Xbox person? I got both. It’s two diverse communities, though. Xbox is way more

7 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

competitive. Sometimes I want to play Overwatch with the Korean kids, so I might have to get on the PlayStation. I played PlayStation for a long time, and then one of my homies got me to get on Xbox just to play with him, and then I learned about the toxicity that is the Xbox. I literally recently just got a PlayStation 5 because I was like, “Look, man, I need something to do so I’m not working all day.” It’s a little bit calmer. That Xbox life—they ready to die for that.

They don’t play around on Xbox. I put BLM, Black Lives Matter, as my [gamer] tag, just because I was like, “Let me see what happens.” Bro. Bad mistake.

Then they don’t want to say the N-word because they’ll get banned, so they’ll hop in your DMs and they’ll send you the voice mails that be like, “All lives matter!” I’m like, “That’s not exactly

If you were a new artist coming into the game right now, how do you think it would work for you? Imagine you had to come into the game and you had to make your name off a TikTok. I was talking to my friend DJ Dahi about this earlier, who produces a lot of my stuff. He produces a lot of good stuff just in general—his biggest one was probably 21 Savage’s “A Lot.” He always talks about music being so time-specific. Certain things come out at certain times. We all know what a good song sounds like, but timing is what makes something unique. When you think about Donald Glover dropping “This Is America,” I remember he had that song recorded for years before he dropped it. But the timing made it a cultural shift, because of all the things that were happening politically. If he dropped that song a couple years before, I don’t know if it does what it did with everything around it. But it was still a great song, no matter what. You really never know.

← OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket $2,125 pants $695 Versace

shirt $320 Acne Studios sneakers $110 New Balance his own socks Uniqlo bracelet $325 David Yurman THIS PAGE

shirt $825 Caruso t-shirt $125 Levi’s Vintage Clothing pants $1,200 Dior Men sneakers $180 Salomon his own socks Uniqlo

This is something I’ve always wondered about recording music. Before an NBA game, you’ll see Steph Curry shooting, and the average person will never know what it’s like to be able to just put the ball up in the air and have it land exactly where you want it. Now, as a rapper, when you first start rapping, it’s A, B, C, whatever. Easy stuff. Then you get to the point where it’s you and it’s super intrinsic: You’re rhyming fast, you’re doing styles. Do you ever stop and think, Oh, shit, I didn’t realize I got nicer than the last album? Literally, I didn’t start making music until I started making music. When I was 15, 16, and I met Earl [Sweatshirt], Syd, Mike G, Matt Martians…

Just so many people that helped me. I didn’t know anything about music or what I was doing. So at the beginning, for the first four, five years of just me trying to learn how to rap, I was just doing what everybody else was doing. If you’re rapping like this, I’m rapping like this.

I remember I was on tour with Mac Miller.

He and his security guard used to always say, “Oh, make sure you say your name, because no one knows who you are.” That’s such a thing that you don’t think about. So it was mostly learning about introductory steps of making music. I remember going on tour with Schoolboy Q and him going, “I hear you rapping, but it’s too slow. Make it faster.” People would tell me how things work, and I’ll just keep asking questions along the way. People will remind you. I’ve always been detail-oriented as far as how I wrote, because I used to speak really slowly or I’d start stuttering.…

Really? I always had to make sure that my lines could convey something, because I wasn’t going to be able to do a bunch of crazy flows. My asthma was fucked up too when I was a kid. It was worse than it is now. So I try to make sure that I have specific things [to say] that stand out. I try to write certain things based on the beats I was getting.

Oh, yeah. I learned that the listener is coming to you because they want you to give them a break away from normality.

This dude named SAINt JHN—he’s a great musician. Two years ago he said to me, “[Your music’s] good, but no one cares.”

I was like, “Explain that.”

“Everyone’s busy,” he said. “Because [the listener] just got off work. They might hate their wife. They might hate their husband. They might hate their kids. They hate their job. They hate the car. They hate the house. Life’s not perfect. They don’t have time to try to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. You’re just supposed to

7 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

shirt $595 Z Zegna sweater $1,245 Missoni pants $425 Drake’s belt $18 H&M his own sneakers Jordan Brand x Union his own socks Uniqlo

make them feel better and make them feel good. Put them in a specific space.”

And that’s just something that I’ve been thinking about a lot. Something that I learned from him. I’m just learning how to have a balance of everything within the same space and just not necessarily put a lot of pressure on what we create.

I’ve known you for a couple of years, and you seem more relaxed now. You seem comfortable. You seem more at ease with yourself. You were always happy.

You’re a happy dude. But you had to learn to remove the pressure that you were putting on yourself. I’ve grown up in a specific type of environment my whole life. And I was in that environment nonstop with no breaks for 20-something years.…

Then I was constantly putting out music,

constantly touring. But I hadn’t been able to have a mental gap or space to really live an actual life outside of that environment. So it’s getting out of that. And a lot of relieving myself of that goes to helping the people from my environment, my community. Like my older homies and my younger homies.

I show appreciation for them and the things they do. I’m trying to right some wrongs and help people.

Right. It’s something that’s taken weight off my shoulders. Pressure, tension.

I feel like it’s important for me to try to mend relationships. Of course, some things aren’t forgiven, but I’m just trying to make sure that I’m becoming the person that I’m supposed to be. In a perfect world, more than anything musically or more than anything creatively, my goal in life is

to be able to live in Long Beach peacefully.

And for everybody else to be able to live in Long Beach peacefully. That means a lot to me.

It’s also like, how do you have that constant growth while giving back and not forgetting where you come from? It used to be a stress for me. But it’s been done before, and by so many other great people. Now it’s all about how you carry yourself. And I learned that from just watching Snoop, watching Nip, watching YG, watching Ice Cube—watching these people navigate all these things and become something greater.

That’s good to hear. Did you have to learn to use external validation to your advantage? I know in my case, I never really cared. I was always like, “Whatever, if n-ggas fuck with me, n-ggas fuck with me. I don’t need that. I have to be successful regardless.” But then you actually see people were rooting for you and what you’ve done for them—they remind you where you’re coming from.

And then you start being like, “Yo, this means something.” When I was younger, I used to like that people didn’t like me. That was the identity of my neighborhood. Like, we don’t got no homies, we don’t clique up. It was a “we beef with everybody”–type thing. Maturity changes that. So now it’s like, I want the people who we didn’t get along with growing up. I feel like music is an outlet, right? When you’re going through certain things and certain time periods in the community, you can hear it in the music.

We hear Summertime ’06 and it wasn’t that friendly. I mean, it wasn’t about unity. It was “Northside Long Beach.” Not anything else. In my specific part, we run this side.

Little stupid stuff that we said when we was kids. Right?

And then I realized something. At first I thought I was just picking myself up along with where I come from. But you can do that without putting others down. That’s something I didn’t know when I was younger.

With Nipsey’s passing, that was huge—major—across the whole world.

And you’re someone who comes from a similar background. You’re not Nipsey, but you’re a successful rapper. You still be out there. How does all of that make you feel? I think it all depends on what you stand for. If you look historically at people in leadership roles—especially leadership roles in Black communities, especially in urban communities—there’s no connection if you’re not physically there.

Right. From John Huggins and Bunchy Carter in Los Angeles to when you think about what Ralph Abernathy (continued on page 80)

7 8

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

← OPPOSITE PAGE

coat $1,665 Caruso

t-shirt $330 pants $445 A-Cold-Wall sneakers $110 New Balance necklace $225 David Yurman → THIS PAGE

leather jacket (price upon request) Lanvin jacket $670 Homme Plissé Issey Miyake pants $25 Dickies his own socks Uniqlo

hair by jacki brown. manicure by natasha ray at noir grooming lounge. tailoring by yelena travkina. produced by camp productions. special thanks to palihouse santa monica.

V I N C E S TAP L E S Are your people excited about the vaccine? Or are you having to talk to people and convince them to get it?

Oh, no. Look man, my mama took us to the hospital. We get our shots, man. We went to public school. You go to public school, you got to get some shots. I just feel like there’s so many people who’ve passed away from COVID, they had to do something. I’m just happy that they’re trying to make sure it’s accessible and that the people who are high-risk get it first.

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 7 8

and Fred Hampton and all these people did from all the di≠erent places. Huey Newton, Angela Davis. People that have touched people. They had to touch people physically on a local level. And to me there’s no di≠erence from these people and Nipsey Hussle. I mean, Nipsey Hussle is Gil Scott-Heron. Nipsey Hussle is James Baldwin. He hears these people that had a message.

Crazy as it might seem, Black leadership is something that’s always di≠erent in hindsight. You know what I mean? I wasn’t there for Malcolm X. My mom, she’ll tell me about Black Panthers being in L.A. and Compton.

She saw how things transitioned and how things turned out afterwards. She saw the whole thing. The end of the story is just as important as everything else. So I can’t say if it makes me feel any other way, except motivated and inspired, because, you know, Nipsey Hussle died doing what Nipsey did. It’s not like he died doing anything else. He died in that parking lot taking pictures with kids, giving them money.

I remember when Tupac died, all of a sudden we just started getting all types of demos and shit leaking. And it was like, some of the stuff he clearly did not want hitting the streets. And I was wondering, are leaks something you think about? Like, what happens to the songs in the Vince Staples vault when you don’t use them?

I think, nothing? Back then, with Tupac, recording music was such a di≠erent process. It was an ordeal to really record something on tape. To do punch lines and ad-libs and things like that. It was di≠erent. Now it’s a little bit easier. Everything’s on a computer, digitized. Albums have got a little bit easier to create after people pass. You could have a Pop Smoke [album], and they’re able to make sure that they still have a good body of work to use. So things that came out since Pop Smoke’s passing all sound great. It’s all about the people you have around you. My people, they’re not going to let nothing come out that they know I wasn’t going to want to come out.

Oh, wait, I wasn’t trying to get dark like that—like what’s going to come out when you die. I meant, like, what are you going to do with the songs? [Laughs.]

Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I don’t know. But that was a good question. We got a lot of them. They sit around and become a “This Is America” situation. You never know when you might just have something that becomes timely.

8 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

Have you had to stay confined at home because of your asthma?

Oh, yeah. It’s crazy. I got to stay at the house.

I mean, it’s not that bad. I’m here a lot, anyway. I need to furnish it. My house has been empty for a long time. I’m trying to get my house in order. I’m good at pieces, but I’m not good at room dynamics. Sometimes the room be looking too empty or too cluttered. That’s a big problem I got.

I have the same problem. I have no art on my walls or nothing. I don’t know where to begin with that.

This is my thing. I’m fake bougie. Right?

Right.

It’s like, if I’m going to spend some money on some art, it needs to make some money for me later. I’m not going to just put a poster on my

“I’ve never been on vacation, so I might just do a vacation.

But I don’t even know where I would go.” wall. I need stu≠ for real. But then real joints down at the Martin Lawrence Galleries, it’s too much money. I don’t got thousands to let a painting sit on the wall. I’m cool. I’ll make my own artwork if it comes down to that. I could still pick up a paintbrush.

You told me once that home repairs aren’t your forte.

I’m not handy at all, bro. I’m not handy.

I don’t even have a toolbox. I got one wrench. I buy stu≠ at the Home Depot as I’m needed by my mama. Or I’ll call my little cousin to handle that. But my mama be on me. She said, “You can’t be a homeowner, not knowing what’s going on.”

Being a homeowner, it catches up to you.

And the animals! That’s my problem. It’d be animals outside, and I didn’t think of that.

When I bought a house, I got a yard. And something wanna live in it, and you’re going to have to get it out. And with me it’s like, “All right. You mind your business, I’ll mind my business.” But the animals be getting a little too close to the house sometimes. You know what I mean? I remember there was like a giant rodent. I don’t even know what it was, but it was by the south side, by the garage.

I just had to leave it there. And man, I kept calling people to try to take it out of there for like five, seven hours.

And then they told me to call animal control, and animal control is controlled by the police department. [Editor’s note: Animal control in Long Beach is actually under the parks department.] And Black people feel a way about calling the police to the house.

I was scared the whole time. That was my personal hiccup as a homeowner. Eventually they came to the house to remove the rodent; they was cool. But I was like, “Man, I don’t know if I want you all to come over here and be looking at me like, ‘Oh, look at this n-gga; he can’t get a rodent out of this house.’ ” I got to stand strong.

That happened to me when I was taking care of my parents’ house. It was in New York—we got these big-ass raccoons, like the size of dogs and shit— and a car hit a raccoon. It died, just in the middle of the street. And it starts rotting—the cars are driving around it.

I called the city, and the city was like, “That’s your raccoon.” I’m like, “N-gga, I don’t own the raccoon. What do you want me to do here?”

Long Beach raccoons are famous. A Long Beach raccoon will chase you to the death. And they never by themselves. It’s like 5 to 10 in a pack. They running around the Eastside. They running around the beach, and they look up at you. I remember it was 2017 on the Eastside, kind of by the beach. It was like a specific gang of raccoons that was just terrorizing people.

They didn’t want no food. They didn’t want to play. They was like, “We see people, we own them.” And it was on the news and all that. But they just let them run free.

Raccoons is scary, too, because they got— They got thumbs!

Yeah! And they’d be walking on their back legs. I don’t trust that.

They can open the door. They can get into your house.

They could lift the lid off your garbage can. They literally just use both hands like they’re humans.

That thumb changes a lot.

That’s a game changer. If dogs had thumbs, they would not be pets.

That’s a fact. They’d be in the wild.

Where’s the first place you’re trying to go when it’s all safe to travel again?

I’ve never been on vacation, so I might just do a vacation. But I don’t even know where I would go.

You’ve just never been on vacation?

So every time you’ve been on a trip, it’s been for work?

Yep. Oh, wow. Damn. Yeah, you definitely need to take a little time out for yourself.

I feel like I’m missing out. desus nice is a comedian and the cohost of Showtime’s ‘Desus & Mero.’

DE L ROY L IND O

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 5 6

Da 5 Bloods, a character who grew from the parts of him that he doesn’t discuss. “However I, as an actor, mine my own anger, however I mine that—that’s my stu≠,” he says. “That’s my personal shit that I’m keeping for myself to utilize in service of this wonderful craft that I get to pursue.”

five or six years old, Lindo portrayed a king in the school Nativity play. He recalls the scene: “The kid who was playing King Herod was a guy named Michael Penny.

The dialogue that we had to say was on these cardboard little cards—we held them as we were rehearsing. Michael Penny could not remember his lines, and at a certain point in the rehearsal, my teacher said, ‘Do it the way Delroy does it.’ ” The feeling of a∞rmation planted a seed.

Another pivotal moment in his development came in 1973 when a 21-year-old Lindo, then living in Toronto, visited New York City and saw a performance by the Negro Ensemble Company of The River Niger, a family drama set in Harlem. “I’m seeing all these Black actors onstage in front of me, and I’m also seeing all these Black people in the theater,” Lindo recalls. “I’d never experienced anything like that, and I walked out of that theater with the notion that it might be possible for me to be an actor and have a career in the theater.”

Four years later, still without much stage experience, he was accepted to the American Conservatory Theater, an acting school based in San Francisco (where he would first meet his future Malcolm X costar Denzel Washington).

He moved to New York in 1979 and began performing o≠-Broadway and traveling for roles in regional productions.

He was an archetypal theater kid, in a sense.

“What bequeaths me a sense of belonging is when I am part of an acting company,” he says.

“Part of a film crew. And when it works, it is what? A∞rming. Which is what that lady gave me when I was five years old.”

His art could also deliver lasting blows, however. In 1983, Lindo landed the lead role of Walter Lee Younger in a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s play about a Black family struggling to make it on the South Side of Chicago. It was to be produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, under the aegis of the original director of the drama’s 1959 watershed Broadway debut, Lloyd Richards, then move to New York for the play’s 25th anniversary. But Lindo, ever the outsider from South London, could not convince himself that the African American experience was his to interpret. His performance, he recalls, was flat, and W H E N H E WA S

the revival never made it out of New Haven.

“I was the weak link in that production,” Lindo says. “It still hurts.”

But three years later he played Walter Lee Younger in a production at the Kennedy Center that broke box o∞ce records and wowed critics. On opening night, after the show, the playwright’s widower, Robert Nemiro≠, came to the hotel holding a review from The Washington Post. “I remember leaving the room because I didn’t want to hear the review, sitting in the hallway in the hotel while he was reading the review to the other actors in the room,” he says.

“And I remember walking back into the room and everybody was just beaming.”

Lindo’s deep research and reimagining of his character’s backstory had been the difference between the roles. He would bring the approach to all of his future roles, including Paul in Da 5 Bloods, for which he interviewed two cousins who had served in Vietnam.

For West Indian Archie, in Malcolm X, he visited Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn to observe stroke victims, to better inhabit the frail old man Archie became after years on the streets. He took piano lessons to play Woody Carmichael in Crooklyn. When he was o≠ered the role of an apple picker who was secretly having sex with his daughter in The Cider House Rules, Lindo decided that the character’s abuses grew not from evil but from real love for his daughter—a terribly misguided love.

But that rigorous approach was not always well received; Lindo feels it ultimately contributed to his long fallow period. “There were a couple of projects that I worked on many years ago where the scripts in question needed some work,” he says. “And the manner in which I communicated that to the producer—and he agreed, by the way—was not as diplomatic as it could have been. And when one, as I was in this particular case, is being paid a lot of money to be in a project, to come to the producer and express dissatisfaction with the material, that can be seen as an a≠ront.”

Lindo would not name the projects, but in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year, he was quoted as having spoken about a fraught dynamic with Miramax, the studio that produced The Cider House Rules, that did not endear him to Harvey Weinstein. After Lindo’s performance in the 1999 movie, critics proclaimed it his Oscar year. But the studio didn’t support him.

“Do I feel that some of the disagreements that I’ve had, were I a white actor, might I have been given a pass?” he poses to me. “Yes, we don’t get as many chances. But I’ve got to say this in tandem: To speak about it in those kinds of terms seems reductive. It’s more complicated than that, but it’s not. So if you’re in the center of that, how do you navigate your way through it?”

When he didn’t have meaningful work, he went looking elsewhere for validation, and it turned up in surprising places. “I remember being on Park Avenue years ago,” he says.

“I had a little 1968 VW bug. I parked my car, and a bicycle messenger sped past me and then he stopped. ‘Oh shit, man, oh shit,’ he said. ‘I dig you, man. You know why I dig you?’

I said, ‘Why you dig me, man?’ He said, ‘Man, because nobody will fuck with you in the movies, man. Don’t nobody fuck with you in

the movies,’ and he rode o≠. I said, ‘Man, God bless you, brother.’ The way I translated it was what I do is a∞rming to him.”

“When I think about perhaps some of my more self-destructive tendencies,” he adds, “what caused me not to self-destruct? He, She, the Universal Being, was not going to allow that. There was a plan.”

during the filming of Da 5 Bloods when the actors who weren’t in a scene would observe the others and absorb the impact of their work. Jonathan Majors, the youngest of the leads, has an appreciation for Lindo that is poetic. “He’s a tiger,” he tells me, “and I’m the younger tiger that’s watching this mature tiger move and how e≠ortless he is. Where I would be a bit more athletic, he’s graceful.”

Clarke Peters recalls noticing Lindo deep in thought in moments of downtime, presumably rehearsing his next performance in his head. Norm Lewis had the sense that something special was happening: “I said it one time, and he’s like, ‘Don’t say anything, don’t say anything.’ But I’m like, ‘This is his Oscar moment. Whether nominated or winning, this is his Oscar movie.’ ” Lindo and I met before the Oscar nominations were announced and after he had been snubbed by the Golden Globes; he refused to answer questions about awards. This would not be his year. But he still has a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. “We did this as Black people,” he tells me of Da 5 Bloods. “We presented these brothers, man. We paid an appropriate homage to these cats, in their humanity.

That’s why I wanted to become an actor.”

There’s a battle scene in Da 5 Bloods, a flashback to the war, in which the soldiers’ helicopter makes a crash landing after being shot out of the sky. The aircraft lands near a downed plane containing gold bars that the Bloods had set out to retrieve. On set, Lindo watched Lee direct the scene as Lewis, Peters, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. ran through the underbrush, making their way toward the loot. “It was so heroic to watch these cats,” Lindo says.

“We don’t ordinarily get to do that. It almost brought tears to my eyes. I told them, ‘That scene, it was extraordinary for me to witness, as an actor, as a castmate, but also as a man, and as a Black man, watching my comrades get to tell that story on film.’ ” A similar scene from the shoot of The Harder They Fall, in Santa Fe, stayed with Lindo, a moment between takes when he found himself o≠ to the side of the set. “I was watching these three brothers on horseback,” he recalls. “Two of the actors were background actors, and one was a central figure. And I was just observing them, these three dudes. They were just talking. And I said to myself—‘That image.’ I took a photograph and I sent it to my lady. I said, ‘We don’t get to see that. We don’t get to see those kinds of images of us.’ ” It was a new vision of Hollywood, a scene that filled Lindo with hope. “I don’t say this very often,” he tells me. “I’m actually—can I use the word excited? I’ve been around the block too many times to say I’m excited. But I am.”

THERE WERE MOMENTS

mosi secret is a writer in New York City.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 1

T YL ER M AH AN C OE

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 3 4

Jody decides she’s with him, at least long enough that she finds herself pregnant. Then she splits, back to Michigan, where her child, a son, is born. She doesn’t even put “Coe” on his birth certificate. A year later comes a phone call: “David Allan is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Please come to Nashville, to Johnny Cash’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and let him meet his son.”

On the plane to Tennessee, she prays: “Lord, help me be strong. Let me stand up for myself.”

At the house, Willie Nelson is there. So are Kris Kristo≠erson and his wife. June Carter Cash, of course. Waylon… Well, she doesn’t quite remember if Waylon and his wife, Jessi Colter, are there, but what the hell, let’s say they are, just to complete this firmament, this Nashville Versailles. David Allan Coe is in an upstairs bedroom, apparently bereft. Johnny Cash himself takes the kid up to the room. He says, “David, I need you to look after this child for a second,” handing the baby over before Coe has a chance to protest. When he comes back a few minutes later, the two are getting along.

“Say, this kid likes me. He seems smart too,” says Coe. “Well, that’s your son,” says Johnny Cash.“His name is Tyler.”

The weekend goes well, but Jody tears herself away. Back in Michigan, she leaves Tyler with her parents overnight for the very first time, to attend a wedding in Detroit. When she calls to check in, her mother tells her, “David just called from the airport. He says he’s coming to get you.” Maybe it’s whatever it is about David Allan Coe that’s hard to say no to. Maybe it’s that she suspects she’s pregnant again.

But Jody says yes. Before they leave to start their new family life, Coe takes the keys to that orange Camaro and tosses them to Jody’s brother. She won’t need that car anymore.

And if that don’t make a young man feel like it might be his destiny to write about country songs, well…

Like many country stars, David Allan Coe has always had a thing for including his family in his act. By age two, Tyler had already appeared on the cover of the album Son of the South, on which he sits on his father’s lap, draped in a Confederate flag, while David Allan leans down, seemingly to take a bite out of the child’s ear. DAC enlisted Tyler as a regular onstage when he was still a toddler, performing with his boy a maudlin duet of a song that Bobby Bare had made famous with his own son, “Daddy What If.” When DAC went out on tour, the whole family went. Jody was dragooned into playing keyboards, an instrument she did not actually play. At home, first in Branson, Missouri, and then in Nashville, it was all hands on deck, writing and assembling newsletters for the o∞cial fan club, of which Tyler was president. You’re either with David Allan Coe or you’re not.

After two more children—Shyanne and Carson—Jody put her foot down and said she and the kids were done traveling. There was less of David Allan Coe around the house then, but his shadow was still felt both when he was on the road and at home. “There was an element of fear. He was a scary presence,” says Tanya, who now runs a popular vintageclothing store in Nashville and has released two albums of her own music. “I say it was like living with a ghost. You never knew when he would be in this very bad mood that just seemed evil. Where if you were in the same room with him, you were probably getting on his nerves.”

Tyler was 12 when Jody worked up the courage to leave. They’d just traded up to a topof-the-line Prevost tour bus, something David Allan Coe had been dreaming of forever, and she figured he might be briefly happy enough to let her go. The kids still occasionally joined their father on tour during school vacations, but it was a period of relative normalcy in suburban Nashville. Predictably, Tyler started to get bored in school. Then drunk in school.

When he spotted military-school pamphlets in his mother’s mail (Jody says they were a friend’s idea, not hers), he called his dad and said he wanted back on the “with” side of David Allan Coe. Jody was heartbroken; so was Tanya.

“I thought I was going to die,” Tanya says.

“The idea that Tyler was going to be able to leave this lackluster life we had and go be part of that excitement, and to have a relationship with my dad… Of course, Tyler had a completely di≠erent experience than that.”

Tyler embraced the romance of the working musician’s grind more than he did sex, drugs, and rock and roll—a respect for professionalism that he would later bring to celebrating the session musicians and producers who are the backbone of country music. Within months, David Allan Coe informed his son that he was the band’s new guitarist, despite Tyler’s minimal skills in that area. It’s fair to say that onstage in front of thousands of cantankerous David Allan Coe fans is not the most nurturing place on earth to develop one’s craft, though perhaps it is good practice for putting one’s podcast out into the world. Before long he opted to travel on the FROM THE BEGINNING,

David Allan Coe saw his marriage to Jody Benham, complete with a new son and, soon, a daughter, Tanya Montana, as a fresh start. He cut his hair, had a tattoo artist cover all his prison ink in one marathon session. Which is not to say life was conventional. For a while, Coe collected big cats—two jaguars, two leopards, and a bobcat. “At night, they make the most terrifying sounds. It sounds like a woman screaming,” says Tyler, who was once bitten by a frisky jaguar. There was also a chimpanzee, named Rocky, who had to go once he took to throwing the contents of his diaper at Jody.

A S T Y L E R C O E T E L L S I T,

8 2

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

band’s bus, rather than DAC’s. Road manager Bruce Smith became a sort of surrogate father; Tyler would stay with Smith and his family, in Springfield, Missouri, between tours. He doggedly got better at guitar. He lugged a suitcase of books on the road, holing up in the bus and reading while at the motorcycle rallies DAC played every year. Lest this seem too monkish, he was often on acid at the time.

“He was a just a typical teenage shithead,” Smith says fondly.

A decade and more went by, the band playing as many as 200 dates a year. By the 2010s, David Allan Coe shows had become scattershot a≠airs at best. It was not unusual for DAC to spend the majority of his time onstage ranting about how unjustly he had been treated by the country music industry, grumbling about the sound system, and then rushing through a sloppy medley of his, or other people’s, hits.

By now the band’s leader, Tyler became the de facto complaint department for both sides, audience and father.

Then, in March 2013, during a tour, David Allan Coe got into a car accident in Ocala, Florida. The last Tyler heard from his father, once he recovered, was that he planned to play a few solo shows before getting the band back together. Thus, it came as a surprise to see him onstage with an entirely new lineup at Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic that year. It was a move that Tyler and others believe stemmed from the apparent desire of David Allan’s newest wife, Kimberly, to build a wall between DAC and people from his previous life.

Tyler found himself back in Springfield, with no driver’s license, no transferable job skills, and a felony record stemming from a drug arrest on tour (possession of 12 hits of LSD) and an ensuing DUI. For a while he sold plasma to get by, 30 or 40 bucks a pop, twice a week. On his 29th birthday, Tyler told his side of the band’s breakup story in a post on his blog, Baby Black Widows. “This is not a tirade or reproach,” he wrote. “I’m going back to Nashville to be around the rest of my family.”

Not long after that, he went looking for a podcast on country music; when he couldn’t find one, inspiration struck. The idea for Cocaine & Rhinestones arrived all but fully formed, the first five seasons laid out before him as clearly as a book fallen open to just the right page. A life’s work.

“It hit me with the most nauseating feeling of fear in my life,” he says. “I was almost physically ill. Because I knew that I had to do it.”

I asked Tyler if he felt in any way grateful to his father for putting him on this path, however inadvertently. “Grateful is probably not the word I would use,” he said. “But I do believe in God. I do believe I was made to do this. So it’s all happened the way that it had to happen for this to happen.” I had a somewhat startling thought: Would he still be in his father’s band if the choice hadn’t been taken out of his hands?

Would he have left of his own accord?

He answered quickly, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world: “No,” he said.

“He’s my dad.”

self-inflicted ugliness surrounding David Allan Coe that it obscures a strain of archetypal American hucksterism for THERE IS ENOUGH

T Y L E R M AH A N C OE C O NT I N UED

which it is hard not to feel at least a little a≠ection. He rolled into Nashville in 1967, driving a hearse painted red and hand-lettered with the words “SUPPORT THE GRAND OLE’ OP’RY,” and soon took to wearing a mask and a rhinestone suit. He’d park the car outside the Opry’s home at the Ryman Auditorium, duck into the doorway of the stage door, and jog in place until he was sweaty. Then he would emerge, as though having just stepped o≠stage, to bestow autographs on approaching tourists. The Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, as Coe dubbed himself, is a character worthy of David Bowie.

DAC has always seemed devoted to the showbiz credo of “whatever works.” In the 1970s, he claimed to be employing country’s first all-female backing band, Ladysmith. In the 1980s, he became enamored of stage magic, eventually buying a theater in rural Arkansas and opening a magic show there. The act’s centerpiece was a “big cat” illusion, à la Siegfried & Roy, that culminated in young Tyler emerging from a box holding a stu≠ed Garfield doll. Coe’s magic skills were so ba±ingly nonexistent that the act verged on a kind of outsider art. His performances came to the attention of the magicians Penn Jillette and Teller, who became fascinated fans: “The greatest insult you can give in science is ‘He’s not even wrong.’ The analogue to that in magic is ‘What’s the e≠ect?

I don’t even know what the e≠ect is supposed to be,’ ” Jillette says. “That’s what David Allan Coe’s tricks were like.”

Much energy has been spent over the years investigating the foundational mythology of Coe’s persona: that he killed a man in prison for hitting on him, that he played guitar with Charles Manson, that he once stood up and peed on a record executive’s desk for keeping him waiting too long before a meeting, or later lived in a cave after having his assets seized by the IRS. The absolute truth of these legends seems to matter less than the fact that Coe himself surely by now believes them. (He may be the first profile subject in history to rail against a magazine, Rolling Stone, for daring to suggest he did not kill somebody.) He does appear to have entered the penal system at nine years old, consigned to a reform school by a stepmother who didn’t want an extra son inclined toward wildness. All told, he spent some two decades in and out of various institutions, including stints in the Ohio State Penitentiary, giving him perhaps the most legitimate claim to outlaw status of any star of the outlaw-country movement. He may have been a bit too much even for his fellow outlaws. “David Allen Coe is like a carnival coming at you with all the rides going at once,” Billy Joe Shaver supposedly once said.

The problem with “whatever works,” as has been made abundantly clear in recent years, is what happens when what works is deeply malign. In Coe’s case, his legacy has come to be widely defined by his two so-called X-rated albums: Nothing Sacred, released in 1978, and Underground Album, in 1982. They are collections of juvenile, vulgar, and o≠ensive songs, including ones that use the worst racial and homophobic slurs. For years the records were cult items, sold by mail order from the back of biker magazines, reemerging to a wider audience in the Napster era. Adding fuel to the fire, as if Coe needed the help, songs by a virulently white-supremacist singer who went by the

name Johnny Rebel were widely attributed to Coe on the illegal-download circuit. DAC has always insisted that he is neither a racist nor a homophobe and that the albums should be received as satire. For all his father’s sins that he will happily catalog, Tyler agrees. David Allan Coe is stubborn, retrograde, and in possession of racial attitudes complicated by his age, background, and experience in prison, he says, but he is not a white supremacist.

“If somebody showed up at a David Allan Coe show wearing Klan robes, they would get the shit kicked out of them,” he says, which may be true but also falls into the if-you-haveto-say-it category.

It does seem clear that the songs were meant to be funny. At least several of them can be read as being directly about the absurdity of bigotry. It’s also clear that none of that really matters. As Tyler himself says in a Cocaine & Rhinestones episode about Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee”: “Every songwriter knows what you meant to write in a song does not matter. It’s what people hear that determines the meaning of a song.” David Allan Coe has remained stubbornly allegiant to the X-rated albums, which he sells on tour, and to an audience that, at least in part, seems to take them at face value. Meanwhile, the o∞cial DAC Facebook page is a miasma of Trump memes and Confederate flags.

“At some point,” Tyler concedes, “he decided that if he was going to do the time, he was sure as fuck going to do the crime.”

I called Tyler Coe, he was agitated and depressed. The day before, the singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle, son of Steve Earle, had died of what would later be confirmed as an accidental overdose. There is an unspoken connection between the children of country stars: Shooter Jennings, Bobby Bare Jr., Hank Williams III, Waylon Payne, the son of guitarist Jody Payne and singer Sammi Smith. As John PayCheck, son of Johnny, told me, “The things that we can talk about, the things that we can share—it’s like an extended family.”

Tyler took pains to say that he and Justin had not been close but they had spent a few days together, two decades ago, that he found especially memorable. He was 16 at the time; Earle was 19. Their fathers were shooting a neverreleased movie called Blackbirds and Blazers, and the sons had been invited to appear in a few scenes, which primarily meant sitting around, killing time, and shooting the shit. They compared experiences on the road with their dads and played Justin’s guitar; mostly, like country fans of any era, but especially the late ’90s and early aughts, they bitched about the state of country music. “Back then the most common response to ‘What kind of music do you listen to?’ was ‘Everything except country and rap,’ ” Coe says. “I mean, you might as well say, ‘I don’t like music made by poor people.’ Justin and I only listened to country and rap.”

What they really connected on were all the bullshit things that fans seemed to believe “real” country depended on: drugs and booze, toxic masculinity, being born poor, being Southern, all of the superficial trappings of “authenticity.”

ONE NIGHT WHEN

“It came back to this idea: What makes country music good?” Tyler said. “And it’s working your ass o≠ inside the form. It’s getting inside it and living, sleeping, breathing inside it. You play guitar 10 hours a day. You copy down lyrics of songs you love and you draw a slash between every syllable and you figure out the mathematical pattern. You walk around all day making vowel sounds with your mouth to write a melody. It has nothing to do with the drugs you’ve done or the clothes you wear.”

The deceptively simple language of country music, he said, is the ancient language of poor people satirizing the rich beneath their noses, of the enslaved passing messages over their masters’ heads, the arcane, symbol-rich “green” and “bird” languages of alchemists and troubadours. A great country song may seem simple, but it taps into a storytelling mode as deep as the tarot, old as dirt.

By the end of his time with Earle, Tyler had begun to think in a kind of shorthand about all the misconceptions and misdirections that obscured the depth of the music he loved: “I walked away from that conversation with one phrase in my mind: ‘cocaine and rhinestones.’ ”

red-haired and rail thin, with an angular face. He claims, plausibly, to have worn the same clothes since he was 15. It’s something of an ongoing joke that people he spars with on Twitter inevitably make a snarky comment about his hair, the implication being that he’s a pretty boy. It has to be said that the hair is enviably lustrous.

When I finally drove up to Nashville to see him, he was waiting for me outside his apartment, posed like an album cover in aviator sunglasses, a gray-green western shirt, cowboy boots, and a black-and-white cowhide belt with an oversized buckle that he wore shifted over to one hip. We visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and thumbed through the museum’s archive of press and memorabilia clippings on David Allan Coe. “That should not be in here,” Tyler said, quickly shu±ing away a postcard that showed him as a naked cherub.

It was the first day the museum had opened since the coronavirus struck, and a handful of visitors wandered among the displays. Tyler had never set foot in here until after the first season of Cocaine & Rhinestones, thinking it was just a cheesy tourist trap. Now he’s spent countless hours in the museum’s archives.

Coe and his wife live in a cluttered, cozy two-bedroom apartment with Bill, the oneeyed dog. People assume Tyler has a regular stream of revenue from his father’s music, but the elder Coe either ceded or sold the rights to nearly all his music amidst bankruptcies and tax problems years ago. Since the conclusion of Cocaine & Rhinestones season one, Tyler’s sole income has come from his Patreon page, which he says totals about a thousand dollars a week, the same amount he made as a member of his father’s band. Tyler says he had multiple o≠ers from podcast companies to buy Cocaine & Rhinestones—including an extended courtship with Gimlet Media—but here he learned the lessons of his own subject matter well.

“I’ve spent my entire life watching old men complain about bad contracts they’ve signed, control they’ve given up, IP they’ve sold.

TYLER COE IS

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 3

T YL E R M AH AN C O E C O NT I N U ED

It’s the only story,” he says. “I would lose an arm before I would sell one percent of Cocaine & Rhinestones.”

It has to be said that the longer the break between podcast seasons has stretched, the more the Coe of Cocaine & Rhinestones has been overshadowed by the Coe of Your Favorite Band Sucks and of Twitter. That persona tends toward the swaggering and combative. As his sister Tanya puts it: “He’s a dick.”

The author of a post on the blog Saving Country Music wrote, “Something has changed in Tyler Mahan Coe, and pretty dramatically. That guy who seemed curiously well-adjusted, articulate, wise, and evenkeeled for the Coe blood coursing through his veins all of a sudden started living up to the type of guy you feared he could be when you first heard he was the son of David Allan.”

Tyler has dealt with some version of that his entire life. “I’ve been called a white supremacist like once a week,” he says. “For no other reason than my last name.”

But the question of what to take and what to reject from his father hangs over Tyler, as it does us all. “My father was my role model for what a man should be, which is loud enough to be paid attention to,” he says. “My whole life I’ve been told the worst thing that can happen is you be ignored. Loving you or hating you is the most important thing.

And obviously I would much rather be loved than hated. But also, it would be worse to be ignored. It really would.”

Of course, nobody has more reason than Tyler to know the danger of that approach: that it will come to overshadow everything else.

In the back of the apartment, a tiny bedroom serves as Tyler’s o∞ce. This is where he was completing his season about George Jones, which clocks in at over 18 hours, more than Ken Burns took to cover all of country music’s history. On a shelf rests a collection of cowboy boots; the closet holds a small but impressive collection of westernwear. .

“My last name is Coe,” he says. “If you invite me to a party, I am going to come correct.”

Among his pieces is a rhinestone-studded neckerchief. Rhinestones may be a symbol of superficiality, but that’s not all they are.

“If you’ve ever worn a piece of rhinestone clothing, you know,” Coe says. “You put it on, and when you move, you see points of light everywhere. It’s a very magical experience. It’s like being surrounded by fairies.”

And so we were back to bullfighting: Tyler believes the western rhinestone suit has its origins in the traje de luces (“suit of lights”), the outfit worn by toreadors. It’s a costume at once preeningly macho and nakedly vulnerable, patently absurd for the task of facing down the 1,000-pound beast before it, and yet glittering in starry defiance. “To strap a rhinestone suit on yourself and go out onstage and sing about your feelings, that’s some really intense shit. It’s like painting a bull’s-eye on yourself and being like, ‘Here I am. This is me,’ ” Coe says. “Why would you put on a rhinestone suit if what you were about to do next wasn’t, like, the most important thing in the world?”

brett martin is a gq correspondent.

8 4

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

T HE JAI L B RE A K AU T E U R

C O N T I N U E D F RO M PAG E 6 1

is sidHration, an archaic word that refers to the state of being “planet-struck.” Everyone at Réau is paralyzed. They aren’t even sure who is escaping. Another famous jailbreak artist, Antonio Ferrara, happens to be in a visitation chamber at the same time. When he hears the helicopter blades, he summons a guard to take him back to his cell.

Other guards, breaking free of their apparent hypnosis, attempt to call for backup, but the direct line from the prison to the nearby police station is inoperative, as a guard will later explain to French station BFM TV. That guard dials 17, the French equivalent of 911, on his cell phone. The operator who finally answers asks if the call is a joke, then demands to know the full name, address, registration number, and job title of the caller. The guard raises his voice, insisting that reinforcements are urgently needed. The operator tells him to calm down and follow protocol. The questions last a full five minutes.

By the end of the call, Faïd is already out in the sunlight of the courtyard, calmly walking down the path toward the helicopter, the power cutter in his hand. He feels in that moment like James Caan in his hero Michael Mann’s Thief—“entirely invested in the role,” as he puts it to me. Even the guards can’t help but admire his swagger. As one of them will later say in the documentary RHdoine Fafid: Public Enemy Number One, Faïd played the entire caper “like sheet music.”

The helicopter’s blades haven’t stopped turning. As Kemmet reports, Faïd notices a guard and two inmates staring at him from behind glass. He turns toward them, puts his right hand to his temple, and gives them an air force salute; then he climbs up into the front passenger seat beside the pilot.

“I’m not a terrorist,” Faïd tells Buy. “I haven’t killed anyone.” The pilot has no idea who Faïd is. But the prisoners left inside the jail do. A Snapchat video shot from within Réau’s walls would later show the helicopter taking off to the sound of cheering for the man called El Mago (“the Magician”). Moments later the cops arrive and launch what will become the largest manhunt in French history. “Nobody imagined it was possible,” a police spokesperson will admit. The escape will make front pages around the world, solidifying Faïd’s legacy in France as the criminal of the century.

The forces of order will henceforth treat him as an enemy of the state—“a danger who must be socially eliminated,” says a member of the National Assembly—while he becomes a folk hero in the banlieues outside Paris, Lyon, and Marseille. “Bravo Rédoine Faïd, all of France is with you,” the actor Béatrice Dalle will

write on Instagram. (She would later apologize.) Even French justice minister Nicole Belloubet will grudgingly concede that it was “a high-profile escape.”

The Alouette II lands next to a field north of Paris, near Charles de Gaulle International Airport. Faïd and his men douse the helicopter in gasoline and torch it, then set Buy free. As the pilot watches his chopper burn, a black Renault suddenly smashes through a metal barrier blocking access to the adjacent highway and whisks the commando unit away. They drive to the parking lot of a nearby shopping mall, where the crew sets the Renault on fire, then hops into a white utility van. Faïd is last seen headed north on the A1 highway. After that, his tracks vanish.

Later, still dazed and slightly perplexed about the role he was just forced to play in the perfectly orchestrated escape, Stéphane Buy finally learns from the press the identity of the man he spirited from the prison yard: that infamous criminal who’d been inspired by the movies.

he stole was candy. He was six years old, at a shopping mall near his family’s home in the banlieue of Creil, an hour’s drive north of Paris. In the 1970s of Rédoine Faïd’s youth, these stores were frequented by bourgeois shoppers from wealthy suburbs, and Faïd couldn’t accept that others could afford extravagances that his working-class immigrant family could not. “It wasn’t right, I said to myself from the beginning,” he explains in Outlaw, a book-length interview with journalist Jérôme Pierrat about his exploits, published in 2010. “We were just like them.”

THE FIRST THING

Faïd is already out in the sunlight of the courtyard, calmly walking down the path toward the helicopter, feeling in that moment like James Caan in his hero Michael Mann’s Thief.

In a sense, Faïd’s story is the story of modern France, a country that is defined by its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity yet has struggled to assimilate its large immigrant populations—especially those scarred by colonial conflicts. According to Outlaw, his Algerian-born father, Derradji, first immigrated to France in 1950, finding work in a chemical factory before returning to his homeland to fight for independence in the French-Algerian War. For the Faïd family, his exploits in that conflict have taken on a mythic status: At one point, according to his daughter Leila, Derradji waged a single-handed assault against a mass of French troops in the country’s mountainous highlands, detonating land mines as the soldiers passed and finishing off survivors with

T HE JA IL BR E A K AU T EU R C O N T IN UE D

a submachine gun. In Rédoine’s telling, his father would end up being tortured in retaliation, much of his village razed.

In 1969, Derradji moved his wife and their first seven children to Creil, not far from the chemical factory where he was rehired. And in 1972, their ninth child, Rédoine, was born.

The family lived in one of the suburb’s housing projects, where from a very young age Rédoine became acutely aware of how different his family was from those in the wealthy neighboring suburbs like Chantilly. He began to think about how to get ahead.

Soon he was stealing more from the mall—toys and comic books. By the time he was 11, he had banded together with three other kids from the neighborhood to form what he called a “cosmopolitan gang.” They robbed supermarkets and as teenagers eventually graduated to apartments, looting TVs and stereos. With the cash their crimes provided them, they bought their favorite outfits: Lacoste shirts and Adidas sneakers and Tacchini tracksuits. In those adolescent years, Faïd developed a mantra: “What you can’t get legally, you’ve got to take.”

In 1991, at age 18, Faïd was arrested for the first time, for robbing a department store.

According to Outlaw, he’d fallen in with a pair of older gangsters who’d come up in the rough streets of Paris, wily criminals who were stealing Amex cards out of mailboxes and computers from warehouses.

But Faïd’s true mentors were the criminals he’d grown up idolizing onscreen. “He had a phenomenal memory,” his brother Abdeslam tells me. “And he was completely immersed in movies.” Abdeslam recalls an eight-yearold Rédoine returning home from a matinee of the 1975 French crime film Peur Sur la Ville (released in the U.S. as The Night Caller), starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, and enchanting their mother and his siblings with a sceneby-scene reenactment. “I’d seen the film,” Abdeslam says, “and his version was just as I remembered it.”

Later, when an 18-year-old Faïd started carrying a gun, it was a .357 Magnum revolver— just like Belmondo’s. And when he brandished the weapon during robberies, he would quote lines from that film and others. “Shut up! Do what I tell you,” he says he admonished one bank teller, reciting dialogue memorized from the 1984 film Mesrine. “I’ve got nothing against you, I only want the money. Think of your children.”

That stickup netted Faïd and his crew 240,000 francs—more than they’d made from a decade of petty robberies. And he looked to cinema for ideas about how to spend the money, refashioning his tastes to fit the character he was creating: He wanted Rolexes and fast cars and bespoke suits. The world he saw onscreen provided the template he needed. “He didn’t have the savoir faire,” his former lawyer, Raphael Chiche, explained on French television in a documentary about Faïd. “He had to create his own methodology. What better way than movies to get inspired and learn the operational modes of criminality?”

In 1995, Faïd and his crew robbed a jewelry store in an act of homage to Reservoir Dogs, everyone done up in sharp black suits

and going by aliases—Mr. Green, Mr. Black, and Mr. Yellow. “I studied Harvey Keitel to learn how to do a holdup,” he tells me.

Later, he and his posse reenacted a scene from Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break by wearing the masks of former presidents. Leaving the crime scene, Faïd quoted Patrick Swayze’s character: “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. And please don’t forget to vote!”

The foresight with which Faïd planned these robberies led his associates to give him a nickname—Doc, after Doc McCoy, Steve McQueen’s character in 1972’s The Getaway, a bank robber on the run who, like Faïd, has a preternatural ability to visualize how jobs will play out. McCoy also made a habit of carrying out “thoughtful hits,” Faïd explains to me. “He had to rob in a precise and neat way.”

Faïd likewise stresses the neatness of his own robberies. As he puts it, he executed his hits “as gentlemanly as possible.” He wants to be known as a master thief who took careful precautions to avoid acts of violence.

Bloodshed, he felt, would mar the cleanness of his artistry. And his artistry was paramount. His favorite tribute was to Michael Mann’s 1995 cops-and-robbers thriller, Heat: Two years after the film’s release, Faïd and his associates wore hockey masks for their attack on an armored truck, just as Robert De Niro’s gang does. Faïd watched the film dozens of times, studied its every frame, and in July 2009, he sat down to write a letter to Mann, explaining how the director’s oeuvre had provided a template for his career. It was, he wrote, “a documentary report on what needs to be done or not done when you want to learn to become a crook: You don’t snitch, you don’t touch drugs, you never spill blood, you don’t get mixed up with big crime lords.”

Just a few days later, Mann participated in a “cinema lesson,” part of a retrospective of his films at the French Cinémathèque in Paris.

Midway through the question-and-answer session, a genial bald man took the microphone. It was Faïd. Introducing himself as a reformed gangster, he explained that throughout his career, “I had a technical adviser, a college teacher, a kind of mentor, and his name is Michael Mann.” Then Faïd told the director how much he had influenced him. “I don’t know how to respond,” Mann demurred, laughing uncomfortably. Yet in a sense, Faïd already had the answer he needed. When, at the age of 10, he first saw Mann’s Thief, he felt like he was watching his future unfold. As he told the director in the letter he had written: “No matter what you do, you can’t escape your own destiny.”

Michael Mann in Paris in 2009 was a fortuitous one: The thief had been paroled just a few months earlier from the prison where he had spent the previous decade for his cinema-inspired crimes. Faïd’s mid-20s had caught up with him in 1997, when the police pinned an armored-truck robbery on him and he went on the lam. He escaped into Switzerland and eventually to Israel. Faïd evaded arrest several times before he was eventually tracked down by French police through the travel agency he’d used to FA Ï D ’ S B R U S H W I T H

purchase his plane tickets. He was sentenced to 19 years at the Moulins-Yzeure penitentiary, in central France, but on account of good behavior, served only 10.

With his newfound freedom, he decided he would speak openly about his past, and working with Pierrat, he published Outlaw.

A shockingly candid account of gangsterism, it turned Faïd into a media sensation, and he was soon making the publicity rounds on French television, repeatedly insisting that prison had reformed him. “My demons aren’t asleep,” he declared in one interview. “They’re dead.” The media devoured the story of the rehabilitated gangster—but investigators tailing him had their doubts.

Five months before Outlaw was published, on the morning of May 20, 2010, two police officers rolled to a stop at a red light in the Parisian suburb of Créteil, just behind a white Renault van. Noticing two bullet holes in the van’s rear door, one of the officers ran a check on the vehicle’s license plate, as he would later tell prosecutors. Not receiving an immediate response over the radio, he got out to investigate. “Police!” he barked, approaching the van’s passenger side. “Turn off the motor and take the keys from the ignition.” No reaction.

The officer didn’t realize that the van was on a heavily armed mission to knock off two armored trucks carrying almost $16 million in cash. Repeating himself, he banged his fist on the front passenger window. A man looked over for an instant, then rapidly turned to the driver and ducked backward. As the officer unholstered his gun, the driver shifted gears frantically and the van peeled out through the red light into traffic. The cruiser gave chase.

They blew through stoplights, tore across an overpass, then veered onto the D1 highway. As the van slalomed through traffic, its bullet-riddled back door opened wide enough for another passenger to launch a canister of gas at the squad car. More projectiles followed, including fire extinguishers and an object with an ignited wick, apparently a bomb. It didn’t fully detonate on target, though it did leave burn marks and punctured the hood of the police car.

Within moments, the high-speed chase became a full-on gunfight. One of the van’s passengers fired warning shots from a hunting rifle, then aimed a handgun at the police car. The officers fired back. Soon they realized they were being sprayed with bursts of gunfire from an AK-47.

A snarl ahead caused traffic to slow to a crawl, and the cops nearly slammed into the van. The two policemen then rolled out of their car and ran for cover, ducking to avoid the bullets. Several bystanders were injured in the cross fire. The van then squeezed into the emergency lane and sped off. When the police officers returned to their cruiser, they found that the tires had been blown out.

The fugitives took the next off-ramp, where they abandoned their van and frantically stole another vehicle. But before they could make it anywhere, a second squad car screeched up behind them carrying two police officers, including 26-year-old Aurélie Fouquet. The fugitives opened fire, mortally wounding Fouquet before speeding away.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 5

THE JA IL BR E A K AU T EU R C O N T I NU ED

The death of Fouquet, who left behind a one-year-old child, was a national tragedy.

It marked the first time a municipal policewoman in France had ever been killed in the line of fire. Posthumously awarded the Legion of Honor, she was given a hero’s burial attended by thousands of law enforcement officers—a crowd addressed by President Nicolas Sarkozy. “I say this in front of Aurélie Fouquet’s coffin,” he declared in solemn outrage. “Her killers will be punished with all the severity their ignominious crime demands.”

Detectives on the case of a harrowing would-be heist that turned into a Hollywoodstyle shoot-out had someone in particular they wanted to talk with.

he had nothing to do with the foiled robbery. He even had an alibi: On the morning Fouquet died, he’d been at his day job—to meet the conditions of his parole, he’d been working in an administrative position at a construction-recruitment agency.

But Faïd had, according to his employer, been missing shifts at that point; he’d been meeting frequently with a journalist to complete the manuscript of his book.

Over the next eight months, as investigators pieced together the facts, Faïd maintained that he was “light-years away” from any involvement in criminality. He was, by this time, promoting his book about how he’d turned his back on the lawlessness of his youth. But investigators found security-camera footage from the day before the shoot-out showing Faïd driving a Renault hatchback, leading a convoy of three vehicles—including the Renault van with bullet holes in its back door.

The primary officer tasked with investigating Faïd was Jean-François Maugard, a now retired commander of the Brigade de Répression du Banditisme (BRB), or Banditry Suppression Brigade, the special-forces unit of the French National Police that fights organized crime. (Maugard didn’t respond to requests for an interview.) Faïd likes to imagine that the officer was consumed with him, and Faïd, too, was obsessed with his opponent. He had always loved the cat-andmouse aspect of being pursued. Ever since he learned, back in 1993, that the agency was on his tail after his first major robbery, he says he hadn’t “eaten, walked, slept, run, dreamed, had a nightmare, kissed, swam, or traveled without thinking continually of the BRB.” Maugard, who had spent his career chasing the biggest gangland figures in the Parisian underworld, recognized in Faïd a singular adversary. “Faïd is the first time I came across that type of a character: someone who lives his criminal life as though it’s out of a screenplay,” he told Special Correspondent, a French investigative-news program, in 2018. “And that’s where he’s truly dangerous. We all know that a film lasts an hour and a half or two hours, and then everybody goes home. But he’s caused lasting trauma. When Aurélie Fouquet died, it was a powerful illustration of his non-mastery of the circumstances. Because at that point, we entered the real. It wasn’t a movie anymore.”

While investigating the Fouquet incident, Maugard’s lieutenants gathered enough R É D O I N E FA Ï D S W O R E

8 6

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

evidence to arrest Faïd at dawn on January 11, 2011. But when they came for him, covertly, they didn’t find him at home. He’d gone into hiding, guided by intuition.

“I could get away with the biggest con in the universe,” he writes in the manuscript he sent me, “but I will never feel the spiritual force and absolute fulfillment I experienced on that morning.”

Faïd had grown certain that police were watching his movements and that they would come for him one morning. So he was fastidious about taking the Métro to and from work at exactly the same time each day. It was all part of a long game: He wanted the police to feel confident that he would be home in those early hours.

He also had a hunch that, when they arrived to arrest him in his apartment, they would choose to climb the stairs rather than risk alerting him by taking the elevator at that early hour. For that reason, Faïd began getting out of bed at 4 a.m. every day and sitting vigil in the stairwell in order to hear them on their way up, if ever they came.

It was a crazy tactic, but it paid off. On the

“He escapes twice,” says journalist Elsa Vigoureux, “and in the collective unconscious, it’s as though Algeria has attacked France twice. Some people have taken it that way.” frosty morning of January 11, he was shivering in his stairwell when he heard sounds that, though quiet and muffled, were decidedly unlike anything he’d heard those past weeks. Merde! It was the BRB team, moving up the stairs just before 6 a.m.

He scampered up his long-planned escape route to the top of the stairwell, opened the skylight, and quietly pulled himself up onto the roof. By then, he could hear the BRB knocking down his door. Moments later, he descended through a neighboring building’s skylight and made his way to a hiding spot he’d scoped out, a storage space where residents stowed baby carriages and bikes. He spent the next six hours ensconced there, 9-mm pistol in hand, until an associate he contacted via walkie-talkie whisked him away in a getaway car.

Afterward, Faïd phoned the journalist he collaborated with on Outlaw, explaining that he was innocent but that his only way to prove it was to run. He was on the lam for almost six months, during which time an armored vehicle was robbed near Arras, a city in northern France. Faïd was finally nabbed, along with other suspects, in a sting operation. In his pocket, police found 2,000 euros bearing serial numbers matching those of bills taken in Arras.

Prosecutors not only accused him of this robbery but also argued that he was responsible for the aborted heist that subsequently led to Aurélie Fouquet’s death. Though he didn’t shoot her and wasn’t even accused

of being at the scene of the crime, he was, they said, the “organizer” and “instigator” of the operation. The court agreed, finding him guilty. His appeals failed. Faïd would ultimately be sentenced to 53 years for the events that caused Fouquet’s death and for the Arras robbery. Given that he was in his 40s, it was effectively a life sentence.

in the Sequedin prison, in November 2012. His stay there was, for the first months, uneventful. But then came the morning of April 13, 2013. As guards escorted Faïd out of his cell for a visit with his brother, he brought with him what was thought to be a bag of dirty laundry. What the guards didn’t realize was that the bag contained not clothes but, as would soon become abundantly clear, a loaded gun, lighters, and an explosive material called pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which had been smuggled into the jail.

“In a few minutes, the watchtowers’ sniper rifles will be fixed on me,” he writes in Spiral.

“But the fact that I’ve trained like crazy to be able to operate in these circumstances means that I’m full of confidence. I’m sure of myself.

In my head and in my heart, it’s decided: I’m going for it—all the way.”

Laundry bag in hand, Faïd proceeded down a corridor toward the visitation chamber. When he arrived, he dropped onto one knee and rummaged through his bag. Another inmate stood waiting for his own session to begin. Their eyes met just long enough for the other convict to understand what was about to occur. Faïd pulled out a handgun and shot it into the ceiling to show it was loaded. He then took four guards, each unarmed, as hostages. “Don’t be a cowboy for 1,300 or 1,400 euros,” Faïd told them, referring to their low pay. “It’s not worth it. Think of your families. Think of your kids.”

From his laundry bag, he also produced a bundle of the explosives and proceeded to blow his way through an armored door. In all, he would need to blast through five such barriers. Nearing the final gate, Faïd positioned the guards around him as human shields to make sure the snipers in the watchtowers couldn’t fire a clean shot. Once he and his hostages made it outside the prison wall, the police could only watch, still unable to shoot safely, as he shepherded his group toward the highway, where an escape vehicle awaited them. Faïd let three of the guards go, keeping one with him until it was clear they weren’t being followed.

For the next six weeks, Faïd roamed free, bouncing from hotel to hotel in disguise, wearing wigs. French police suspected that he might have left the country. Interpol put out a Red Notice, broadcasting his fugitive status to the whole world.

Ultimately, they didn’t need to look all that far. In May 2013, police tracked Faïd to a hotel in Pontault-Combault, 13 miles from downtown Paris, and captured him in a grim, middle-of-the-night bust. For his Sequedin jailbreak, Faïd would end up getting 10 more years, bringing his total sentence to 63 years.

This time the authorities sent him to Réau, which they figured was impregnable, and where he would face additional surveillance.

There he was greeted as a star and immediately began plotting his sequel.

FA Ï D E V E N T U A L LY L A N D E D

A DDI TI ONA L CR EDI TS

T HE JA IL BR E A K AU T EU R C O N T IN UE D

breakout, 3,000 police officers took part in the manhunt.

According to the 2019 documentary La Traque de Rédoine Faïd, detective units scoured records of cell phones used during his escape, isolating a handful of numbers active at the time that went silent shortly thereafter. Each of these ultimately led back to Faïd’s hometown of Creil. The orange Hugo Boss T-shirt and the power cutter turned up in a bag left in the woods; a hunter identified Faïd’s nephew Isaac as the figure he’d seen discarding them, according to Paris attorney general François Molins.

Then, several weeks after the escape, authorities caught another whiff of the fugitive: A police cruiser came across a Renault Laguna pulled over on the side of an express road. The officers stopped to investigate, but at the sight of the flashing lights, the Laguna tore off, commencing a chase through the outskirts of Paris. The Laguna ended up abandoned in a mall parking lot 20 miles from Faïd’s native Creil; security footage showed men the authorities later said were Faïd and his brother Rachid fleeing the scene.

Law enforcement soon received an anonymous tip that Faïd had been spotted in Creil, and police set up a number of unidentified espionage vehicles, or “submarines,” observing and recording goings-on throughout the neighborhood. In the footage recorded by one vehicle, they noticed what Molins later described as “a person wearing a burka whose appearance gave the impression that it might be a man.” The veiled individual was tall and had difficulty walking in the outfit.

That burka, it turned out, was concealing the most wanted man in France. When police finally trapped Faïd, on October 3, 2018, both Rachid and Isaac were also in the apartment.

In photos taken during the arrest, Faïd’s face looks emaciated and exhausted. An officer described him to the press as “haggard, like a hare caught in the headlights.”

Police detectives, trying to piece together exactly how the helicopter escape was accomplished, initially focused on Faïd’s relatives and soon identified Rachid and Isaac as suspects, according to Le Parisien. The identity of the third figure the police believe to have participated in the getaway—the accomplice who joined them when Buy had trouble restarting the chopper—remains unknown.

Precisely where Faïd found help is a mystery that police are still trying to unravel. Last summer, investigators announced that they were questioning a notorious Corsican crime lord, Jacques Mariani, son of the putative godfather of Corsica’s Sea Breeze gang, and were looking into any possible assistance he or his network may have provided. For his part, Faïd is still awaiting a trial at which he’ll face charges for the Réau jailbreak. (Citing that pending case and the ongoing investigation, prison officials declined to answer questions about the details of his escape.) He seems likely to receive at least as great a penalty as he did for his first escape—10 years—as well as extra time for the Laguna police chase. Not that it will matter much. For a prisoner nearing 50, there’s not much difference between six decades and eight.

A F T E R FA Ï D ’ S H E L I C O P T E R

in a state of incarceration from which escape seems harder than ever.

According to his lawyer, Yasmina Belmokhtar, he’s being held in solitary confinement at Vendin-Le-Vieil, a maximum-security prison near the Belgian border, where he is thoroughly strip-searched by a team of guards up to five times a day, at random intervals. He must wear handcuffs whenever he leaves his cell. Even to use the phone, he’s escorted by four or five guards. He hasn’t touched another human being in over two years.

“His conditions are almost inhuman,” says Belmokhtar. “They’ve taken every coercive method that legally can be done today in France, and they’re doing them all at the same time. They’re burying him alive.”

She compares the punishments Faïd is enduring to those given to prisoners of war and suggests that perhaps he’s being forced to serve penance for his father’s actions in the war. Though Derradji spent time in both French and Algerian prisons, family members feel that Rédoine is now being made to further atone for his father’s deeds. As his sister Leila puts it: “I feel that we’re caught in a self-perpetuating system, a continuity from my parents through to Rédoine, where we need to pay for a history that still hasn’t resolved itself. Is it normal to be treated like a whore, a jihadist’s daughter, by police officers interrogating me?”

Indeed, France has never been able to fully reckon with what happened in its war of decolonization with Algeria. Elsa Vigoureux, a journalist at the French newsmagazine L’Obs who interviewed Faïd last year, suggests that the conflict accounts for much of Faïd’s image as a menace to society. “He’s much more disruptive than any other high-profile criminal this country has ever had,” she says. “Let’s put it this way: He escapes twice, and in the collective unconscious, it’s as though Algeria has attacked France twice. Some people have taken it that way.”

In Vendin-le-Vieil, Faïd’s circumstances have been suffocating. He writes that solitary confinement makes him feel as though he’s being “mummified in a sarcophagus.” Can anyone withstand a lifetime in what he calls the “black hole” of an isolation chamber? He’s gone on hunger strikes to protest his treatment, but they’ve been to no avail. He tells me that he mostly spends his time writing, which he hopes will help him maintain his mental health, or at least stave off a possible descent into madness. Yet dark thoughts are crowding in. The unpublished manuscript he sent me includes his personal definition of insanity: “Absorbed by the chaos one longs for.”

Court evaluations and officials insist that given the chance, Faïd will attempt to flee again, that he’s a danger to public safety, that there’s little hope he might be reformable or readaptable. So he remains in solitary confinement, locked in an isolation chamber from which he can escape only through the movie projector of his mind. Even now, at this moment, he’s still looking for it, the path, dreaming of it, imagining it into life.

FA Ï D N O W L I V E S

Pages 18–19. Herman Miller, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, and Casey McCafferty: courtesy of brands. All other photographs: Martin Brown.

Hermès, Saint Laurent, Dior Maison, and The Elder Statesman: prop stylist, Johnny Machado at Judy Casey, Inc. All other photographs

by Martin Brown; prop stylist, Liz Serwin at Judy Casey, Inc. Page 26. Collage, still-life photographs: Martin Brown; prop stylist, Johnny Machado at Judy Casey, Inc. Pharrell Williams: Arnaldo Magnani/Getty Images. A$AP Rocky: David Peters. Queen Elizabeth: Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty Images. All animals: Getty Images.

Pages 28–29. Collage, still-life photographs: Martin Brown. White jacket and short-sleeve shirt: prop stylist, Liz Serwin at Judy Casey, Inc. Red jacket and hat: prop stylist, Dustin Hubbs at Mark Edward Inc. All other photographs

by Martin Brown; prop stylist, Johnny Machado at Judy Casey, Inc. Gigi Hadid: Pierre Suu/Getty Images. Madonna: Jamal Nasrallah/Shutterstock.

Cam Newton: Mike McCarn/AP Photo. All animals: Getty Images.

GQ IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT © 2021

CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE

U.S.A. VOLUME 91, NO. 4. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly (except for combined issues in December/January and June/July) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE:

Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007.

Roger Lynch, Chief Executive Officer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Global Chief Revenue Officer & President, U.S.

Revenue; Jackie Marks, Chief Financial Officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No.

40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO

CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE

INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA

50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@

gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast. com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295. For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.

com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com.

To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines on the World

Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened

companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330.

GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO,

UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY

OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR OTHER

MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND

ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO

adam leith gollner is the author of ‘The Book of Immortality,’ about the science of living forever. This is his first article for gq.

BY GQ IN WRITING. MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND

OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED

BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE.

M A Y

2 0 2 1

G Q . C O M

8 7

S H O P. G Q . C O M

FINAL SHOT

For our story on Justin Bieber, see page 36.

ST YLIST, K ARL A WELCH.

Jacket, $1,560, and pants, $1,350, by Prada. Sneakers, $90,

by Nike. Necklace (top), $4,150, by Cartier. Necklace (bottom), $2,700, by Tiffany & Co. Ring, his own.

9 0

G Q . C O M

M A Y

2 0 2 1

P H O T O G R A P H

B Y

R Y A N

M c G I N L E Y