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The TV Issue
John Oliver Is Mad as Hell As the news gets worse, he gets funnier. Inside TV’s most hilarious new show. By Brian Hiatt
Page 38 The Trippiest Show on TV...........44 The Good, the Bad, the Gotham...47 Best. Show. Never .......................50 The Original Son of Anarchy......52
FEATURES 56 My Life in 15 Songs: Smokey Robinson
Motown’s greatest all-around talent on five decades of hits. By David Brow ne
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ARTHUR MOLA/INVISION/AP IMAGES; © BARON WOLMAN; CARTOON NETWORK
60 Inside the Koch Brothers’ Toxic Empire Behind the fortune of the men who are trying to buy the U.S. government. By Tim Dickinson
Lenny Kravitz, ageless rock star. Page 18
DEPARTMENTS ROCK & ROLL
18 Lenny Kravitz Revisited Riding along with the rock star as he tours his old Bed-Stuy digs.
The weird world of Adventure Time. Page 44
RECORD REVIEWS
71 U2 Find Rock Salvation
Bono and Co. celebrate music itself on their most personal LP ever. MOVIE REVIEWS
80 So Not a Love Story
David Fincher’s Gone Girl tackles a marriage made in hell.
Smokey Robinson looks back. Page 56
ON THE COVER John Oliver photographed in New York on August 19th, 2014, by Max Vadukul. Styling by Robert Molnar. Grooming by Kerrie Jordan. Suit and shirt by Comme des Garçons.
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The Launch Heard Round the World
The long, painful birth – and stunning arrival – of U2’s new album By Andy Greene
B
y some measures, it was the biggest album release of all time: In early September, U2’s new album, Songs of Innocence, suddenly appeared in the libraries of 500 million iTunes users. “Wow,” said Bono, onstage at the Apple press conference where it was announced. “That’s instant gratification. Did that really happen?” The album’s launch may have been close to instantaneous, but the recording process was U2’s longest ever – over five years, they recorded roughly 100 songs. To add to the pressure, the band was coming off 2009’s No Line on the Horizon, which spawned
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U2’S ‘SONGS OF INNOCENCE’ the most successful tour ever, but underperformed commercially by the band’s standards. “I thought to myself, ‘Why would anyone need a new U2 album?’ ” says Bono. “ ‘There’s loads of them out there.’ And then I wanted to ask a tougher question: ‘Why would we want to make one?’ ” The band began with producer Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse, and nearly finished an entire album, before starting over. “The experiments and excursions from this time were unashamedly unhinged and free of all critical judgments,” says the Edge. “As the songs were coming into focus, we could see that certain qualities, hallmarks of our work, were not represented.” One of the band’s sounding boards was Jimmy Iovine, the former head of Interscope Records. “When they first played me music, I didn’t hear songs that were going to include people that weren’t U2 fans,” says Iovine. “I heard lyrics and ideas that could, but not songs.” He told them they had to dig deeper: “I was straight up with them. I said, ‘In order to make the record you want to make, you have to go to a place where you don’t live now. And it hurts. It’s dark and painful, but you have to go there. Can you put yourself back in the place you were at 25 or 35 and the world was coming at you 100 miles per hour and you don’t give a shit?’ ” In order to get there, Bono began writing songs about his difficult teenage years in Dublin and the music that changed his life, most notably the Clash and the Ramones. “I went back and started to listen to all the music that made us start a rock band,” says Bono. “It gave us a reason to exist, again. That’s how this album started.” The result is the most personal batch of songs U2 have ever released. “Iris (Hold Me Close)” is a moving tribute to Bono’s late mother. “She fell down at her own father’s funeral, and I never spoke with her again,” says Bono. “Following grief comes rage, and I channeled it into music.” “Song for Someone” is about falling in love with his wife, Ali, whom Bono met when he was just 13, and “Cedarwood Road” is a look back at his childhood street, where he met his lifelong friends Derek “Guggi” Rowan and Gavin Friday. “The whole album is first journeys,” says Bono. “First journeys geographically, spiritually, sex-
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ually. And that’s hard. But I went there. We went there.” The singer says Danger Mouse helped the group keep it simple. “He has a natural elegance, and is unimpressed by emotional fireworks,” says Bono, later adding, “We wanted the album to have songs that would stand up when played on acoustic guitars or piano, not relying on Edge, Adam and Larry’s atmospheres or dynamic playing.” Longtime collaborator Flood, who has worked with the band since 1987’s The Joshua Tree, was on hand to “drop some acid in the water at the right times,” says the singer. Over the past year, as Danger Mouse turned his attention toward his group Broken Bells, U2
“It might be too big,” says U2 manager Guy Oseary about the launch. “But we like to think big.” brought in OneRepublic guru Ryan Tedder and Adele producer Paul Epworth. “They were equally strung out on the oldfashioned notion of ‘songwriting,’ ” says Bono. “It takes a village to make a U2 record. We have always needed all hands on deck.” With the end of recording in sight, the band turned to an issue almost as serious: how to make a big, U2-level cultural impact at a time when album sales are at a record low and rock radio is diminished. “We wanted to reach as many people as possible,” says U2 manager Guy Oseary. “We brainstormed and brainstormed. Apple has hundreds of millions of iTunes accounts – giving it away just made sense.” There have been reports that Apple agreed to pay $100 million or more in marketing, which a source close to the band believes is incorrect. “I have no idea where they are getting that number
from,” says the source. “I think it’s wrong.” The amount the band was paid directly by Apple remains even more of a secret. (“There was a payment made to the label by Apple,” is all that Oseary will say.) Perhaps predictably, considering that the album went out to half a billion people, reaction to Songs of Innocence has been all over the map: everything from elation to curiosity (“Never really been a big fan, but that Songs of Innocence [is] kinda dope,” said one Tweeter) to bewilderment (“Either someone hacked my iTunes or I’m buying U2 albums in my sleep,” said another) and even to anger. After the release, Apple received so many complaints that it put out a software tool that allowed users to delete the album from their iCloud accounts. But the band’s camp points to the fact that 17 of U2’s albums appeared in the iTunes top 100 chart in the days following the release. “There’s not much rock in the zeitgeist,” says Iovine. “So what the band were trying to do is defy gravity. And whatever tools you can use to do that, you should use.” The iTunes giveaway for Innocence will end October 14th, just as a physical release hits shelves with bonus tracks and acoustic renditions of the songs (the latter, Bono says, are to “try to prove [his] point” about the level of the songwriting). There’s also a follow-up disc called Songs of Experience in the works; Bono says the band has close to 10 songs earmarked for that. “Early on, it became obvious we were working on two separate albums,” says the Edge. “The majority of the unfinished songs are worthy of becoming part of Songs of Experience and some are already as good or better than anything on Songs of Innocence. It will be released when it’s ready.” Specific tour plans haven’t been fleshed out, but the group is expected to hit the road next year. “The tour is still in the planning stages,” says the Edge. “It’s too early to describe what it will be like. I think we will start small. We certainly can’t get any bigger than the last tour.” In the meantime, nobody with the band is apologizing for aiming high on the release of Innocence. “By this point, seven percent of the planet has gotten the album,” says Oseary. “It might be too big, but we like to think big.” Bono, when asked about the response to the record, puts it even more simply: “If you don’t want it, delete it.”
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ROCK&ROLL
NEW ALBUMS............................. Pg. 72 SINGLES.......................................... Pg. 74 MOVIES .......................................... Pg. 80 CHARTS.......................................... Pg. 86
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Bono and Co. celebrate rock itself on one of their most personal – and thrilling – LPs ever
U2
Songs of Innocence Interscope
HHHHH BY DAVID FRICKE
No other rock band does rebirth like U2. No other band – certainly of U2’s duration and achievement – believes it needs rebirth more and so often. But even by the standards of transformation on 1987’s The Joshua Tree and 1991’s Achtung Baby, Songs of Innocence – U2’s first studio album in five years – is risky, dynamic and focused renaissance: 11 tracks of straightforward rapture about the life-saving joys of music, drawing on U2’s long palette of influences and investigations of post-punk rock, electronica and dance music. “You and I are rock & roll,” Bono shouts in “Volcano,” a song about imminent eruption, through a delirium of throaty, striding bass, alien-choral effects and the Edge’s rusted-treble jolts of Gang of Four-vintage guitar. Bono also sings this, in a darker, challenging tone: “Do you live here or is this a vacation?” For U2, rock & roll was always a life’s work – and the work is never done. Songs of Innocence is aptly named after William Blake’s 1789 collection of poems about man’s perpetually great age of discovery: childhood. For the first time, after decades of looking abroad for inspiration – to American frontier spirituality, Euro-dance-party irony and historic figures of protest such Illustration by R aul Allen
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as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela – Bono, the Edge, bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. have taken the long way ’round to metamorphosis: turning back and inward to their lives and learning as boys on the way to uncertain manhood (and their band) in Dublin. Bono’s lyrics are striking in their specific, personal history. In “Cedarwood Road,” named after a street where he lived, the singer remembers the fear and anger that drove him to music and to be heard – and which won’t go away. “I’m still standing on that street/Still need an enemy,” he admits against Clayton and Mullen’s strident, brooding rhy thm and the enraged stutter of the Edge’s guitar. “Raised by Wolves” is a tension of metronome-like groove and real-life carnage (“There’s a man in the corner in a pool of misery. . . . A red sea covers the ground”) based on a series of car bombs that bloodied Dublin one night in the Seventies. In “Iris (Hold Me Close),” Bono sings to his mother, who died when he was 14, through a tangle of fondness and stilldesperate yearning, in dreamy neo-operatic ascension over creamy keyboards and Clayton’s dignified-disco bass figure. “You took me by the hand/I thought that I was leading you,” Bono recalls in a kind of embarrassed bliss. “But it was you made me your man/Machine,” he adds, a playful shotgun reference to his early, poetic conceit in Boy’s “Twilight” (“In the shadow, boy meets man”) and his wife, Ali. The teenage Bono once gave her Kraftwerk’s The Man-Machine as a gift while they were dating. For U2 – and Bono in particular – the first step on the road out of Dublin was the sound of a voice, and they name it in the opening track, “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone).” U2 have always been open in their gratitude to New York punk and the Ramones in particular. This homage to unlikely heroism – that kid you least expect to take on
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the world and win – is a suitable honor: a chunky guitar riff and a beat like a T. Rex stomp, glazed with galactic-Ronettes sugar. “I woke up,” Bono sings, “at the moment when the miracle occurred/Heard a song that made some sense out of the world.” U2 also pay due diligence to the Clash in “This Is Where You Can Reach Me Now,” dedicated to Joe Strummer, and there is a strong hint of the Beach Boys’ allure – their standing invitation to a utopia far from the Dublin grit and rain – in the chanted Smilestyle harmonies in “California (There Is No End to Love).” “Blood-orange sunset brings you to your knees,” Bono croons in awe. “I’ve seen for myself.” These are the oldest stories in rock & roll: adolescent restlessness, traumatic loss, the revelation of rescue hiding in a great chorus or power chord. But Songs of Innocence is the first time U2 have told their own tales so directly, with the strengths and nerve they have accumulated as songwriters and record-makers. This album was famous, long before release, for its broken deadlines and the indecision suggested by its multiple producers: Brian Burton, a.k.a. Danger Mouse; Paul Epworth of Adele fame; and Ryan Tedder of the pop band OneRepublic. Those credits are misleading. Burton, Epworth and Tedder all co-produced “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)”; that’s Epworth on the additional slide guitar in “Cedarwood Road”; and Burton arranged the chorale in “Volcano.” But the extra hands are thoroughly embedded in the memoir. There is no time when the telling sounds like it was more than the work of the four who lived it. And it is a salvation, U2 believe, that keeps on giving. “Every breaking wave on the shore/Tells the next one there’ll be one more,” Bono promises in the tidal electronics of “Every Breaking Wave.” And “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” comes with a pledge to every stranded dreamer who now hears Rocket to Russia, Give ’Em Enough Rope or some U2 for the first time and is somehow, permanently, changed. “We can hear you,” Bono swears. “Your voices will be heard.”
Livin’, lovin’: Kravitz
Lenny Kravitz Gets It On
Big riffs, funky grooves and sex on the brain: Kravitz returns with a superfun album
Lenny Kravitz Strut Roxie HHHH Check out the cover of Lenny Kravitz’s 10th album and be amazed: Dude turned 50 this year, but his open shirt reveals a body that could be half as young. Kravitz’s music has always cheated time too, blurring Sixties and Seventies guitar power and post-Purple Rain flash into something pumped and polished enough to feel contemporary. His last album, 2011’s Black and White America, was a post-hip-hop rumination on our vexed racial politics. Strut is inspired by something else that keeps him up at night: “I’m just a slave for your pleasure, and I’m waiting to pop,” he sings on “Sex,” KEY TRACKS: “Strut,” “Sex,” which opens a muscular back-to-rock “Ooo Baby Baby” album recalling his early-Nineties work. Kravitz produced Strut in his studio in the Bahamas and played many of the instruments on it himself. The album has an energetic, party-grab-bag feel. He does devotional old-school R&B (“I Never Want to Let You Down,” complete with bar-blues horns) and Stones-y country rock (“She’s a Beast”). On the sinewy “The Chamber,” Kravitz suggests Elvis Costello in Prince-ly garb. Yet his signature look remains the Grand Funk/Guess Who-style arena-stud action of “Dirty White Boots,” where he sings, “Take your knickers and give me that treasure,” and the stomping funk rock of “Strut.” He ends the record with a cover of the Miracles’ 1965 classic “Ooo Baby Baby,” reworked as an explosive showcase. For Kravitz, cranking things sky-high is the sincerest kind of flattery. JON DOLAN
HHHHH Classic | HHHH Excellent | HHH Good | HH Fair | H Poor
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