Search Results for: Rolling Stone

Longreads Best of 2014: Here Are All of Our No. 1 Story Picks from This Year

All through December, we’ll be featuring Longreads’ Best of 2014. To get you ready, here’s a list of every story that was chosen as No. 1 in our weekly Top 5 email.

If you like these, you can sign up to receive our free weekly email every Friday. Read more…

A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA

Longreads Pick

A freshman at University of Virginia is brutally assaulted by seven men at a frat party. When she tries to report it, she discovers a culture that is complicit in covering it up. Update: Rolling Stone’s editors are now raising questions about events described in this story—but exactly which parts remains unclear.

Source: Rolling Stone
Published: Nov 21, 2014
Length: 37 minutes (9,296 words)

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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The Genius and Mystery of Willie Nelson

Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He’s an uncanny vocal phraser: “The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” said the late producer Jerry Wexler. “The art of gliding over the meter and extending it until you think they’re going to miss the next actual musical demarcation – but they always arrive there, at bar one. It’s some kind of musical miracle.”

In a time when America is more divided than ever, Nelson could be the one thing that everybody agrees on. “The Hells Angels love him, and so do grandmothers,” says Raphael. But in private, he can seem introverted and given to long silences. He will often describe his life in brief, purely factual terms, saying things like, “Oh, why does a guy write? I don’t know. You get an idea, and you sit down, and you write it.” Over the course of 30 interviews with his friends, family and band members, a lot of the same words come up – generous, charismatic, loyal and, as Keith Richards has said, “a bit of a mystery.” “He’s really good at throwing out a one-liner that will get you off of what you’re talking about,” says Shooter Jennings, who has known Nelson since he was a kid tagging along on the Highwaymen tours with his father, Waylon. “You’re like, ‘Fuck, Willie, answer the question!’ There’s a lot of exterior there. That’s why you’ll never quite fully get that picture.”

“You never get to know him like you should, but you know there’s more there than what you’re seeing,” says Loretta Lynn. “I know there’s more there because of how he writes. He can’t fool me!”

“He’s a hard man to know,” Johnny Cash wrote in 1997. “He keeps his inner thoughts for himself and his songs. He just doesn’t talk much at all, in fact. When he does, what he says is usually very perceptive and precise. . . . He has a beautiful sense of irony and a true appreciation for the absurd. I really like him.”

Patrick Doyle, in Rolling Stone, on the story of a music legend.

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Photo: thomashawk, Flickr

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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All Together Now

Longreads Pick

The Spice Girls were the biggest, brashest girlie group ever to have hit the British mainstream. Kathy Acker was an avant-garde American writer and academic. They met up in 1997 to swap notes—on boys, girls, politics.

They are here to rehearse for an appearance on Saturday Night Live. Not only is this their first live TV performance, it’s also the first time they’ll be playing with what Mel C calls a ‘real band’. If the Girls are to have any longevity in the music industry, they will have to break into the American market; and for this they will need the American media. Both the Girls and their record company believe that their appearance here tonight might do the trick. There is a refusal among America’s music critics to take the Spice Girls seriously. The Rolling Stone review of Spice, their first album, refers to them as ‘attractive young things . . . brought together by a manager with a marketing concept’. The main complaint, or explanation for disregard, is that they are a ‘manufactured band’. What can this mean in a society of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and En Vogue?

Source: The Guardian
Published: May 3, 1997
Length: 16 minutes (4,211 words)

Making the Magazine: A Reading List

Magazine nerds, here we go: A starter collection of behind-the-scenes stories from some of your most beloved magazines, including The New Yorker, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, plus now-defunct publications like Might, George, Sassy and Wigwag. Share your favorite behind-the-magazine stories with us on Twitter or Facebook: #longreads. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: doug88888, Flickr

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Drug Life: A Reading List

1. “Finding Molly: Drugs, Dancing and Death.” (Shane Morris, Bro Jackson, September 2013)

Every batch of Molly is different. And that’s what makes the pills or powder you’re buying at your local music festival so dangerous. Shane Morris offers a first-person account of his time in both the EDM and Molly industries.

2. “Is Marijuana Withdrawal a Real Thing?” (Malcolm Harris, Aeon, January 2014)

When the author takes a smoke break after five years, his dreams are disturbing enough to send him looking for answers in medical journals and user forums.

3. “The New Face of Heroin.” (David Amsden, Rolling Stone, April 2013)

In case you’ve missed the swathe of NPR reports, Vermont is a plaid-clad heroin hotspot, “conjuring up images more commonly associated with blighted inner cities than a state with the nation’s fifth-lowest unemployment rate and a populace that is 95 percent white.”

 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

A Kurt Cobain Reading List in Reverse Chronological Order

Every generation has that one unforgettable death that bears the question, “Where were you when ____ died?” For baby boomers, it was JFK. For the cool music-minded baby boomers, it was John Lennon. And, for Generation Xers, like myself, it was Kurt Cobain. Like generations past, you never forget where you were when a cultural icon dies. For me, the day the news broke that Kurt Cobain died is permanently etched in my mind because I was there.
—Former Billboard editor Carrie Borzillo

Twenty-seven years ago, in December 1987, three kids in Aberdeen, Wash. formed the original line-up of Nirvana. They recorded a 10-song demo the next month. Bleach was released on Sub Pop six months later, followed by Nevermind in September, 1991. It opened at #144 on the Billboard charts. The next January, it hit #1, and the band played “Saturday Night Live” that same night. Three months later they were on the cover of Rolling Stone. In Utero, their third and final album, was released in September 1993, debuting at #1 on the Billboard charts and selling 180,000 copies within a week of its release. Seven months later, Kurt Cobain was dead; a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

That was 20 years ago. Nirvana will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this Thursday. Kurt Cobain’s life and legacy have been examined in far too many books, dissertations and teenage diary entries to name. This list is the opposite of comprehensive; instead it offers seven specific snapshots.

The Chemistry of an Echo: On the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, investigating copycat suicide and the lasting influence of the Nirvana icon (Candace Opper, Guernica, April 1, 2014)

According to Opper, Cobain’s death was arguably the first major celebrity suicide since Marilyn Monroe’s passing in 1962. This piece, which examines both Cobain’s death and the phenomena of suicide contagion, provides a fascinating look at how suicide prevention specialists sprung into action after the tragedy, providing resources to devastated fans.

Who Killed Kurt Cobain? (Tim Kenneally & Steve Bloom, High Times, April 1996)

Two years after Cobain’s death, High Times investigated the rumors that foul play—and not a self-inflicted gunshot wound—were to blame.

Kurt Cobain’s Final Tour (Amy Dickinson, Esquire, February 1996)

Crisscrossing the country with Courtney Love, this story follows the strange saga of Cobain’s earthly remains, which, in search of nirvana, are divided, molded, stuffed in a teddy bear, held up in customs, and inhaled by many).

Kurt Cobain’s Downward Spiral: The Last Days of Nirvana’s Leader (Neil Strauss, Rolling Stone, June 1994)

Rolling Stone traces Cobain’s final days—from his nearly fatal drug overdose in Rome to the discovery of his body one month later in Seattle.

Cobain to Fans: Just Say No (Robert Hilburn, Los Angeles Times, September 1992)

An LA Times interview in the living room of Cobain’s Hollywood Hills apartment; he addresses drug rumors and tenderly explains that as a new father he doesn’t want his daughter “to grow up and someday be hassled by kids at school… I don’t want people telling her that her parents were junkies.”

Kurt and Courtney Sitting In a Tree (Christina Kelly, Sassy Magazine, April 1992)

From the seminal teen magazine Sassy, a cover story on the then-newly engaged poster couple for grunge love. Bonus: an I Heart Daily video interview with the story’s author and former Sassy editor Christina Kelly.

Everett True Thrashes It Out With The Latest Wizards From Seattle’s Sub Pop Label (Everett True, Melody Maker, October 1989)

From the now defunct British music weekly Melody Maker, a very early interview—right after Bleach, and back when Cobain still spelled his name “Kurdt.” Cobain jokes around, sports a goatee and is described as “your archetypal small guy—wiry, defiantly working class and fiery.” Note: This interview comes via Flavorwire’s excellent compendium of essential Kurt Cobain books, interviews and photos.

Photo: Ramsey Beyer, Flickr