Rolling Stone USA - 13 March 2014 issue

Rolling Stone USA - 13 March 2014 issue - Justin Bieber cover

ON THE COVER Justin Bieber photographed in Beijing on September 29th, 2013, by © Imaginechina/Corbis.

Hey, Washington: The

Pay Is Too Damn Low!

Why raising the minimum wage

is great for the economy – and for

Democrats By Tim Dickinson

Justin Bieber, Bad Boy

Inside the egg-throwing,

hard-partying, drag-racing,

arrest-resisting, brothel-patronizing,

lightning-quick fall of a pop idol

By Claire Hoffman

The ‘Dookie’ Chronicles

Twenty years later, Green Day

look back at the album that took

pop punk from the gutter to

MTV By David Fricke

The Entrapment of

Jesse Snodgrass

How did an autistic teen loner get

targeted by an undercover cop?

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely

33

38

46

52

ROCK & ROLL

Inside ‘True Detective’

Meet the dark mind behind TV’s

best, most twisted new show

Luke Bryan Parties On

On the road with the hottest

former frat boy in country

Spring Music Preview

Thirty must-hear LPs – Neil Young,

Miranda Lambert, U2 and more

Beck Finds His Sunrise

Revisiting his Sea Change sound

for an instant folk-rock classic

MOVIE REVIEWS

‘Grand Budapest Hotel’

Wes Anderson drops us down the

rabbit hole of a vanished past

Matthew McConaughey as philosophical cop Rustin Cohle on

True Detective

Page 13

ROB SHEFFIELDrollingstone.com/ shef eld

M a rch 13, 2014

6 | Rol l i ng St on e | rollingstone.com

Prince’s career didn’t end after “Batdance.” And even though his work since the Nineties hasn’t got-ten as much attention, he has released some great material Check out the top songs from Prince’s most underappreciated era

PRINCE: THE BEST

OF THE LATER YEARS

a year at rollingstone.com – and on the

ROLLING STONE MUSIC NEWS iPHONE APP, available for FREE at the iTunes Store

caption

here

See the real life of the country superstar –

who’s touring in support of his new LP,

The Outsiders – from drinking whiskey on a

private plane to hanging out backstage

ERIC CHURCH:

BEHIND THE SCENES

ROLLING STONE is printed on 100 percent carbon-neutral paper.

More than 20 years after their classic

“Weak” hit Number One, the R&B trio have

a popular reality show and a big arena tour

We have the full story of SWV’s rise, fall

and unexpected resurrection

They sold millions of records back

in the 1990s and even starred in their own feature fi lm – and after

a long hiatus, the prank-call kings are back on the prowl Read our feature on the Jerky Boys’ return

THE JERKY

IN ACTION

EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Jann S Wenner

MANAGING EDITOR: Will Dana EXECUTIVE EDITOR: Nathan Brackett DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR: Sean Woods SENIOR WRITERS: David Fricke, Brian Hiatt, Peter Travers SENIOR EDITORS: Christian Hoard, Coco McPherson,

Simon Vozick-Levinson, Thomas Walsh

ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Patrick Doyle, Andy Greene,

Sarene Leeds, Jessica Machado, Phoebe St John

EDITORIAL MANAGER: Alison Weinflash ASSISTANT EDITORS: Corinne Cummings,

Elisabeth Garber-Paul, Jason Maxey

ASSISTANT TO THE EDITOR AND PUBLISHER: Ally Lewis EDITORIAL STAFF: Cady Drell

ROLLINGSTONE.COM: Caryn Ganz (Editorial Dir.),

David Marchese (Deputy Ed.), Elizabeth Bruneau (Sr Photo Ed.), Todd Bernard, Elizabeth Oh (Art Dirs.), David Fear (Senior Ed.), Jason Newman (News Ed.), Kory Grow (Staff Writer), Shara Sprecher (Social Media Ed.), Catherine Fuentes,

Nicole Fara Silver

SPECIAL PROJECTS MANAGER: Nina Pearlman EDITOR AT LARGE: Jason Fine

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Mark Binelli, David Browne,

Rich Cohen, Jonathan Cott, Anthony DeCurtis, Tim Dickinson,

Jon Dolan, Raoul Duke (Sports), Gavin Edwards, Josh Eells,

Jenny Eliscu, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Mikal Gilmore, Jeff Goodell, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Joe Hagan, Erik Hedegaard, Will Hermes, Robert F Kennedy Jr., Steve Knopper, David Kushner, Guy Lawson, Greil Marcus, Charles Perry, Janet Reitman, Austin Scaggs, Jeff Sharlet, Rob Sheffield, Paul Solotaroff,

Ralph Steadman (Gardening), Neil Strauss, Matt Taibbi, Touré,

Ben Wallace-Wells, Jonah Weiner, Christopher R Weingarten, David Wild

DESIGN DIRECTOR: Joseph Hutchinson CREATIVE DIRECTOR: Jodi Peckman

ART DEPARTMENT: Matthew Cooley, Mark Maltais (Art Dirs.),

Toby Fox, Yelena Guller (Assoc Art Dirs.)

PHOTO DEPARTMENT: Deborah Dragon, Sacha Lecca

(Deputy Photo Eds.), Griffin Lotz (Assoc Photo Ed.), Sandford Griffin (Finance Mgr.)

ART AND PHOTO ASSISTANT: Meghan Benson PUBLISHER: Chris McLoughlin ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Michael H Provus HEAD OF BRANDED CONTENT AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS: Scott Fedonchik ADVERTISING BUSINESS DIRECTOR: Danika Parente NEW YORK: James Craemer, Lora Logan, Craig Mura

CHICAGO: Joe Hoffer, Adam Anderson (Dirs.)

LOS ANGELES: Kurt DeMars, Tami Prins-Simon SOUTHWEST: Adam Knippa, Ellen Lewis, Michael Stafford SOUTHEAST: Christine Costello, Peter Zuckerman NATIONAL MUSIC DIRECTOR: Mitch Herskowitz DIRECT-RESPONSE ADVERTISING: Allie Frenkel MARKETING: Artie Athas, Michael Boyd, Nancy DePiano,

Danielle Dodds, Sara Katzki

PUBLICITY: Melissa Bruno CHIEF DIGITAL OFFICER: David Kang DIRECTOR, ROLLINGSTONE.COM: Gus Wenner

DIGITAL SALES: Matthew Habib (Dir.),

Nina Sasson (Los Angeles)

DIGITAL OPERATIONS: Alvin Ling (Exec Dir.),

Eric Ward (Exec Prod.), Justin Harris

CIRCULATION: Elyse Kossin (Dir.), Amy Fisher, Mee-Vin Mak,

Jeff Tandy

MANUFACTURING: Patrick Bryan, Kevin Jones,

Enid Silverman (Dirs.), Jessica Horowitz (Assoc Dir.)

EDITORIAL OPERATIONS: John Dragonetti, Paul Leung

(Dirs.), Therese Hurter

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER: John A Gruber VICE PRESIDENT, TAX AND FINANCE: Timothy Walsh GENERAL COUNSEL: Dana Rosen

HUMAN RESOURCES DIRECTOR: Amy Burak Schoeman INTERNATIONAL LICENSING DIRECTOR: Maureen Lamberti RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Amy Matoian Ninomiya CONTROLLER: Karen Reed

333 N Michigan Ave., Suite 1105, Chicago, IL 60601;

312-782-2366

5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 345, Los Angeles, CA 90036;

323-930-3300 Responsible Media, 277 Linden St., Suite 205, Wellesley, MA 02482; 781-235-2429 Lewis Stafford Co., 5000 Quorum Dr., Suite 545, Dallas, TX 75254; 972-960-2889

Z Media, 1666 Kennedy Causeway, Suite 602, Miami Beach, FL 33141; 305-532-5566 Angelo Careddu, Oberon Media, Via Andegari 18,

20121 Milano, Italy; 011-3902-874-543 Copyright © 2014 by Rolling Stone LLC All rights reserved Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited Rolling Stone® is a registered trademark of Rolling Stone LLC Printed in the United States of America.

RALPH J GLEASON 1917-1975 HUNTER S THOMPSON 1937-2005

Coko Clemons (left), Taj George

The Jerky Boys: The Movie

*vs Gain liquid ©2014 P&G.

New Gain flings detergent has 50%* more amazing scent and is available in stores now Tell us why they’re

#MusicToYourNose at ilovegain.com/flings

Gain fan Jean says:

Like any household detergent, keep away from children.

I LOVE the way my clothes smell now

CORRESPONDENCE LOVE LETTERS

& ADVICE

Vatican Star

i a p p r e c i a t e d m a r k

bi-nelli’s balanced article on Pope

Francis [“The Times They Are

A-Changin’,” RS 1202] Francis’

humanity, wit and backbone

are exactly what the Church

needs during this uniquely

challenging time

Mark Horner, Austin

i’m disa ppoin ted th at rs

fell victim to the media’s

nar-rative that our new Holy

Fa-ther will be an agent of deep

change because he is somehow

making a break with his

prede-cessors and advocating a new

political platform The pope’s

social-justice concerns are cut

from the same cloth as his

de-fense of life, his support for

tra-ditional marriage and his love

of the poor Pope Francis’

mes-sage has been the mesmes-sage of

the Church for two millennia

Ronald W Cobb Jr., Chicago

a s a j e w i s h a t h e i s t, i

don’t follow the goings-on at

the Vatican very closely, but

I enjoyed your cover story on

Pope Francis Francis appears

to be an inclusive person Plus,

any pope who rubs Sarah Palin

the wrong way must be doing

something right

Dave Steinfeld, New York

m a r k b i n e l l i w r i t e s

about the “disastrous”

papa-cy of Benedict This is not only

unkind but untrue I too used

to judge Catholicism

harsh-ly, but one of many reasons I converted to the Church was Benedict Without the discern-ment of Pope Benedict, there would be no Pope Francis for your cover

Melissa Overmyer Washington, D.C.

as a lapsed catholic, i was encouraged by Francis’ elec-tion I hope under his guidance the Church will become less se-cretive and conservative, more inclusive and nonpolitical

Marie Ryder, San Bruno, CA

w h i l e f r a n c i s m a y i n deed be a people’s pope and

-an honest -and humble m-an, it would be useful to also focus

on the years of abuse suffered

by innocent boys inside the world’s many archdioceses

Roberta Chizzini Via the Internet

Toxic Export

tim dick inson’s piece on U.S sales of petrocoke to for-eign interests highlights the

LETTERS to R OLLING S TONE , 1290 Avenue

of the Americas, New York, NY 10104-0298 Letters become the property of R OLLING S TONE and may

be edited for publication.

E-MAIL letters@rollingstone.com SUBSCRIBER SERVICES Go to rollingstone.com/customerservice

•Subscribe •Renew •Cancel •Missing Issues

•Give a Gift •Pay Bill •Change of Address

Contact Us

inherent hypocrisies in the Obama administration’s green policy [“How the U.S Exports Global Warming,” RS 1202] It also makes me question wheth-

er the White House has any moral authority on the subject

Reminds me of my own ernment’s despicable practice

gov-of selling asbestos to the nese Weren’t we supposed to

Chi-be the good guys?

Mike Jacques Richmond Hill, Ontario

A Kingpin’s Fall

r i v e t i ng p i e c e on ro s s Ulbricht and Silk Road [“Dead End on Silk Road,” RS 1202]

While I was reading it, I was reminded how many millions

of illegal transactions occur

on city corners and on Wall Street Regardless of how high-tech Silk Road’s marketplace was, though, Ulbricht’s fall was old-fashioned, brought about

by greed and an inability to cover his tracks

Katlin Gee Via the Internet

i r e c e n t ly r e a d p i e c e s about the pope and about

Ross Ulbricht in The New York

Times, but I found your two

ar-ticles far better-researched and far more interesting

Tauno Ahonen, Temperance, MI

Crosby’s Return

th a nk s for stephen rick’s “David Crosby Is Some-how Alive and Well” [RS 1202]

rod-I just saw Crosby perform – the collision of rock and jazz in his music, something Rodrick nicely describes in his piece, re-ally comes through onstage It was also great to see this rock legend vertical

Brian McAdams Santa Barbara, CA

Fair Game?

it’s peter tr av ers’ r ight

to publish a negative review of the film adaptation of my novel

Labor Day [Movies, RS 1202]

But he suggests that the flaws

in Jason Reitman’s movie are somehow connected to my rela-tionship 41 years ago with J.D Salinger It appears that news

is more relevant than my

au-thorship of To Die For, and 14

other books, or a long career as a journalist and fiction writer

four-decade-Joyce Maynard, via the Internet

Peter Travers responds: In a recent interview in “Bustle,” Maynard said, “I always ex- ploit the themes of my life in

my writing.” Those themes, cluding the imbalance of power

in-in her relationship with in- ger, speak to what’s onscreen

Salin-in “Labor Day.” Fair game for

a film review? I think so.

UPDATE

in februa ry, “ the a-te a m k illings,” by “rolling Stone” contributing writer Matthieu Aikins [RS 1196, No-vember 21, 2013], was honored with one of investigative jour-nalism’s most prestigious prizes, the George Polk Award

Aikins’ exposé of alleged American war crimes in istan garnered praise

Afghan-from Polk judges for its “dogged reporting”

– Aikins spent more than five months on the ground in some of Afghanistan’s most vi-olent regions before filing his harrowing account This is RS’s second Polk win The late Michael Hastings won in 2011 for

“The Runaway General,” a story that prompted President Obama to fire the top Afghan War commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal In winning a Polk Award, Aikins joins the ranks

of esteemed reporters including Edward R Murrow, Carl Bernstein, Bill Moyers, Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill

RS Wins Polk Award

Also available at bn.com/rsnirvana

ON NEWSSTANDS NOW

Nikki Sixx

With Mötley Crüe’s well tour coming up, the band’s co-founder talks about fi ve songs he loves

Sly and the Family Stone

“Dance to the Music”

Anything by Sly gets my attention This song could

be covered by anyone in the world – from Metallica

to Morrissey – and you’d

go, “Dude, this is ing.” So much soul, so much funk

fun.

“We Are Young”

I really like this band

I love the sparse ment and the singer’s voice I was thinking about reaching out to him about a duet on my next Sixx:A.M album – and it’s very rare that I think that

“Mambo Sun.” The tion just sucks you in

repeti-M a rch 13, 2014

10

GUEST LIST

2 Real Estate

“Talking Backwards”

Our favorite song on the New Jersey dream-pop crew’s great new album,

Atlas, is this spirally,

jan-gly, sneakily tuneful song about a disintegrating relationship Listen once and those rif s will keep curling around your head for weeks, guaranteed

6 Bleachers

“I Wanna Get Better”

The fi rst single from fun

guitarist Jack Antonof ’s

new side project is an

instantly hummable pop

treat We’ll be shocked

if it’s not all over the

radio by spring

4 Metronomy

“Love Letters” video

This British electro-soul

act’s sparkling homage to

Seventies-style AM gold is one

of the catchiest songs we’ve

heard all year It got even

better when director Michel

Gondry gave the video his

classic trippy treatment

1 Beyoncé feat Kanye West

and Jay Z “Drunk in Love (Remix)”

“Drunk in Love” was already one of the sexiest songs

on Beyoncé’s new album Then Kanye West hopped in

with a slick guest verse that’s somehow even raunchier

Pro tip: Play this one on headphones if you’re in public

3 Angel Olsen

“High & Wild”

The Midwestern folk singer’s second album,

Burn Your Fire for

“All Tomorrow’s Parties.”

West

5 The Lego Movie “Everything Is Awesome”

Supercatchy pop duo Tegan and Sara and joke-rap masters

the Lonely Island collaborated on the theme song for The Lego

Movie’s animated dystopia, where 24/7 positivity is mandatory

The results can fairly be described as, well, awesome

7 St Vincent

“Regret”

Every song on the indie singer-guitarist’s new

album, St Vincent, feels

like it might be her best ever This one has crunchy power chords, a heavenly melody and a seriously psychedelic vibe What more could we ask for?

Introducing the new, deliciously layered Vanilla Macchiato.

Mc-his mind is on Rustin “Rust”

Cohle, the brilliant but deeply troubled Louisiana homicide cop

he plays opposite Woody son in True Detective, the stunner

Harrel-of a debut show from a former lege professor with little TV ex-perience named Nic Pizzolatto McConaughey was the fi rst actor

col-to sign on col-to True Detective (the

Meet the brilliant mind behind TV’s best (and most twisted) new show By Jonathan Ringen

SPRING PREVIEW 15 MUST-HEAR LPS PG 20 | RICK ROSS A BOSS SPEAKS PG 26

first season wraps March 9th), and was

in-strumental in getting the show on the air

“I loved the writing,” he says “I read the

first two episodes, and I said, ‘I’m in.’ It’s

like Mark Hanna in Wolf of Wall Street

or Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club

These are characters with clear obsessions,

and that’s what I’ve been choosing

Some-body where I could grab ahold of their

ob-sessions and get drunk on them.”

Just a few years ago,

Pizzolat-to – an intense, hyperverbal dude

with a serious Faulkner jones –

was in a very diferent place

Be-fore he became the creator and

showrunner of True Detective,

be-fore he persuaded fimmaker Cary

Fukunaga to helm every episode

(Fukunaga’s badass thriller Sin

Nombre helped seal the deal for

McConaughey), way before he

be-came drinking buddies with his

movie-star leads, Pizzolatto was

the author of a little-read novel,

Galveston, about a

cancer-strick-en criminal and a tecancer-strick-enage

prosti-tute stumbling around the Gulf

Coast, and had a tenure-track job

teaching literature and creative

writing at tiny DePauw

Universi-ty, in Greencastle, Indiana

“I was really desperate and

hungry to get out of academia,”

Pizzolatto, 38, recalls, cruising

into town from his house in the

desert two hours outside L.A “I

had been interested in writing

for television, but I never had any

kind of window into that world.”

But when his novel was

pub-lished in 2010, it was optioned

“for just a little bit of money” – which put

Pizzolatto in touch with a couple of

Holly-wood agents He asked them how to break

into screenwriting The answer was

sur-prisingly simple: Write screenplays

“With-in a week I sent them a spec script for

Jus-tified, which suited my voice really easily,

and an original pilot,” he says “In about a

month I had written six scripts – and one

of them was the pilot for True Detective.”

Pizzolatto moved his family to L.A that

year, renting a house in Van Nuys and

con-verting the garage into a writing studio

Work came right away: a development

deal with HBO for a rodeo-show pilot that

didn’t work out, but got him in the door; a

writing job on AMC’s The Killing; ofers to

buy True Detective, which producers

imag-ined franchising of, Law & Order-style

“You could have True District Attorney,

True FBI,” he says “But I held on to that

one – it was special to me.”

Like American Horror Story, and

basi-cally unlike every other series on TV, True

‘TRUE DETECTIVE’

Pizzolatto wrote all of Season One himself “I got

so into it, I couldn’t find

a way for people to help.”

Detective was conceived as an

antholo-gy show, each season telling a discrete story with a diferent locale and group of characters For the first season, Pizzolat-

to set his tale in a place he knows well: the swampy, oil-refinery-studded coast of Lou-isiana, where he grew up in a deeply Cath-olic family, obsessed with comic books and

The Twilight Zone.

The show follows two head-butting micide detectives, the cerebral Cohle and

ho-Harrelson’s good ol’ boy Martin Hart, over

a span of nearly two decades The structure

is almost psychedelically complex: In 1995, Cohle and Hart, then partners, investigate the murder of a young female prostitute who had been dosed with LSD and meth-amphetamine, crowned with a set of ant-lers and arranged in a prayer pose with a creepy little twig sculpture

Seventeen years later, the pair, no longer with the force (and having had an ominous falling out), are separately interviewed by detectives investigating similar murders

Those interviews drive the story for a pery, shifting perspective, from Cohle’s ac-count to Hart’s, as flashbacks slowly reveal what actually went down

slip-“The walls of the converted garage where I was writing were covered in hun-dreds of Post-it notes,” says Pizzolatto, who, unusual for TV, wrote the entire sea-son alone “I’m not against a writers’ room, but I had such preconceptions of what I wanted, and I got so deep into it so quickly that I couldn’t figure out a way that other people could help me So I just barreled through it, like you would a novel.”

As the season unfolds, Cohle and Hart are drawn into a world of shady evangelical preachers, hillbilly- genius meth cooks, missing women and children, neo-Na-

zi bikers, and a conspiracy that seems to rise all the way to the top Playing Cohle, McConaughey is arguably even more transformed

than in Dallas Buyers Club In

1995, he’s sober, precise, alytical By 2012, he’s slouchy and shattered, a guy who, says McCo-naughey, “lived longer than he’d hoped.” And along the way, Cohle

hyperan-is forced to go back

undercov-er – becoming a coke-and-meth- fueled maniac who goes by Crash

To keep track of where his character is throughout the 17-year story, the actor created a massive document: “I made this 450-page kind of graph of where Cohle was and where he was com-ing from,” he says

Throughout, Cohle remains deeply dubious about human nature, referring to a well of self-taught philosophy, from Nietzsche to the Romanian pes-simist E.M Cioran, to the annoy-ance of Harrelson’s Hart “Woody and I have always done comedy together,” McConaughey says “As Woody puts it, he hits the ball to me, man, I hit it back harder, and we volley back and forth But this is about opposition, about not being on each other’s frequency.”

So does Pizzolatto share Cohle’s dark worldview? “Well, I’m like Cohle in the things we tend to reject, although I am not

as broadly misanthropic,” he says “I have friends and I enjoy the fellowship of man But what is Cohle’s real relationship to the philosophies he espouses? If Cohle is a sup-posed nihilist, he is a phenomenally unsuc-cessful nihilist He’s too passionate.”

Pizzolatto has started to dig in to son Two, which, once again, he’s tackling

Sea-by himself “I’ve got three characters I love right now, and they’re all unique, and nei-ther of them is Cohle or Hart,” he says But

is there any worry that he can’t maintain the near-kitchen-sink insanity of Season One? “That’s the least of my concerns,” Pizzolatto says “I actually feel more free Now I can really start to bend things.”

ROCK & ROLL

M a rch 13, 2014

14 | Rol l i ng St on e | rollingstone.com

BORN ON THE BAYOU Pizzolatto grew up on the swampy coast of Louisiana

were excited to join the BBM Channel

surge and get fans following them upon

the release of their debut EP Reflections

The band came together in late 2012 and

quickly found their stride with their first

two full US tours They are now back in

studio recording some tracks before

head-ing to Austin for this year’s SXSW

JOIN TOGETHER

CATCH UP, CHAT 1-ON-1 AND SEE WHAT’S WHAT WITH TWO BANDS WHO HAVE

JOINED BBM AND ARE ACTIVELY CONNECTING WITH FANS IN A WHOLE NEW WAY

MOBILE MESSAGING IS GOING TO ANOTHER LEVEL

Social chatters everywhere are both ing and connecting anew with BBM By estab-lishing a BBMTM Channel users like artists MisterWives and The Strypes are creat-ing their own mobile communities that foster real-time conversa-

rediscover-tion, and of er a unique presentation of organic photos, chat and check-in We recently

caught up with these two hot bands

on the road as they established theirBBM Channels and updated fans onnew releases, highlights from the tourand other fun goings-on while out

on the road

MISTERWIVES DEBUT EPREFLECTIONS IN STORES NOW

CHECKING IN,THE BAND TOLD US:

“We opened up chat hours onour BBM Channel recently and had some really interesting, private conversations with our fans We are really getting to know them here

It’s been incredible!”

OUR BBM CHANNEL BBM PRESENTS

The second thing you notice is the crowd – recently, the band have been packingrooms around the country And the third thing you notice is their age The Strypes are a proper phenomenon Four boys aged 16 to 18, they are players with chops way beyond their years, the hard-earned result of years spent honing their craft in Irish pubs and music halls

FOR THESE YOUNG LADS IT’S ALL ABOUT FINDING THE BEST WAYS

TO STAY CONNECTED TO FANS

And BBM is that connection With their new BBM Channel, The Strypes will be instantly chatting with fans, sending updates on their upcoming debut album and the latest on where to experience them full throttle.

DOWNLOAD BBM FOR FREE.

THE STRYPES NEW ALBUM

SNAPSHOT AVAILABLE NOW

OUR BBM CHANNEL

CHECKING IN,THE BAND TOLD US:

“We like to play fast, loud rhythm and blues that can grab our audi-ences attention, it’s immediate

Our new BBM Channel allows us

to have a similar direct connection with our fans online.”

ROCK & ROLL

September, Lake Street Dive made

a boulevard full of new friends

The quartet were invited by T Bone

Burnett to play at a modern hootenanny

in-spired by Inside Llewyn Davis At rehearsals,

directors Joel and Ethan Coen watched

ap-provingly, and during the show, the band held

its own against a lineup that included Elvis

Costello, Jack White and Marcus Mumford “It’s

nerve-racking,” says Rachael Price, the band’s

huge-voiced singer “We were completely

un-known For Joan Baez to say ‘I like what you

guys are doing’ was huge.”

Not bad for a band that’s had one of the

slow-est builds in modern pop LSD got their start

in 2004, in a rehearsal room at the New

Eng-land Conservatory of Music Over the next few

years, Lake Street Dive – named after a locale in guitarist-trumpeter Mike Olson’s Minneapolis hometown – gigged sporadically, as Price pur-sued a career as a Diana Krall-like jazz chan-

teuse In 2012, they cut their second LP, Bad Self

Portraits, a blend of soul, Brill Building pop,

Mo-town and swing topped of by Price’s lustrous, full-throated singing

The album sat in the can for a year as Price extricated herself from a solo record deal In the meantime, Kevin Bacon tweeted a link to their sultry cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”

(Katie Couric did the same), and the YouTube

clip scored 1.2 million views Bad Self Portraits

could make LSD one of 2014’s biggest breakout bands – Stephen Colbert even had them per-form weeks before it was released “So much has happened that’s been unbelievable,” says bass-ist Bridget Kearney, who has particularly fond

memories of the Llewyn Davis show “The Coens

were one of 30 people we’ve ever met who knew where Lake Street was I had to hold myself back

Meet the soul-powered,

jazz-schooled band that won over

Colbert and the Coen brothers

Lake Street Dive’s Songs

for Swingin’ Hipsters

In the surprisingly great

Lego Movie, Lord

Busi-ness, the villainous ruler

of Bricksburg, makes use of a potent piece of

1984-style propaganda:

“Everything Is some,” a gleefully creepy dance-pop anthem about the joys of total conformity “Everyone is living this homogenized existence,” says Jorma Taccone of the joke-rap kingpins Lonely Island, who are featured on the song, alongside Tegan and Sara “This is liter-ally the only song that plays [in Bricksburg].”

Awe-“Everything Is Awesome”

could become a surprise hit – the lyric video has more than a million views, and the song is Number

11 on Billboard’s Dance/

Electronic Chart It was written by film composer Shawn Patterson, and Tegan and Sara got the nod to record it with pro-ducer Mark Mothersbaugh (of Devo) after audition-ing with a demo they e-mailed while touring Europe “The only vocal direction we were given was to sound as jubilant

as possible,” Tegan Quin says “We loved the idea

of contributing to thing that would bring people happiness.”

some-MIKE AYERS

THE LEGO THEME, BRICK BY BRICK

Legos

in love

ON THE ROAD

Photograph by Drew Gurian

“My fans are good-timin’, patriotic, hardworkin’

Americans, looking to let loose.”

mid-February, Luke Bryan appears

on a giant video screen above

the stage at Atlantic City’s

Boardwalk Hall, brandishing a bow and

a fl aming arrow He lets the arrow fl y, and

seconds later, a small space in the middle

of the venue’s fl oor ignites, and Bryan rises

up out of the fi re, dressed all in black,

base-ball cap included, standing in the bed of a

pickup truck Bryan and his six-piece band

then explode into the million-selling party

anthem “That’s My Kind of Night.”

That’s Bryan’s kind of entrance, too –

bigger (maybe cornier, too) and just plain

more fun than anyone else in country

When the song is over, Bryan surveys the

crowd of 13,000 and says, approvingly, “I

can tell you’re ready to party your ass of ”

He should know The peanut farmer’s

son from tiny Leesburg, Georgia, saw his

fourth album, last year’s Crash My Party,

sell 527,783 copies in its opening week –

the biggest debut for a male country

sing-er since 2004, and Bryan’s second

consec-utive release to reach Number One on the

Billboard Top 200 The 37-year-old also

made the jump to headline act, and this

summer his fl eet of semis (adorned with

ads for hunting retailer Cabela’s) will haul

the tour’s gear to four stadium shows

All this on the strength of relentlessly

upbeat, ingeniously catchy odes to

drink-ing beer, drivdrink-ing trucks and watchdrink-ing

girls – preferably while on spring break

– that make his beach-country forebear

Kenny Chesney seem subtle and

uptight by comparison Indeed,

on March 11th, Bryan, a Sigma

Chi brother at Georgia

South-ern, will release Like We Ain’t

Ever, the sixth installment in his

Spring Break EP series of

PG-rated bacchanalia

Sitting on a ratty brown couch

in a greenroom before the show,

the tall, handsome husband and father

of two little boys fi nds it easy to explain

why he’s become a boss “I’m selling

en-joyment, people smiling and dancing,”

Bryan says in his mud-thick drawl

“Ul-timately, Luke Bryan fans are your

good-timin’, patriotic, hardworkin’ Americans,

looking to let loose.” They’re the kind of

guys who are into tailgates and tan lines

a car accident The tragedy put Bryan’s goals on hold for a few years, until his fa-ther urged him to leave home for Nash-ville By 2004, Bryan had landed a song he’d co-written, “Honky-Tonk History,”

on a Travis Tritt album But in 2007, the same year he released his debut LP, his sister, Kelly, died of undisclosed causes

“My whole demeanor is af ected by what

I dealt with in life,” Bryan says “I stand how fragile life is [The losses] made

under-me attack the business and engage my fans that way – smile every day, celebrate the fun stuf and not ponder the negative.”That attitude makes it easy to shake

of any shade Zac Brown called “That’s

My Kind of Night” the “worst song” he’d ever heard, and other critics have accused Bryan of pandering to the lite-beer-and-bronzer set “That stuff’s icky,” he says about the would-be buzzkillers “I’m sorry

if I sing about certain things a lot, but my happiness doesn’t revolve around a review

or global peer acceptance When I’m stage seeing people have a good time” – he waves his hand and smiles – “all the bad stuf goes away.”

on-(also the name of Bryan’s 2011 album) and pop rap (Bryan frequently coversMacklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us” live)

Those guys’ wives and girlfriends have

an added attraction: Bryan’s butt There are social-media accounts devoted to the man’s backside, which he shakes on-

stage with Elvis swagger and Magic Mike

thrust During a meet-and-greet before the Atlantic City concert, Bryan’s handler warned the mostly female contingent that there was to be “no groping.”

“It’s something to chuckle about,” says Bryan, a fan of both Michael Jackson and Alabama, about his dance moves “I like

to ham it up from time to time.”

Bryan’s been hamming it up since hood, when he’d bust out break-dancing steps on the farm He got his fi rst guitar at

child-14, and played in bands and sang in cals throughout high school while dream-ing of a country career

musi-But Bryan went through some heavy times to get to such a lighthearted place

In 1996, his brother Chris was killed in

Country’s Good-Time Superstar

Luke Bryan is Nashville’s

hottest ex-frat boy – and he’s

taking his party to a stadium

near you By David Marchese

20 | Rol l i ng St on e | rollingstone.com M a rch 13, 2014

Prince

PLECTRUMELECTRUM SPRING TBD

“No one can play like this band,” says Prince

“People are going to try, but they won’t be able

to.” The band in question is 3rd Eye Girl, a

chops-heavy, all-female hard-rock trio who’ve been holed

up with Prince at Paisley Park, recording one of his

rawest, heaviest albums “All played live, no

punch-ins,” Prince says “You do it till you get the take you

like.” It’s a true collaboration, with the band

writ-ing songs and Bonham-esque drummer Hannah

“Ford” Welton ofering delicate vocals that Prince

compares to Wendy and Lisa’s Styles range from

fusion-y funk rock to the ballad “Whitecaps,” a

re-minder of how Prince-ly TLC’s “Waterfalls” was

YG

MY KRAZY LIFE MARCH 18

“Young Jeezy asked me who I wanted to speak to

with this album,” says white-hot rap rookie YG “I

told him, ‘The world.’ ” With cameos from Drake

and Jeezy and a Top 20 smash in “My Hitta,” the

Compton MC hopes his debut will cement him as the

next West Coast icon Krazy finds him spitting fluid

street musings (one topic: his stint in jail for burglary)

over DJ Mustard’s sweaty club productions – think ’93

Snoop meets ’03 Lil Jon

Perfect Pussy

SAY YES TO LOVE MARCH 18

This Syracuse, New York, band set the underground

punk scene ablaze last year with an intense

four-song cassette demo For their full-length debut, PP

changed “almost nothing,” says singer Meredith Graves

“We turned my vocals up a little.” In fact, Graves, only an

oc-casional drinker, downed a whole bottle of whiskey to boost

The season’s 30 hottest albums –

from U2’s big return to Miranda

Lambert’s country-pop blowout

her confidence in the studio

The results are relentless but

more textural, as on the

bor-derline-techno suite “Advance

Upon the Real”/“VII,” which

the band devised after crowds

complained that its 15-minute

sets were too short “I’m ready

to puke by the time we’re done

playing,” Graves says “What

more do you want?”

The Hold Steady

TEETH DREAMS MARCH 25

The Hold Steady weren’t

thrilled with 2010’s Heaven

Is Whenever, the band’s fifth

record in seven years “It felt

like we were out of ideas,” says

singer Craig Finn “We

need-ed a break.” After Finn made

a solo LP, the group headed

to Tennessee with Foo

Fight-ers producer Nick Raskulinecz

for its loudest, darkest record

yet Teeth Dreams – a

refer-ence to anxiety-ridden dreams

about losing teeth – is full of big

rifs and desperate characters,

including a couple struggling

with addiction in the nine-

minute “Oaks.” “I don’t want

everyone to feel terrible after

listening to it,” says Finn

Kelis

FOOD APRIL 22

For Kelis’ first album in four

years, the “Milkshake”

soul-woman made a bold choice for producer: indie-rock whiz David Sitek (of TV on the Radio), who added lush layers

of live instrumentation Food

combines retro f lavors with modern touches, from ballads with cooing background vocals (“Floyd”) to giddy, hook-lad-

en R&B jams ( “Breakfast”) “I didn’t want a period piece,” says Kelis “But I wanted something with the emotion of the things

I fell in love with growing up.”

Damon AlbarnEVERYDAY ROBOTS APRIL 29

Albarn spent the past two cades making music with Blur;

de-Gorillaz; and the Good, the Bad and the Queen “It’s possible I was subconsciously avoiding a solo album,” he says But two

years ago he produced Bobby Womack’s comeback LP along-side XL Records owner Rich-ard Russell “Richard and I de-cided to keep exploring what

we were doing,” says Albarn He gave Russell a cache of 60- plus songs and let him choose Some were digital files, some were

on cassettes, some on scraps

of paper Some were recorded

MIDNIGHT SUN APRIL 29

“We’ve f inally developed a sound we’re happy with,” says Sean Lennon, describing Ghost

of a Saber Tooth Tiger, his spaced-out project with girl-friend Charlotte Kemp Muhl For their second LP, the duo spent months at their New York home studio, messing with odd instruments (a calliope dat-ing from the 1890s) and re-cording techniques (running drums through a Leslie organ speaker) Highlights include

“Poor Paul Getty,” a Brit-pop ode to the grandson of oil ty-coon Paul Getty, who was kid-napped for ransom by the Ital-ian mob (they cut of his ear) “I related to the idea of having a famous last name that attracts attention from creepy people,” says Lennon “His story always gave me chills.”

Jhené AikoSOULED OUT MAY

Last year, rising soul star Aiko proved she was a great collab-orator, singing the hook for Drake’s “From Time” and call-ing in Kendrick Lamar and Childish Gambino for her own

hit EP, Sail Out But Aiko’s

full-length debut will set the light squarely on her power-house voice “People are used to

spot-me with rappers,” she says “I’m anxious to show people where I

am as an artist.” She can antee at least one guest verse, though, on the song “Promises”: her four-year-old daughter, Namiko “I practice my songs

guar-in the car, and she’s usually

in the back seat, so she knows them,” says Aiko “I brought her in the studio and said, ‘Re-member that song we’ve been singing?’ ”

FutureHONEST SPRING TBD

“Everybody thought it was going to be pop,” says hop’s reigning hook master Future, who has robo-crooned with everyone from Miley Cyrus to Justin Bieber “But we’re gonna go so hood and so under-

hip-ground on ’em.” Indeed, Honest, possibly the year’s

most anticipated rap release, will have the edged, tear-the-club-up feel of recent tracks like

hard-“Sh!t”: “T-Shirt” is an impassioned shout over

slow-mo EDM, and elsewhere, Wiz Khalifa raps over a lision of Wagner and Miami bass “It’s gonna shock

Master of the robo-croon:

Future

Neil Young

A LETTER HOME MARCH

“It’s one of the lowest-tech experiences I’ve ever

upcoming solo acoustic-covers LP Young cut the album at Jack White’s Third Man Rec ords

in Nashville late last year, and at least part of

it may have been recorded on the 1947 Graph machine that visitors to Third Man use

Voice-o-to record a two-minute song on a six-inch nograph disc (Young recorded a cover of Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death” when he visited the facility last April.) No track listing has been announced, but other tantalizing possibilities include Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Phil Ochs’ “Changes” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” all of which Young played at

Young at Farm Aid

Conor Oberst

UPSIDE DOWN MOUNTAIN

MAY 20

After a prolifi c decade in which

he wrote records everywhere

from a Florida psychic

colo-ny to a Mexican village, Bright

Eyes leader Oberst recently got

married and settled in New

York’s East Village Produced

by Jonathan Wilson (Jackson

Browne), this new solo LP is

full of songs about growing

up and staying off the road,

with Oberst’s sweeping

folk-rock melodies augmented by

Wilson’s jammy lead guitar

and harmonies from Swedish

sisters First Aid Kit “A lot of

the words on this record are

about getting older and being

at peace, living the real shit,”

says Oberst, 33 “Eventually,

the circus leaves town.”

Numque vente sam ipientur

ALSO ON THE WAY

Foster the People

Enter the Slasher House 4/8

Jessica Lea Mayfi eld

Make My Head Sing . .  4/15

The Afghan Whigs

Sam Smith

IN THE LONELY HOUR JUNE 17

Smith, 21, has been having a breakout run The Londoner sang on Disclosure’s U.K hit

“Latch,” topped the U.K charts with “La La La” and even got Twitter love from Adele Smith goes all in on somber elegance

on his debut, mixing dance beats with elements of gospel, soul, classic pop and even country Five songs were Adele-ish-

ly inspired by Smith’s unrequited love for one person “But there’s songs about other things – like one-night stands,”

he says “I deal with all the dif-ferent aspects of loneliness.”

BleachersTITLE TBD LATE SPRING

As fun toured the world off

gui-tarist Jack Antonof spent his downtime recording music for his new project, Bleachers “I wanted to bridge the gap be-tween Disclosure and Arcade Fire,” he says “It’s extremely over the top and extremely epic.”

Antonof worked with ers John Hill (MIA, Jay Z) and Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure) for bombastic synth-heavy singalongs, like

produc-“I Wanna Get Better,” where

he mines the scars of his past, from a damaging acid trip to losing his sister 10 years ago

“The record is all about fi nding

a world where you can be kind

to yourself.”

M i randa Lambert

TITLE TBD LATE SPRING

“This is the most stressed I’ve been about any record,” says Lambert “Everyone’s like,

‘You’re one of the queens, you got it made.’ Yeah, but I want

to stay here!” The country star went all out for her fi fth LP It’s her most diverse album yet, bouncing from hook-packed, Taylor Swiftian pop (the blond-ambition anthem “Platinum”)

to heartfelt moments like cilla” (as in Pres ley), a rollick-ing tune about having to share your husband with the world

“Pris-“Insecurity and tabloids are all addressed in this album,” says

star Blake Shelton “I’ve never hidden anything I’m just a lit-tle bit more high-profi le now.”

She also made her rootsiest track ever with “All That’s Left for You to Do Is Leave,” a bluegrass song she fi rst heard on Sir-iusXM while driving home from her fi fth Beyoncé concer t

“My husband had the idea to do the

s o n g We s t e r n - swing-style,” she says “I hate it when he’s right.”

U2TITLE TBD SPRING TBD

This is the current state of U2’s new album, under

con-struction with producer Danger Mouse since 2010: There

are “about 30 songs we’re really excited about, in various

states of being fi nished,” says guitarist the Edge Of those

tracks, “six or seven” are “mixed and ready to go.” And there

is a thematic connection The fi rst song issued from the

ses-sions, the pneumatic electronica of “Invisible,” started as a

“Ramones-like” demo, the Edge says, adding that much of

the album is rooted in the mid- and late-Seventies music

that infl uenced U2 as they were starting in Ireland “That’s

a rich period, one we’ve visited many times in the past,” he

notes “But it’s a very Dublin-centric record lyrically.” U2

have not chosen an album title – “We have a few,” the Edge

says – and there is no release date yet “But we’re getting

there,” he promises “We’re not, as we say in Ireland, up our

own arse But we do not want to let go of anything if we are

Not up his own arse:

The success of Snapchat, the app that lets you send and receive photos that self-destruct within seconds, has led the way for new secret-sharing platforms Young people in particular want outlets “to share things that can’t be posted to Facebook, whether it’s too sensitive or just embarrassing,” says Mike Isaac, senior editor for tech site Re/code Here are four ways to not put your name out there MARK YARM

WHISPER

How It Works Users

anonymously share Whispers – images with confessional text

Who’s It For College kids, who are

responsible for most of Whisper’s 3.5 billion monthly page views

Sample Message “I slept with my

dentist to give me, my brother and his girlfriend a free whitening treatment.”

SECRET

How It Works As on

Whisper, users share messages laid over photos All you can tell is whether a secret came from a friend or a friend of a friend

Who’s It For Silicon Valley bros.

Sample Message “I work at Evernote

and we’re about to get acquired.”

(Later determined to be totally fake.)

RUMR

How It Works Due in

March, Rumr allows for anonymous messaging with up to 99 people at

a time All participants are listed, but within the conversation folks are ID’d only by an assigned color

Who’s It For Gossips, imposters, the

terminally bored

Sample Message TBD, though we

as-sume major mindfuckery is in order

CONFIDE

How It Works Send

corporate gossip that vanishes after it’s been read Strong encryp-tion and anti-screen-shot measures

Who’s It For Wanna-be wolves of

Wall Street

Sample Message Wouldn’t you like to

know, Mr SEC Investigator?

THE RACE TO

BE THE NEXT SNAPCHAT

ROCK & ROLL

M a rch 13, 2014

24 | Rol l i ng St on e | rollingstone.com

HOT APPS

most a nticipated nex

t-generation video game of

the year, debuts on March

11th, players will be able to wear

20-foot-tall mech suits and blast enemies

with rockets, then eject, parkour

through alleyways, jet-pack

up through a third-fl oor

win-dow and twist an opponent’s

neck But that high-tech

combat pales in comparison

to the behind-the-scenes war

that led to the game’s birth

“I’m mostly over that,” says

Vince Zampella, the game’s cocky,

competitive creator “Well, I’d like to think

I’m mostly over that.” In 2010, after

re-leasing the billion-dollar hit Call of Duty:

Modern Warfare 2, Activision CEO Bobby

Kotick shocked the business by firing

Zampella and Jason West, the franchise’s

game-god creators, shortly before $36

million in bonuses and royalties were

due Zampella and West teamed up with

Activision’s goliath rival, Electronic Arts, and started a new company, Respawn En-tertainment, taking 38 Activision team members with them Lawsuits and accu-sations fl ew like frag grenades

“It was ugly,” says Zampella “It feels bad to be personally attacked when you see where the real greed lies.”

A college dropout who climbed up from his roots as a gamer in a Florida computer store, Zampella is a 44-year-old per-fectionist who excels at hyper-realistic combat And he has unfi nished business Despite winning a multimillion-dol-lar settlement, he says, “I don’t feel like I got my jus-tice, my story, out there.”

What Zampella is getting

out there is Titanfall, which

Mi-crosoft hopes will be the killer app that persuades gamers to buy the Xbox One instead of Sony’s PlayStation 4 It’s already won heaps of awards and is dom-inating pre-sales charts “I don’t know if it’s vindication,” he says, “but I feel we no longer need to prove, not to Activision or Bobby Kotick but to the world, that Re-spawn is here to make games We’re seri-

How ÔTitanfallÕ creator Vince

Zampella turned his outrage

into epic virtual violence

The Battle Behind

A scene from

Titanfall Below:

Zampella

his plush chair at Def

Jam’s Manhattan

of-fices and takes a

long pull on a blunt “That’s

PR-80,” he says, exhaling

a cloud of thick, sweet

smoke “My favorite kind

of weed It’s the

Rolls-Royce of marijuana.”

As usual, everything

about the Miami

hip-hop don is extra-luxe,

from the gold Rolex

on his wrist to his

sixth album,

Master-mind,

co-executive-produced by Diddy

and featuring guest

appearances from Jay

Z and Kanye West “Puf

Daddy told me, ‘Yo, Ross,

this is a classic,’ ” says the

rap star “We made it one

of the greatest ever.”

Who rolls your blunts? Do you

have a guy for that?

I got somebody, but I actually

just hired this chick that I met at a

dispensary in L.A She’s real

pret-ty, green eyes I’m gonna fl y her in

once a month for a three-day

pe-riod to roll all of my weed, ’cause I

ain’t smoking with niggas no more

I need a chick rolling my shit

Wait You’re saying you only get

high with beautiful women now?

Yeah That’s Jedi-level

The cover of your new album looks

a little bit like an all-pink version of

Nirvana’s Bleach Are you a fan?

I can’t say I am That cover comes

from one night when I was up in the

studio, smoking and drinking, and

staring at a bottle of Belaire Rosé

I was like, “Damn, this is the color

I want my album to be.” It’s fuchsia

That shit is energetic

One of my favorite songs on

the album is “The Devil Is a Lie,”

with Jay Z But some people

on YouTube are convinced it’s a

secret Illuminati message

Man, there’s a part of me

that laughs when I hear

that It’s a compliment

Like, “Wow, I made it, I’m in the Illuminati!” But ple who say shit like that, to me, are like people who believe in fucking magic David Copperfi eld is a close homey of mine – I told him I was going to bring my yacht out to his private island – but the fucking Illu-minati? I just smile and keep it going

peo-You’ve rapped some great lines over the years about lobster bisque, crabmeat, oysters and shrimp Is there any kind of seafood you don’t enjoy?

I don’t eat clams But I make a lot of food references because I believe that’s really one of the most important parts of life

To me, it ain’t what car you’re driving – it’s what you’re eating, man

I saw that you bet $100,000 on the Seahawks in the Super Bowl Congratulations Would you have been upset if you lost, or is that just pocket change to you?

I would’ve took it to the chin We bet a lot amongst each other I won a million from Puf out in Vegas a few months ago on craps I have the dice roll on Instagram.You had a series of scary seizures a few years ago Have you slowed your roll, or

do you still party like a boss?

I mean, I still party like a boss – I’m gonna do that until they fold my arms across my chest, you understand? But I’ve had to make some changes It was dehydration and no rest that trig-gered the seizures I used to have to wake

up every hour, just to hit the blunt and look out the window, but now I can go two and a half hours without getting up

If you had to compete in an Olympic sport, which one would you be best at?

Shot put I did that in high school for one year I got pretty decent at it – I think

I ranked in the Bob Hope Invitationals,

or something They knocked me off first round, but at least I got to see all the fi ne chicks running around in their short shorts.What were your favorite movies last year?

12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips – I’m

a Tom Hanks fan, and I like that little

So-malian-looking motherfucker Wolf of Wall

Street was my shit too.

If Martin Scorsese made a movie about your

life, would it be more or less crazy than Wolf?

I mean, it depends on how far Martin Scorsese wanted to go And how much I was

willing to tell him [laughs].

Scientists predict that global warming could devastate Miami by 2030 What would you do

if your city washed away tomorrow?

I’d get on my 98-foot yacht, Rich Forever,

and pick up all my niggas and all the pretty bitches I could fi t on it

Sounds a little like Noah’s Ark

Of course Two of each Then I’d hit up David Copperfi eld on his island Time to take up that of er!

On weed, women, his “classic” new

album and his escape plan if Miami

sinks By Simon Vozick-Levinson

Rick Ross

M a rch 13, 2014

28 | Rol l i ng St on e | rollingstone.com

Miley’s Doggy-Style Moves

“I want my shows to be crazy,” says Miley Cyrus She proved it at her Bangerz tour kickof in

Vancouver, grinding with dancers dressed as splif s and Bill Clinton, and – like Phish before her

– ending her set straddling a giant fl ying hot dog (The tour has reportedly prompted tons of

parental complaints.) “I love entertaining,” adds the star “I live for the rush.”

RESPECT THE QUEEN Aretha Franklin nailed

“A Change Is Gonna Come” at the BET Honors

in D.C “It was magnifi cent,” says Franklin, who hung out backstage with Berry Gordy She’s currently working with Clive Davis on an LP covering her favorite female artists “I’m even thinking of ‘Bootylicious’!” she said

KICKIN’ IT Days before

announcing Girl, his

fi rst album in eight years, Pharrell Williams showed of weird marker-scrawled sneakers (“inside” and

“out”) in L.A “I’m just trying to make things that feel good,” he says

BASKET CASE NBA fanatic Drake had a ball at the All-Star Game

THE FAMILY FLEA Flea and daughter Sunny watched the Lakers give

it away to the Bulls

CALIFORNIA LOVEJohn Mayer – who’s about to hit the studio for a new LP – strolled L.A with rumored

fi ancee Katy Perry CC

rollingstone.com | Rol l i ng St on e | 29

M a rch 13, 2014

Beck Gets Back

Jef Beck turns 70 this year, and he’s

celebrating with “a very important

album.” The guitarist is currently mixing

the LP at his home studio near London,

where he says he’s found an exciting

new sound: “It’s a surprise, but it’s not

Western-style, if you know what I

mean!” And he isn’t sure what’s

happening with the music he recorded

with Brian Wilson last year “They made a

mistake by grabbing me for a tour instead

of fi nishing the tracks It was a bit stupid.”

Stoned Arabian Nights

“I’ve always been looking forward to coming to Abu Dhabi,” says Mick Jagger This year he fi nally got his wish: After rehearsing more than

60 songs in Paris (including Goats Head Soup rarity “Silver Train”), the

Stones touched down in the United Arab Emirates to kick of their 14

On Fire Tour, and posed for a photo with some locals “It’s an amazing experience,” says Keith Richards “I hope to come back as a visitor.” Adds Ron Wood, “It’s the excitement of the unknown – getting a new buzz from a dif erent kind of audience.”

BLOOD BATH For buzzy New York noise-punk band Perfect Pussy, music is in their blood – and

vice versa! Their debut LP, Say Yes to Love, has

a limited vinyl edition fi lled with singer Meredith Graves’ blood (they sold out immediately) So why’d she do it? “Because I’m not attractive enough to pose nude,” Graves says

Adele joined PrinceÕs star-studded guest list

ÒWeÕre doing all the crap you have

to do with Pro Tools,Ó says Beck

ÒNo one has tape anymore!Ó

WHEN YOU’VE GROWN UP WITH

A FRONT ROW SEAT TO THE

BEST IN THE BUSINESS,

YOU LEARN WHAT IT TAKES

IS TWO SHOTS OF COUNTRY WITH A

SPLASH OF JAZZ AND ROCK-N-ROLL

You grew up just outside of Nashville

Do you think living so close to Music City infl uenced your musical path?

I don’t think it hurt anything I could pretty much go anywhere [in Nashville]

and see anybody that is a big songwriter

or big artist now just trying to break through then I remember going to see Blake Shelton play before his career took off Things like that you just can’t do anywhere else That’s the reason people live here

Who were your country infl uences growing up? How have they inspired your style?

I think one of the reasons my style

is probably so different is my base is more traditional – Keith Whitley, Brad Paisley, Tracy Lawrence and Darryl Singletary – but I am also a huge fan of jazz music and classic rock I’m a huge Aerosmith fan The stuff that I like is all across the board and I like to bring it all into my music

Have you had any encounters with fans? Any stories you can share?

If you have been signed for any amount

of time, there’s going to be some awkward off-beat story with a fan For the most part, my fans have been great

I have been so lucky to have them along

Tell us a little bit about what infl uenced the track, “We’re Gonna Find it Tonight” from your new album

A.M Is it based off a certain crazy

night on the town?

I wrote that song with Rhett Atkins and Chris DeStefano The three of us had never written together and we ended up writing that song in 45 minutes When

we got done, we went out and got into a little bit of trouble The party aspect

of that song defi nitely got lived out that night

In “We’re Gonna Find it Tonight,” you say it’s the kind of night for a whiskey water drink on the rocks Is that how you take your Evan Williams?

I drink my Evan Williams on the rocks Eventually, the ice is going to melt and

WE CAUGHT UP WITH CHRIS WHO

REVEALED HIS VARYING MUSICAL

INFLUENCES, INTERACTIONS WITH

DIE-HARD FANS, THE SOMETIMES

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

OF SONGWRITING AND WHO

HE’S PARTYING WITH ON HIS NEXT

TOUR HE EVEN TELLS US HOW

EVAN WILLIAMS – AND A PRAYER –

GETS THE BAND PRIMED AND

READY FOR SHOWS.

“THE STUFF THAT I LIKE

IS ALL ACROSS THE BOARD AND I LIKE TO BRING IT ALL INTO MY MUSIC.”

EVANWILLIAMS.COM/CHRISYOUNG

TO ACCESS DOWNLOAD

VISIT

No purchase necessary One free download of “We’re Gonna Find It Tonight” by Chris Young is available to U.S residents (except residents of AR, CA, TX, UT, Puerto Rico

& U.S Territories), 21 years or older, online between 2/1/14 & 4/30/14 [12am EST-11:59pm EST] Download available through 4/30/14 [11:59pm EST] to the f rst 100,000 participants to request a download Limit: 1 free download permitted per unique email address Sponsor’s online date & time stamp will be used to determine when 100,000 tracks have been requested Void in AR, CA, TX, UT, PR, U.S Territories & where prohibited, taxed or restricted Value of free download is 99¢ Not responsible for sof ware, hardware, application, computer/device or connection malfunctions *Download instructions online only Sponsor: Evan Williams Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 1064

Loretto Rd., Bardstown KY 40004 ©2014 EVAN WILLIAMS KENTUCKY STRAIGHT BOURBON WHISKEY 43% ALC/VOL

CHRIS YOUNG’S SINGLE

WE’RE GONNA FIND IT TONIGHT

an-other on The Americans

“I’d like to meet Blondie She’s

my type.” Yeah, right,

com-rade – she’s just your type It’s

a funny moment, but it also

sums up everything that makes

The Americans so poignant and

harrowing You can really

pic-ture this Russian agent in the

1980s, at the height of the Cold

War, grooving to his Walkman

and dreaming of dating

Deb-bie Harry The FX espionage

thriller is full of spies – some

serving Mother Russia, some

serving the USA, some

play-ing both sides Yet no matter

which side they’re on, they can’t

help falling in love with their

fantasy of America Under the

hard-boiled surface, they’ve got

a heart of glass

After a brilliant debut

sea-son, The Americans brings all

that Cold War dread back Keri

Russell and Matthew Rhys play

a pair of KGB agents posing as

a suburban married couple in

Washington, D.C., circa 1982

They live amid the

conformi-ty of the subdivisions, the kind

Rush sang about at the time

Even their kids think they’re a

regular American family from

Chocolate City’s vanilla

sub-urbs Nobody suspects Philip

and Elizabeth Jennings lead a

secret life of sex, murder and

betrayal But everybody can

tell the country is getting

cra-zier The Big One could drop at

any moment No wonder people

look a little paranoid

The Americans depicts one

of the grimmest moments in

U.S history: The two

super-powers plan their foreign policy

around the assumption they’ll

be blowing up the planet soon

Every day is a nuclear

stand-of that makes the Cuban

Mis-sile Crisis look like a polite tif The Soviets are led by seventy-something Leonid Brezhnev, currently boozing his way to his next (and fatal) stroke The U.S is led by seventysomething Ronald Reagan, who showed up

to the 1983 G7 economic mit without reading the brief-ing materials and explained,

sum-“The Sound of Music was on

last night.” Those are the two gents entrusted with the nucle-

ar launch codes So long,

fare-well, auf Wiedersehen

Russell and Rhys are the

heart of The Americans – for

them, these geopolitical mares get tangled up in their domestic ones They’re like the Griswolds with a body count

night-The rest of the cast is bottom great – Noah Emm-erich is the ruthless FBI agent next door, and Annet Mahen-dru returns as the foxy dou-

top-to-ble agent Nina, the most pathetic spy here because she knows she’s getting screwed by

sym-both sides As usual, The

Amer-icans gets the Eighties details

right, from Alpha-Bits cereal to

Bo Derek’s Playboy cover to the

terrible wigs (Do they give out

an Emmy for Best Supporting Performance by a Down Vest?)

“Things go wrong – they ally do,” Russell tells a rookie spy “It’s part of the job.” Wheth-

usu-er these opusu-eratives are setting

up a sex trap or at home with the family, they bristle with check-the-windows-again tension, the kind you see in the coke-binge scenes of any Eighties-themed movie It’s almost like cocaine and nuclear paranoia are the same drug, wreaking havoc

on the nation’s brainpans The

unspoken theme is No wonder

weÕre all so nuts

And yet for all the violence,

Mr and Mrs Jennings still seem like your everyday Amer-ican parents As Soviet agents bringing up American kids, they don’t understand (or trust) this new generation they’re rais-ing But what parents don’t feel that way? For these Americans, parenthood is exactly like the nuclear-arms race – there’s no master plan behind it, no way

to go back and rethink the inal strategy, not even a way to process all the fear Just a daily struggle to put of the day when

orig-it all could go kerblooey

Sex, spies and nukes

make ‘The Americans’

TV’s most paranoid

thriller By Rob Shef eld

Red-Hot Cold Warriors

The Americans

Wednesdays, 10 p.m., FX

All hail Broad City, a glorious new

low for girl-slob comedy Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are a couple of badass Jewesses living

large in New York, more Laverne

& Chong than Cheech & Shirley

They’re barely capable of a decision bigger than where to get wasted next: “Let’s meet at the ATM where that dude puked on you last week.”

Dirty talk, drugs, gallons of vomit – the closest these ladies get to

a socially responsible decision is

exhaling into a desk drawer when sparking up on the job At last, here are urban-slacker chicks whose world doesn’t revolve around dating, learning things or want- ing more out of life – these two would rather share their sex fan- tasies about Rihanna and Beyoncé

or argue about where to stash weed on the subway (“The vagina

is nature’s pocket!”) Great taste in guest stars, too – Hannibal Buress

as Glazer’s dentist sex buddy and especially Janeane Garofalo, as a vet whom Glazer tries to talk into

a prescription for dog Xanax R.S

Drugs and Sex and the City

Broad City

Wed., 10:30 p.m., Comedy Central

SPY HARD Russell, murdering

in Members Only

Glazer (left) andJacobson

Anyone can learn to code and with software touching almost every aspect of our

lives, it's increasingly important to gain fluency in the languages that power the web

At the New York Code + Design Academy, our hands-on full stack web development

workshops are designed for beginners with no prior programming experience We will

teach you the tools to launch your company online, build an app , or create a website

to share your story.

New York City | Los Angeles

LEARN TO CODE!

Summer Camp for Teens

12 Week Intensive Bootcamp Evening Intensive Workshops

Learn Skills that Power the Digital Economy

rollingstone.com | Rol l i ng St on e | 33

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

recovery from the Great

Re-cession, the American

econo-my remains fundamentally

bro-ken Inequality is getting worse:

Ninety-five percent of income

gains since 2009 have gone to the top

one percent of earners Private employers

have added more than 8 million jobs, but

nearly two-thirds are low-wage positions

The American worker’s share of the

na-tional income is as low as it’s been in the

six decades since World War II But even

as most Americans struggle just to tread

water, corporate profits have soared to

rec ord highs

Worse: The bottom rung of the

econo-my is growing crowded; 3.8 million

Amer-icans – the equivalent population of the

city of Los Angeles – now labor at or below

the minimum wage And that wage itself

has lost more than 12 percent of its value

since it was last hiked to $7.25 in 2007,

due to inflation In a more prosperous era,

the stereotype of a minimum-wage

work-er was a teenagwork-er flipping burgwork-ers,

earn-ing a little beer money on the side But in

the new American economy, dominated

by low-wage service jobs, fewer than one

in four minimum-wage workers are teens

More than half are 25 or older “The

demo-graphics have shifted,” says Rep George

Miller, ranking Democrat on the House

labor committee “These are now

impor-tant wage earners in their families.”

As a matter of public policy, the

solu-tion is obvious There are few government

interventions that can match the elegance

of a higher minimum wage It boosts the

fortunes of the working poor and the

econ-omy at large, with minimal trade-offs

Raising the minimum wage does little or

nothing to dampen job growth The

Con-gressional Budget Ofce estimates that an

increase to $10.10 would trim payrolls by

less than one-third of one percent, even

as it lifts nearly 1 million Americans out

of poverty

Outside of Washington, D.C., raising

the minimum wage is not a partisan issue

Supported by more than 70 percent of

Americans, the policy achieves both

lib-eral and conservative goals: It alleviates

poverty even as it underscores the value

of hard work It reduces corporate welfare

even as it lessens dependence on the social

safety net Today, taxpayers are shelling out nearly $250 billion a year on welfare programs for the working poor Nearly

40 percent of food stamps are paid out to households with at least one wage earner

And yet, the Republican Party is going all out to portray a mandatory pay hike

as just more job-killing nanny-state reach “You’ve gotta totally wipe out this notion of fairness,” said Rush Limbaugh

over-“That’s not what a job is It isn’t charity.”

The GOP’s mysterious determination to wrong-foot itself with the American elec-torate on the minimum wage is handing

the Democratic Party a potent political weapon – one that could make the difer-ence in holding the Senate in November For Democrats, the politics of a high-

er minimum wage are as solid as the nomics The issue unites progressives and independents even as it drives a wedge between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party extremists In his January State

eco-of the Union address, President Obama threw down the gauntlet, calling on the GOP to join Democrats in increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour “Say yes,” Obama said “Give America a raise.”

THE MINIMUM-WAGE WAR Giving America’s lowest-paid workers a raise is great for the

economy And even better for Democratic prospects in 2014

By Tim Dickinson H H

Big-box stores get an even sweeter deal A federal analysis of a Walmart Supercent-

er in Wisconsin found that safety-net sidies ran approximately $5,500 per low-wage associate If that’s representative, every Supercenter in America is enjoying

sub-a rolling bsub-ailout of nesub-arly $1 million sub-a yesub-ar

Taxpayer subsidies to the working poor make welfare queens of some of the world’s most profi table corporations “The large restaurant chains, the Walmarts – they hold themselves up as captains of the free-

enterprise system,” Rep Miller says, “but their whole business plan is dependent on using the social safety net.”

One of the most expensive programs that taxpayers fund is the Earned Income Tax Credit – which doles out $60 billion

in welfare payments to poor working ents every year at tax time The EITC lifts millions out of poverty But thanks to the inadequacy of the minimum wage, it also creates a perverse incentive The EITC subsidizes poverty-wage work, so busi-nesses can – and do – drive wages even further below the poverty line

par-More than one-third of the EITC is pocketed by employers through artifi cial-

ly low labor costs, according to a Princeton economic analysis Worse: The EITC ac-tually hurts many single workers without kids, who don’t qualify for the subsidy and are made strictly worse of by its existence

that lifts all ships This is common sense: If a shift worker gets a raise and is now making what the line manager has earned, the line manager is also going to get a bump in pay Raise the minimum wage, and the bottom 20 per-cent of wage earners soon enjoy larger pay-checks, says Dube of UMass

A $10.10 minimum wage would boost the incomes of 27.8 million workers, ac-cording to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute Far from the image of a teen fl ipping burgers at Jack in the Box, the median worker who would benefi t is a full-time working woman in her thirties, responsible for half of her family’s income.Because these workers spend all the

money they make, the $35 billion in extra wages they would earn as $10.10 is phased

in would get pumped right back into the U.S economy – doing far more to stimu-late growth than if the same dollars were bloating some billionaire’s bank account

At $10.10, a full-time worker would earn $21,000 a year If not a living wage, that’s at least enough to pull a family of three above the poverty line According

to Dube’s math, this boost in wages would drive a 10 percent reduction in poverty

down where it was before Bear Stearns

hikes have long argued that creased wages cost jobs for those who need them the most As House Speaker John Boehner put it, “When you raise the price of employment, guess what

i-mum wage is $7.25 an hour That

represents a pay cut, in real terms,

of more than 30 percent from 1968’s

bottom wage That decline in the value of

the minimum wage has been a key driver

of income inequality “And unlike

inequal-ity that’s been brought about by

technolog-ical change or globalization,” says

Arindra-jit Dube, labor economist at the University

of Massachusetts Amherst, “we could have

prevented it just by pegging the minimum

wage to the cost of living.”

There is no natural level for the

min-imum wage Where it is set is purely a

policy decision In previous decades, the

minimum wage kept pace with advances

in productivity; as workers created more

value for a company, they gained, too Had

the minimum wage tracked productivity

gains since 1968, it would now stand above

$20 an hour More telling: Had workers on

the lowest rung kept pace with the gains

that have accrued to the one percent, it

would have vaulted past $30 in 2007

But there are other more

wide-reach-ing ef ects of settwide-reach-ing the minimum wage

below what it takes to scrape by A

fami-ly of four trying to live on the earnings of

a minimum-wage worker – $15,080 a year

– falls more than $8,000 below the

pover-ty line As a result, today’s minimum-wage

workers are really expensive for the rest of

us They have to rely on taxpayers to

sup-plement their subpoverty wages

Essentially, a low minimum wage adds

up to a massive stealth subsidy for

corpo-rate America A recent University of

Cal-ifornia, Berkeley study reveals that the

Washington governor declares

death-penalty moratorium

Debt ceiling raised , no strings attached.

Breakthrough:

Giant laser creates fusion

energy in the lab.

Fred Armisen

to lead band

for Seth Meyers.

THE DARK REALITY OF OUR ECONOMY IS THAT

GLOBALIZATION HAS ALREADY DONE ITS NUMBER ON US

THE LOW-WAGE JOBS LEFT CAN’T BE SHIPPED OVERSEAS.

happens? You get less of it.” His line is

echoed by many of the party’s potential

2016 presidential contenders Texas Sen

Ted Cruz calls it “wrongheaded”;

Ken-tucky Sen Rand Paul claims it will hurt

the “least-skilled people in our society”;

and Florida Sen Marco Rubio declares

that “raising the minimum wage does not

grow the middle class.”

For other Republicans, blocking an

in-crease in the minimum wage isn’t radical

enough; they argue America must repeal

the wage fl oor altogether Texas Rep Joe

Barton recently declared that the

mini-mum wage has “outlived its usefulness.” In

a sign of how far the national GOP has

tilt-ed to the extreme right, such outré notions

are now being advanced by senators long

regarded as moderates Last June, Lamar

Alexander – the GOP’s ranking

mem-ber on the Senate labor committee –

an-nounced, “I don’t believe” in the minimum

wage, insisting that employers should be

able to get away with paying $2 an hour

Such arguments may have intuitive

ap-peal, but in recent years the conventional

wisdom has been upended The minimum wage is the most exhaustively researched subject in economics Social scientists have scrutinized bordering counties that run along state lines – think Washing-ton and Idaho – measuring what happens when one state boosts its minimum wage and the other doesn’t The results are in:

A 2013 meta-analysis of minimum-wage studies by the Center for Economic Policy and Research concludes that higher mini-mum wages “have no discernible ef ect on employment.” To the degree that main-stream economists still debate the topic, says Dube, it’s whether the jobs impact is

“fairly small or something close to zero.”

Minimum-wage foes – prominently Tyler Cowen, a free-market economist who directs the Koch-funded Mercatus Center – like to point to a controversial

2009 study by University of California, Irvine economist David Neumark, which argues that high minimum wages are dis-advantageous to teen job seekers Yet even Neumark himself does not oppose min-imum-wage hikes “It doesn’t mean we

shouldn’t do it,” he said, announcing his study “If 10 workers lost their jobs but 1,000 families were lifted out of poverty, we’d probably say that was a pretty good trade-of ”

The trade-of s of a $10.10 minimum wage came into sharp relief in February, when the CBO projected that such an in-crease could reduce payrolls by 0.3 per-cent, or 500,000 jobs If accurate, that jobs number is nothing to scof at But for

a sense of perspective, consider that the CBO also estimated that the GOP-led se-quester killed 750,000 jobs last year, pro-viding zero benefit to the economy In contrast, the CBO minimum-wage report calculates that for every disadvantaged job seeker, 33 workers would receive a fatter paycheck Taken as a group, the na-tion’s low-wage workforce would have an extra $31 billion to spend every year, stim-ulating the economy “The bottom line from the CBO report,” says Larry Katz, a Harvard economist, “is that for the vast majority of Americans, an increase to

$10.10 is a big win.”

jobs – greater than 85 percent – are now found in restaurants, retail,

Jobs loading up the deep-fat fryer, ing bedpans and mopping fl oors can’t be shipped to Bangladesh or cheaply auto-mated The dark reality of the American economy today is that globalization has already done its number on us “These are the jobs that are left, and they’re left for

chang-a rechang-ason,” schang-ays Dube “Bchang-arring tation,” he says, laughing, these jobs will have to be fi lled in America even at high-

telepor-er wages

Counterintuitively, those higher checks can create benefi ts for the busi-nesses that write them Better pay leads

pay-to quicker hiring, reduced turnover and happier workers The success of high-

Danish zoo kills

“surplus” giraf e ,

butchers animal

in front of kids.

Man-eating Bengal tiger

in India claims 10th victim.

Flappy Bird

maker pulls game: too addictive.

AGAINST US

America drops

to 46th in global ranking of press freedom.

Chaos

in Kiev

Big study:

Mammograms useless in preventing cancer deaths.

Another coal-related disaster in West Virginia

The

Michael Dunn verdict

WAGE WARS The battle for

higher minimum pay will

likely be a key issue in this

fall’s midterm elections

36| Rol li ng Ston e | rollingstone.com M a rch 13, 2014

wage discount retailers like Costco

dem-onstrates that livable wages and low

pric-es aren’t mutually exclusive But even

if every penny of increased labor costs

were passed on to shoppers, the results

wouldn’t give anyone sticker shock A UC

Berkeley study found Walmart could

fi-nance a pay hike to $12 an hour for its

nearly 1 million low-wage associates by

boosting prices just 1.1 percent – at a cost

to the average shopper of just $12.49 a

year, or the price of a bag of Cat Chow

always been held back by

parti-sanship George W Bush signed

the last increase into law in 2007

But with the national GOP wildly out of

step with the American public on this

issue, Democrats are pressing their

ad-vantage This is not a new playbook The

minimum wage proved its worth as an

of-year wedge issue as recently as 2006,

when Claire McCaskill ran blistering ads

in her Missouri Senate campaign against

Republican Jim Talent, describing him as

the kind of politician who “votes 11 times

against increasing the minimum wage

but takes six congressional pay raises.” On

Election Day, boosted by unusually high

turnout, McCaskill secured a

50,000-vote victory

Seeking to shore up the most

vulnera-ble incumbents in the Senate, labor

activ-ists are now pushing state minimum-wage

ballot initiatives in Alaska, Arkansas and

South Dakota Quite apart from the

obvi-ous economic benefits, the political goal is

to give the party’s base voters – who often

sit out nonpresidential elections – some

skin in the game on Election Day

Proving that the issue can be used to

play ofense as well as defense, Kentucky

Democrat Alison Grimes has turned the

minimum wage into the driving issue of

her candidacy against Senate Majority

Leader Mitch McConnell The

Republi-can is facing a well-funded primary

chal-lenge from the far right, and has chosen to

prove his conservative mettle by

denounc-ing a minimum-wage increase as the “last

thing we should do.”

Noting that 250,000 Kentucky women

would benefit from a raise to $10.10 an

hour, Grimes has countered that voting

for a minimum-wage increase would be

her first priority In early polling, the

un-tested Democrat has leapt to a four point advantage over Kentucky’s 30-year in-cumbent

The political battle lines have been drawn But is $10.10 really the best that America can do by its poorest workers?

The experience of other advanced racies suggests that the minimum wage could rise far higher still In Australia, the minimum wage is now greater than US$16 an hour, yet the unemployment rate Down Under – 5.8 percent – is signif-icantly lower than our own

democ-Nationwide, there is one high-profile campaign to push the minimum wage sig-nificantly above $10.10 Ironically, this leadership is coming from the conservative end of the spectrum Ron Unz, a Republi-can multimillionaire from Silicon Valley, is advancing a ballot measure to hike Califor-nia’s minimum wage to $12 an hour

Unz is best known as a foe of illegal immigration, and he says he was initial-

ly attracted to the minimum wage as a means to put U.S citizens back to work

in the kinds of jobs Americans

supposed-ly won’t do anymore But Unz has since embraced livable wages on the econom-

ic merits alone – arguing that no ican should be forced to subsidize the labor costs of profitable corporations Unz has especially harsh words for those, like Florida’s freshman senator, who would in-crease the Earned Income Tax Credit in-stead of forcing Walmart to pay honest wages “Why should all taxpayers pay for massive, hidden government subsidies?”

Amer-he asks “But that’s what Marco Rubio and fellow Republicans are calling for: an in-crease in welfare spending!”

In the past, conservative opposition

to higher minimum wages was premised

on the fear that they would drive an crease in joblessness, creating greater de-pendency on the welfare state, Unz says

in-But now that hard economic data prove the opposite case – that higher hourly wages don’t kill job growth and simulta-neously reduce reliance on Uncle Sugar – Unz believes there’s no reason this policy shouldn’t unite both bleeding-heart liber-als and Mitt Romney conservatives, who fret about the freeloading of the 47 percent

of Americans who don’t pay income taxes

“There are a lot of conservative sons,” Unz says, “to increase the mini-mum wage.”

IRONICALLY, THE ONE

HIGH-PROFILE CAMPAIGN TO PUSH THE

MINIMUM WAGE ABOVE $10.10 IS

COMING FROM A RIGHT-WINGER

A progressive California billionaire

is poised to give the Koch ers a run for their money on climate change in November, attempting

broth-to raise $100 million for the 2014 elections in an efort to punish climate deniers much the same way that the NRA lowers the boom on gun grabbers Tom Steyer, a former San Francisco hedge-fund manager,

is pledging at least $50 million of his own $1.5 billion fortune to the efort

No newcomer to green activism, Steyer is already a heavyweight in California politics, where his track record includes foiling Big Oil’s 2010 ballot initiative to dismantle the state’s cap-and-trade system and passing a 2012 proposition to fund green jobs by closing corporate loopholes Steyer made his first foray into national politics last year, spend-ing $11 million in Virginia to defeat anti-science gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli and nearly $300,000

to tilt the Democratic Senate primary

in favor of climate hawk Ed Markey in Massachusetts

At $100 million, Steyer’s 2014 campaign kitty would dwarf the elec-tion spending of the nation’s largest environmental groups, and provide

a counterweight to the oily politics

of the Koch brothers’ network, which raised $400 million in 2012

If many progressives remain easy about the huge-money politics

un-of the post-Citizens United world,

Steyer is sanguine about that cally awful” Supreme Court decision

“histori-“We’re trying to accept the state of play as it is,” he says

For 2014, Steyer’s network will

be targeting competitive Senate and gubernatorial contests in swing states like Iowa and Florida, where climate is a defining diference between the candidates, rewarding allies and punishing those who’ve lined up on the wrong side of history

“Elected ofcials, whether Democrat

or Republican, have to feel that less they are progressive on climate and energy it will afect their career,” Steyer says

Like the Kochs, Steyer and his network are engaged for the long haul, working to influence races that will resonate not only in November but also in 2016 and beyond “We think that you don’t win elections by creating a movement,” Steyer says

“You create a movement by winning

THE ANTI-KOCH

CLIMATE NOTES