Table of contents for May 2025 in Rolling Stone

COMEDY! GREENLAND! KIMMEL! RANDOM NOTES Plaqueboymax leads the charge of Twitch streamers in music (p.9). Jensen McRae talks through the heartbreak of her new LP, and we reexamine the Donald Trump of The Apprentice (p.11). Timbaland defends AI-music generators (p.12), Olivia Munn talks life post-cancer (p.13), and Charley Crockett takes Texas to the world (p.14). Young Chop is ready to get back to music (p.16), while Rhiannon Giddens leans into the past (p.17), and Tunde Adebimpe stays upbeat on his first solo album (p.18). “The image that I cut — compared to George Strait or someone — I’m controversial.”CHARLEY CROCKETT NATIONAL AFFAIRS Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, fired tens of thousands of workers while cashing in — but a protest movement is growing in the wake of his…

Not long ago, Timbaland thought he was tapped out. Since the mid-Nineties, he’s repeatedly reinvented R&B, hip-hop, and pop, lacing classics by the likes of Aaliyah, Justin Timberlake, and Jay-Z with skittering beats, future-shock synths, and his outrageous ear for samples and hooks. At age 53, though, the producer worried he was aging out of innovation. “I thought it was over,” Timbaland says, sitting in the sun-splashed studio of his Miami mansion. “I can make the drums, but something about it don’t hit the same way in this generation.” But then Timbaland met Baby Timbo. That’s his pet name for Suno, the powerful, controversial AI-music generator currently facing a lawsuit from all of the record industry’s major labels over its admitted use of countless copyrighted songs in its training…

“The American people are saying, ‘You know what, Elon Musk? You’re a liar.’” Ben Vizzachero had his dream job, working as a wildlife biologist with the Los Padres National Forest in California. He was moving up the ladder, had recently received a positive performance review, and was “making the world a better place,” he says. Yet, over Presidents’ Day weekend in February, Donald Trump’s administration told Vizzachero he was being let go for his “performance.” Vizzachero was one of many thousands of “probationary” federal workers who were baselessly fired by Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency as part of Trump’s effort to purge the federal workforce and make it more MAGA. It was crushing. “My job is my identity,” Vizzachero says. “How I’ve defined myself since…

Taking Comedy to the Streets Carson. Letterman. O’Brien. Baira. Rahma. Williams. You may not recognize those last few names, but there’s a direct line between them and some late-night legends. They’re part of the wave of TikTok talk-show hosts who are remixing old-school late-night tropes — breezy interview segments, parlor games, silly characters — for a digital audience. Gone are hosts sitting behind bulky desks; the stars of the future are mics on the move. “My job is to share the mess,” says Tiff Baira, host of the dating show Street Hearts, in which she coaches two complete strangers through an impromptu first “date” on a New York City sidewalk. Donning one of her signature sparkly, furry, and/or pink hats, Baira uses her charm to smooth over awkward moments…

In a recent episode of the Max hospital drama The Pitt, a bitter middle-aged patient refers to Mateo, a handsome young Latin emergency-room nurse, as “Erik Estrada.” After shrugging off the guy’s racist microaggressions, Mateo turns to veteran charge nurse Dana to ask who Erik Estrada is. Incredulous, she references CHiPs, Estrada’s hit Seventies motorcycle-cop drama, before playfully scolding, “Know your television history!” Meanwhile, in the second-season premiere of the Peacock mystery series Poker Face (May 8), Natasha Lyonne’s crime-solver Charlie Cale meets four sisters who, as children, starred in a show called Kid Cop Nights, which sounds more insane with each new mention of it. (Season Nine, we are told, took place “in the mind of a coma patient that Kid Cop’s evil twin shot in the neck.”)…

In the past three-plus years, Olivia Munn became a mom, was diagnosed with cancer, underwent surgeries including a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy, had a second child by surrogate, and got married (to comedian John Mulaney, father of those two kids). Prior to all of that, her career was her focus, after 15 years in Hollywood that saw her go from hosting G4’s Attack of the Show! all the way to the MCU (as Psylocke in X-Men: Apocalypse). But now, “when I take a job,” she says, “I have to make sure it makes me happy.” The new Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors — a dark dramedy starring Jon Hamm and set in an uber-wealthy New York suburb — marks her first major role since her life…

Rhiannon Giddens is juggling a dizzying handful of upcoming projects when she logs on to Zoom. There’s Biscuits & Banjos, the inaugural festival she organized this spring in Durham, North Carolina, which, she surmises, could be one of the largest-ever gatherings of Black string-band musicians. There’s her highly anticipated reunion with the Carolina Chocolate Drops at the festival. There’s also What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Giddens’ new record, with fiddler Justin Robinson, one of the original Carolina Chocolate Drops. The album represents a radical return to her roots: Giddens on banjo and Robinson on fiddle running through a series of mostly instrumental tunes. “There are probably people who are going to be like, ‘This is really fucking boring. Why did she put this out?’” she says.…

It’s 5 a.m. in Georgia, and Tree Sound Studios is quiet. I’m in a side room of the vast, oaky complex near Atlanta, preparing to be the first person outside of Lil Wayne’s circle to hear Tha Carter VI, the album he’s been working on for six years. ● On this mid-January night, our listening session was supposed to begin at 1 a.m., but it took two hours for Wayne to show up. Wayne’s manager, Fabian Marasciullo, an affable, stout Queens native wearing all black, told me that the hip-hop icon is doing some last-minute edits to songs before I hear them. It’s been a long minute. I ogle the labyrinthine recording console in the room. I wouldn’t know the first knob to push, but I have mastered the…

As the title of his new memoir — Actress of a Certain Age: My Twenty-Year Trail to Overnight Success — suggests, Jeff Hiller did not take the express bus to stardom. Best known as Joel, best friend to Bridget Everett’s Sam on the HBO series Somebody Somewhere, Hiller accepted dozens of oddball parts while bouncing around showbiz, often killers and creeps thanks to his “unconventional” looks. The book, out June 10, chronicles the hustle it took to make it as a full-time performer. He shares some lessons learned. Practice gratitude One of Hiller’s first TV roles was in the 2005 FX dark comedy Starved, centered on an eating-disorder support group. He was cast as a sex worker providing services — off camera — in a bathroom stall where two…

Josh Johnson can’t remember all of the details about this one particular bank robbery gone wrong. It happened in the Seventies, or maybe it was the Eighties. The amount of money stolen is hazy. But he can recall the parts that matter — the funny ones. “He ran up in there, robbed the place, didn’t wear a mask,” the comedian says. “They eventually catch up with him, and he’s so shocked that he’s been arrested.” With an exasperated flair, the Louisiana native echoes one phrase the culprit repeated during questioning: “I was wearing the juice!” What did he mean? “This dude, because lemon juice is an ingredient in invisible ink, he thought rubbing lemon juice on himself would make him not appear on the camera.” Johnson tells the story…

Brian Tyree Henry is tall. Around six feet two, with a commanding presence that, rather than impose, invites — a warmth that seems proportional to his stature. It’s how he manages to maintain a comfortable, low-key profile inside the restaurant at New York’s Four Seasons hotel, where, he tells me, he’s a regular. The Emmy-nominated actor, famous for his performance as the rapper Paper Boi in the acclaimed series Atlanta, has an easy rapport with the staff, who seem relieved that the A-lister in their midst treats them like peers. He’s in town promoting his new Apple TV+ series, Dope Thief, directed by Ridley Scott and written by Peter Craig. Henry stars as Ray Driscoll, a down-on-his-luck ex-con who, along with his buddy and former cellmate Manny Carvalho (played…

In the 2004 series premiere of The Apprentice, Donald Trump reintroduces himself to America with a glossy anecdote about overcoming financial adversity. Narrating over sweeping aerial shots of New York City — “my city,” he calls it — and footage of him flying over his own shiny buildings in his Trump-branded helicopter, he declares, “It wasn’t always so easy. About 13 years ago, I was seriously in trouble. I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back and I won, bigly. I used my brain, I used my negotiating skills, and I worked it all out.” In reality, Trump reportedly climbed out of that $3 billion-plus debt in the early 1990s by taking loans from his wealthy father and siblings and evading federal taxes. But he doesn’t…

Keyla Monterroso Mejia made her professional acting debut only four years ago, playing Maria Sofia Estrada in the 11th and 12th seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Since then, the 27-year-old has been steadily working with some of the biggest names in comedy. Here, she shares her takeaways from the sets and stars of Curb, Abbott Elementary, and, most recently, Seth Rogen’s Hollywood farce, The Studio. Act with purpose As a novice working with one of comedy’s all-time greats, Monterroso Mejia says she was “definitely not” approaching Larry David “asking for tips.” But one direction he gave her stuck: “He said, ‘You can do anything within the bounds of the scene. Just make sure that it makes sense and there’s a reason, and it’s not just because you want to…

In addition to all of the creative superlatives we can lay on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as it approaches the 20th anniversary of its debut in August, the FX comedy has provided perhaps the greatest return on investment in television history. The series’ original, unaired pilot episode — made largely because stars Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day, and Glenn Howerton weren’t happy with the roles they were getting — cost maybe $200, with the bulk of that covering the price of videocassettes. One hundred and seventy episodes and counting later, Sunny itself is still going strong, and the three friends and co-star Kaitlin Olson are all now staples in either film or other television series. That 200 bucks has built a big enough fortune that McElhenney is today a…

Take a peek around the current pop landscape and you’ll notice the persistent, surprising influence of two 2012 albums. No, it’s not some combination of Taylor Swift’s career-defining Red, nor Kendrick Lamar’s opus good kid, m.A.A.d city, nor Frank Ocean’s breakthrough, Channel Orange, all of which came out that year. Instead, these days it can feel like the two most influential albums of 2012 are, for better or worse, Mumford & Sons’ Babel and the Lumineers’ self-titled debut. Both records jump-started an early- to mid-aughts pop moment that resulted in Mumford & Sons smuggling banjo onto the Top 40, Kesha bringing harmonica riffs to the top of the charts, and Icelandic bands shouting “Hey! … Hey!” in seven-times-platinum blockbusters. That moment pales in comparison with the current Gen Z…

BUDDY SYSTEM FROM STORYBOOK BROMANCE TO BREAKUP FRIENDSHIP In Theaters MAY 9 MEET CRAIG WATERMAN (Tim Robinson), the world’s most socially awkward suburbanite. His wife (Kate Mara), a cancer survivor, is clearly still in love with her firefighter ex-boyfriend. His son thinks he’s a dweeb. The guys at his corporate job barely tolerate him. So when his super cool neighbor Austin (Paul Rudd) — A TV weatherman! With a Burt Reynolds mustache! Who plays in a rock band! — befriends him, Craig finally feels like he’s found a soulmate. Then Austin “breaks up” with him after a group hangout goes sideways, and suddenly, Craig will do anything to get his dream bromance back. Writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s feature debut skewers the self-consciousness of middle-aged dudes trying to bond. Think I…