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Zebra & Giraffe
Saturn Returns
Zebra & Giraffe exorcise the ennui of family dysfunction, the joylessness of late-20s coupling,and microcosmic fatalism on their new indie rock parable, ‘The Wisest Ones’.
By Damon Boyd
Only tired, eternal eyes that have seen everything could peer past the one billion kilometres of void and find Saturn, gyrating on its trajectory. Aloft and in the dark it hulahoops in orbital ambivalence, just another cheap thrill in the cosmic vaudeville show– all performance, no opinion, deliberately indifferent. On Earth, the ringed planet is far less quiet, more bully and sly, and a supposed big influence in the life development of tiny 20-somethings trapped by everything.
No Future
On the “other side” of the tracks, separated from the young upwardly mobile MCs and beatmakers, hard-knock hip-hop die-hards in the Mother City ’hood are locked in a continuing street battle for recognition – and survival.
By Max Barashenkov
Photograph by Luke Daniel
They come in droves, one after another, twenty, thirty, forty. It doesn’t stop. An onslaught of MCs and crews taking their turn to spit rhymes in a bleak prefab in Khayelitsha’s Site C. Outside, a Total garage labours under a stream of taxis, a Standard Bank ATM spews cash to a never-ending queue, meat is being cooked on the sidewalk, dope is smoked and beer guzzled. It’s the township that tourist buses see on brave ventures into poverty, but inside the hall, there are youths who will never make it into any photo albums or glossy magazines.
Adele
The Triumph of Adele
The voice, the passion and the making of '21': inside the biggest pop-music story of our time.
By David Browne
"I wanna do something mean!" said Adele. It was the day after the 2010 Grammys; she hadn’t been up for any awards the night before, but that hadn’t stopped her from “celebrating”.S he showed up at a Hollywood studio hung over and “pissed off”, in the words of One Republic’s Ryan Tedder, her collaborator that day – grumbling about the way her girlfriends were talking about her based on what they'd read in the tabloids. “My friends all read gossip shit, and they’re like, ‘I heard you’re going out with blah blah’, and I haven’t even met these people,” she told ROLLING STONE last year.
Rolling Stone Issue 12
Jimi Hendrix
February 6, 1992
His revolutionary synthesis of guitar violence, improvisational nerve and melodic reverie first began to transform popular musicin the late Sixties. His wild antics, soulful blues and New Age, distortion-laden sounds combined to create one of rock’s most influential bodies of work.
By David Fricke
When Jimi Hendrix sent his Fender Stratocaster up in f ames at the end of his historic performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, it was the ultimate in mind-blowing rock ’n’ roll spectacle, a brilliant grandstand play by a consummate psychedelic showman well schooled in the show stopping high jinks of great rhythm-and-blues entertainers like T-Bone Walker and Little Richard. It was also a profound gesture of affection and gratitude.