March 13, 2014 rollingstone.com
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“A l l t he NEWS
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ON THE COVER Justin Bieber photographed in Beijing on September 29th, 2013, by © Imaginechina/Corbis.
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Justin Bieber, Bad Boy
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The ‘Dookie’ Chronicles
Twenty years later, Green Day
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The Entrapment of
Jesse Snodgrass
How did an autistic teen loner get
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ROCK & ROLL
Inside ‘True Detective’
Meet the dark mind behind TV’s
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Prince and his
all-female band make
one of his heaviest
albums ever. Page 20
Matthew
McConaughey as
philosophical cop
Rustin Cohle on
True Detective.
Page 13


CULTURE
ROB SHEFFIELD
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March 13, 20146
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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
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CORRESPONDENCE
LOVE LETTERS
& A DVICE
Vatican Star
i appreciated mark 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 disappointed that 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 message of
the Church for two millennia.
Ronald W. Cobb Jr., Chicago
as a jewish atheist, 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
mark binelli writes
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
while francis may in-
deed be a people’s pope and
an honest and humble man, 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 dickinson’s piece on
U.S. sales of petrocoke to for-
eign interests highlights the
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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 gov-
ernment’s despicable practice
of selling asbestos to the Chi-
nese. Weren’t we supposed to
be the good guys?
Mike Jacques
Richmond Hill, Ontario
A Kingpin’s Fall
riveting piece on ross
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 recently read pieces
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
thanks for stephen rod-
rick’s “David Crosby Is Some-
how Alive and Well” [RS 1202].
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 travers’ right
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 four-decade-
long career as a journalist and
fiction writer.
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, in-
cluding the imbalance of power
in her relationship with Salin-
ger, speak to what’s onscreen
in “Labor Day.” Fair game for
a film review? I think so.
UPDATE
in february, “the a-team killings,” 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 Afghan-
istan garnered praise
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
March 13, 20148
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Rolling Stone
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rollingstone.com


Also available at bn.com/rsnirvana.
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW


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

Queen
“Ogre Battle”
If you started with
“Bohemian Rhapsody,”
you need to go back to
the fi rst three albums.
This song blew me away
– Freddie brought some-
thing new to the table.
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 amaz-
ing.” So much soul, so
much funk.
fun.
“We Are Young”
I really like this band.
I love the sparse arrange-
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.

David Bowie
“Changes”
“Changes” was a battle
cry for me when I was
a teenager. We were all
going through changes.
The song might as well
have been a tattoo on us.
T. Rex
“Mambo Sun”
T. Rex evolved from
acoustic stu to that
electric boogie. You can
hear it coming in on
“Mambo Sun.” The repeti-
tion just sucks you in.
March 13, 201410
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 ri s will keep

curling around your head
for weeks, guaranteed.
6. Bleachers
“I Wanna Get Better”
The fi rst single from fun.
guitarist Jack Antono ’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
No Witness, is a bold
electric revelation that
deepens with every spin.
Best of all: this emphatic,
accusatory track, with
welcome echoes of the
Velvet Underground’s
“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?
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Introducing the new,
deliciously layered Vanilla Macchiato.



rollingstone.com
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Rolling Stone
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13March 13, 2014
The Dark Thrills
of ÔTrue DetectiveÕ
ÔO
h, yeah, rustiiiiin
Cohhhhhhle,” drawls a
delighted Matthew Mc-
Conaughey. It’s the day after the
annual Oscar luncheon, where the
nominees mingle and have a group
photo taken, but he’s not talking
about Dallas Buyers Club. Today,
his mind is on Rustin “Rust”
Cohle, the brilliant but deeply
troubled Louisiana homicide cop
he plays opposite Woody Harrel-
son in Tr ue Detective, the stunner
of a debut show from a former col-
lege professor with little TV ex-

perience named Nic Pizzolatto.
McConaughey was the fi rst actor
to sign on to Tr ue 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
LACEY TERRELL/HBO

SOUTHERN
DISCOMFORT
Matthew
McConaughey and
Woody Harrelson
as Louisiana
detectives in 1995

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 dierent 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 teenage 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; oers to
buy True Detective, which producers imag-
ined franchising o, 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, Tr ue
‘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 dierent 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 ho-
micide detectives, the cerebral Cohle and
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 slip-
pery, shifting perspective, from Cohle’s ac-
count to Hart’s, as flashbacks slowly reveal
what actually went down.
“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, hyperan-
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
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 Sea-
son Two, which, once again, he’s tackling
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
March 13, 201414
|
Rolling Stone
|
rollingstone.com
BORN ON
THE BAYOU
Pizzolatto
grew up on
the swampy
coast of
Louisiana.
LACEY TERRELL/HBO