Unlike most women, Shakira is willing to let her body go. In fact, the 5-foot-2 Colombian “She Wolf” singer, 32, says she’s looking forward to it — if it means she’ll become a mom. “My body feels like it is asking to reproduce, to have a huge belly and carry babies,” she tells the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands today. “My boyfriend is six feet tall, and sometimes I feel like I’m his keychain, a small thing.” But while the Grammy winner — currently in a nine-year, monogamous relationship with investment banker Antonio de la Rua — has long had a maternal instinct, don’t expect her to walk down the aisle any time soon. It’s something she says she’ll never do. “We live in a society that represses women’s subconscious dreams,” Shakira, who considers herself a die-hard feminist, says. “You know, women have to make enormous efforts through life, much larger than men. We deal with so many pressure: the pressure of aesthetics, and how society wants us to deliver our performances as mothers, daughters and wives. “It’s funny how the papers want to see you married, and then they want to see you divorced,” she continues. “Well, I won’t do any of it.” For more on Shakira’s desire to start a family — but not before putting the finishing touches on her Nov. 23 She Wolf album — pick up the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands now.

Good for her … Shakira seems to be a woman unafraid to be exactly what she wants to be … and if she wants to have a baby, she strikes me as the type of lady who won’t wait around for a man to help her have one. You do your thang, Shakira! Ah-woooooo!

[Source, Source]

In January 1984 Madonna had just one album under her belt when she told American Bandstand’s Dick Clark she had lofty plans: “To rule the world.” Over the past three decades, she has provoked, innovated and inspired; she’s set and broken her own records, most recently wrapping the highest-grossing tour ever by a solo artist with her Sticky & Sweet show. And now that she’s released the two-disc retrospective Celebration, the pop superstar who rarely looks back sat down with Rolling Stone’s Austin Scaggs for a revealing trip through her early days in New York, some of her biggest scandals, and of course, her most massive hits in our new issue, on stands today. Even as a seventh grader in Michigan, Madonna reveals she knew how to push her audience’s buttons. For her first ever performance, “I had my girlfriends paint my body with fluorescent hearts and flowers,” she recalls of a rendition of the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” that left her fellow students speechless. “I wore a pair of shorts and a midriff top, and I just went mad. … I’m sure everyone thought I was insane. That was the beginning of my provocative performances, I guess.” But having innate stage savvy didn’t mean Madonna grew up a wild child. Though she tells Scaggs about her days as a graffiti artist when she was running with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York City (her tag: Boy Toy), life was tamer before that. “I was a geek in high school. I didn’t really have a drink until I got divorced for the first time [from Sean Penn] when I was 30,” she admits. ” ‘Geek’ is not a word anyone uses to describe me, except perhaps [Confessions on a Dance Floor producer] Stuart Price, who once said, ‘You know, you’re a nerd at heart, nobody knows it.’ I took it as a compliment.” She credits her first major shift in style — from punky brunette club kid to blonde wedding wonder — to getting dressed and styled for more photo shoots and videos as her career progressed. “I think people put a lot of emphasis on the whole reinvention of my image, and it’s always been a lot less calculated than people think,” she says. ” I think it’s boring to stay the same. A girl likes to change her look.” But if she had to pick her worst fashion moment: “It was the purple lipstick, fluorescent-green sweater combo. … It’s OK, it was the Eighties. It was a bad-hairstyle era. Let’s face it.” But Madonna doesn’t have many musical regrets. She tells Scaggs about writing “Live to Tell” and “Vogue,” returning with a head full of brand-new ideas on Ray of Light and teaming with some of the industry’s biggest hitmakers on Hard Candy. But after all these years, she admits she still can’t sniff out a Number One. “I’ve never been a good judge of what things are going to be huge or not. The songs that I think are the most retarded songs I’ve written, like ‘Cherish’ and ‘Sorry,’ a pretty big hit off my last album, end up being the biggest hits,” she tells RS. ” ‘Into the Groove’ is another song I feel retarded singing, but everybody seems to like it.”

You know, say what you will about Madonna — whether you love her or hate her — you cannot deny that the woman knows what she wants and gets what she wants … no matter what it is that she wants. From the start of her career, her hunger to conquer the world has kept her on point and allowed her to carve out a legendary career. Because she now has everything that she wants, she’s not as hungry anymore and, therefore, isn’t as innovative as she used to be. While I would love for Madonna to be the iconic trendsetter that she is known to be for years to come, I just don’t know that she can really do that anymore … which is why, I think, she is looking to the next generation to take up the reins. After the jump, read some of Madonna’s comments about Lady Gaga and find out what she thinks of the singer …

“I can see myself in Lady Gaga. In the early part of my career, for sure,” she told the mag. “When I saw her, she didn’t have a lot of money for her production, she’s got holes in her fishnets, and there’s mistakes everywhere. It was kind of a mess, but I can see that she’s got that It factor. It’s nice to see that at a raw stage.” And she appreciated the “Just Dance” singer live, as did Madonna’s oldest child, Lourdes. “I think Lady Gaga is great. When [she and daughter Lourdes] saw her, I actually felt a kind of recognition. I thought, ‘She’s got something,’” the pop star said. “There’s something quirky about her. She’s fearless and funny, and when she spoke to the audience, she sounded intelligent and clever. She’s unique.”

And a few more excerpted quotes from this Rolling Stone interview:

“What can you say? It was a challenging year. I think work saved me, and I’m very grateful that I had work to do. I may have thrown myself off a building,” she told the mag. “Life is an adjustment. It’s different. My sons aren’t with me right now, they’re with their father, and I’m not very comfortable with the idea of my children not living together. There are pros and cons, but I feel good now” … “I wanted to work with Eminem,” she revealed. “I don’t think he wanted to work with me. Maybe he’s shy” … “I was a geek in high school. I didn’t really have a drink until I got divorced for the first time [from Sean Penn] when I was 30,” she said. “‘Geek’ is not a word anyone uses to describe me, except perhaps [‘Confessions on a Dance Floor’ producer] Stuart Price, who once said, ‘You know, you’re a nerd at heart, nobody knows it.’ I took it as a compliment.”

That is some compliment that she paid Lady Gaga … as I’ve said many times, I’m not the biggest Gaga fan primarily because I find her over-the-top “shocking” tactics extremely contrived and banal. I do believe she is a very talented musician and I have HUGE respect for her work to advance equal rights in this country. For me, the jury is still out on Lady Gaga but the fact that Madonna has given her her stamp of approval says a lot. I cannot wait to read the rest of this interview. I’m still solidly on Team Madonna … even if she isn’t the inspirational innovator that she once was, her contributions to pop culture cannot be denied.

[Source, Source]

Megan Fox has proclaimed herself bisexual, called actors narcissistic douche bags, flat-out lied to the press about a lesbian teen affair and slipped some scathing words about her Transformers director Michael Bay into interviews. So what makes this sexy starlet tick? Rolling Stone’s Erik Hedegaard goes head to head with the star of Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body in the new issue and learns the secret of her bewitching power: “a powerful, confident vagina.” “Men are scared of vaginas,” she says, telling RS a woman is most powerful when she is “completely in charge of her sexuality.” So what makes this seemingly in-control 23-year-old star crave the security of her pillow cocoon in bed at night and let her temper flare so wildly she’s told off-again, on-again boyfriend Brian Austin Green, “I’m going to stab you with something”? Fox opens up about childhood panic attacks, the only two relationships she’s ever had, and her struggle to reconcile her public persona with her true self. “I don’t really want to share myself with the public,” she says. “I want to deflect attention from my reality.” In Jennifer’s Body, Fox is a demon-girl who literally devours her horny high school classmates and engages in the most anticipated girl-on-girl make-out scene of the year. “Clearly I can’t argue that it’s not gratuitous, because it is,” she admits.

Rolling Stone promises that there is much more interesting stuff in Megan’s coverstory interview to read in the new issue of the mag which hits newsstands today … apparently Megan Fox is a “self-loather”. HMMM. You wouldn’t really know it by reading/listening to her interviews. After the jump, check out some of the photos that are included in Megan’s Rolling Stone photospread …

Yeah, the photos are pretty much what we’ve come to expect of Ms. Fox. Whether she’s laying about with mouth agape, or showing off as much as possible without giving it all away … this RS photoshoot is exactly the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Megan Fox. Yeah, she looks like a self-loather to me. I can’t wait to read the rest of this interview.

[Source]

Of his drama-free coming out as a gay man, NPH had this to say to Rolling Stone magazine:

“I love going to the Playboy Mansion party with my boyfriend. Last year, we got dressed up as dead foppish Brits with topcoats and white contact lenses. These naked girls on Ecstasy kept coming up to us, like, ‘We love your contacts.’ We’d twirl around and say, ‘Well, we like your breasts!’”

Hahahahaha! He’s so fun. I think pretty much everyone became even more enamored of Neil Patrick Harris after witnessing his amazing performance as host of The Tony Awards earlier this year. Now that NPH will be hosting The Emmys, it seems like he is the go-to guy for awards shows (stealing a bit of thunder from Hugh Jackman who also did a great job hosting The Academy Awards this year). I can’t help but still see Doogie when I look at NPH but photos like this go a long way in helping me see him in a new, more grown up light too ;)

[Source via Source]

In the days just before his death, Michael Jackson was working harder than he ever had in hopes of staging “the greatest show on Earth” according to our latest cover story. Claire Hoffman retraced the pop icon’s final moments for “The Last Days of Michael Jackson” in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, and found that Jackson was well aware of how the public came to perceive him in recent years and that he had fully dedicated himself to a comeback tour that he hoped would erase that perception. “He wanted people to see his work and not just talk about his lifestyle,” AEG CEO Randy Phillips tells Hoffman in her cover story. He was also eager to finally clean up his finances and settle down in Las Vegas. “He was ready to stop living like a vagabond and settle down and earn money again,” Phillips tells Rolling Stone. And those who were inside his final rehearsals say that the show he was prepared to mount may have actually succeeded on all fronts. “He was so brilliant on stage,” tour director Kenny Ortega tells Hoffman. “I had goose bumps.” “I turned to somebody and said, ‘This is amazing,’” adds Ken Ehrlich, the longtime Grammy Awards producer who sat in on rehearsals. “For so many years I have watched Chris Brown and Justin Timberlake and Usher and the Backstreet Boys and En Vogue all imitate Michael Jackson — and now here we were this many years later, and he was going to do it again. I got chills, literally. The hairs on the back of my neck were raised. Those are the moments you hope for.”

At this point, what hasn’t already been said about the “comeback that never was”? From what I’ve gathered from this new Rolling Stone piece, there really isn’t anything new that we haven’t heard already … still, RS has a great tradition of music journalism and I’m sure MJ fans will be happy to read any stories on the late King of Pop. To be honest, I’m much more interested in finding out the results of MJ’s autopsy/toxicolgy reports — which are supposedly due for release this week. We may definitively know, very soon, what exactly was the cause of MJ’s death. Until then, tho, we wait. After the jump, check out a short video from Rolling Stone that features Claire Hoffman, the author of this MJ coverstory, talking about her article and explaining what is in store for readers — be warned, the video autoplays …

Rolling Stone brings you the definitive tribute to the King of Pop, with a dazzling 96 page special issue (plus 4 covers) chronicling the thrilling highs and chilling lows of Michael Jackson from Motown to Thriller to Neverland Ranch. The vast majority of the material here is new, thanks to essays from Will.i.am, Smokey Robinson, Quincy Jones, Sheryl Crow, Slash, Adam Lambert, Usher, L.A. Reid, Akon, Brooke Shields, Gamble and Huff, Wyclef Jean, Ne-Yo, Weird Al, Martin Scorsese, Glen Ballard, John Landis, plus the Rolling Stone staff. Also included are reprints of two classic Rolling Stone cover stories, one from 1973 by Ben Fong Torres, and a 1983 piece by Gerri Hershey.

I’m quite perplexed as to why, exactly, Adam Lambert was asked to contribute to this tribute issue but I’m sure AI fans are thrilled. It makes sense that RS would honor the memory of MJ in this way, he graced the cover of their mag many, many times thruout his life and career. It seems fitting that he would grace their cover at least one … or four more times.

[Source]

If the Jonas Brothers‘ first moment on the cover of Rolling Stone found them reaching the height of teen pop stardom, their latest — on stands this week — finds them pushing for an even loftier goal: musical credibility. “I think we are working to make that trade without having to give anything up,” Kevin Jonas tells Rolling Stone in our cover story. “But I think it will take time, because of where we came from. I would honestly say to anybody, if you were in a band like us, you would take advantage of those platforms too. It’s easy for people to say, ‘No, I’m a real rock & roller,’ but I think you do what you’ve got to do.” Our Jenny Eliscu spent time with the brothers in Los Angeles as they prepared to hit the road in support of their most ambitious album yet, Lines, Vines and Trying Times. The album, the tour and much of what the band does these days seems designed to help facilitate the leap from teen pop to contemporary rock. It’s a challenging feat that few have pulled off. But the brothers are working hard on what they know will be a long, slow march to credibility. Eliscu found Nick on point as the band’s creative lead, putting their touring band through their paces (his brothers have started calling him “Mr. President”), while Kevin helps to steer the Jonas business and image (he even built a foam 3-D scale model of the band’s new stage set, which now takes 180 people to assemble at each show). “We have an operation around us that we run,” Kevin tells Rolling Stone. “It’s not run for us, or dictated to us. Everything that we do, we sign off on.” But even with a strong operation and a lot of hard work, the band knows that teen idols rarely make the leap to “serious artist.” “Personally, I’m not in the band to say, ‘Hey, you need to respect us, take us seriously,’ because that’s kind of stupid,” Joe tells RS. “We’re doing it because we love it, and we don’t care what age group we attract. If they like our music, they like our music, and if they don’t, fine. We don’t need you like our music.”

In the end, I really respect that these young guys have as much control over their careers as they do. They seem pretty grounded and are talented … whether you appreciate their music or not (which I don’t) you have to give them props for doing their thing to the best of their ability and enjoying much success from all of their hard work. Gone are the days when popstars are completely controlled and exploited by larger entities (for example, like Tiffany in the 1980’s who was a huge popstar that had no say about anything and ended up with NOTHING after her career was all said and done). These days, these millionaire tween stars have a lot of control over their careers … it’s pretty incredible. After the jump, check out a few photos from their RS photoshoot …

It appears that they are trying to look more mature, at least in these photos, and yet still maintain their Jonas look. Again, I honestly am not a fan of their music but I can appreciate the appeal. I love me some terrible pop music and I’m sure if I listened to enough of their stuff I bet I could find a song that I like but it’s just not what I’m into. That being said, I’m sure their fans absolutely adore them which is all well and good. Obvs there is a market for a new “Hanson” band and these guys are running with it. Can’t blame ‘em, don’t hate ‘em and, on the real, have a modicum of respect for ‘em.

[Source]

One thing’s for sure … Lambert <3s his make-up. Whether it's Cover Girl or maybe it’s Maybelline, homie deffo loves glamming himself up whenever possible. To be honest, I’d've been more impressed if the RS photoshoot was less obvious … but I guess the pics are nice enough. What do y’all think … do we like?

[Source]

American Idol’s glamtastic runner-up Adam Lambert opens up in the next issue of Rolling Stone, speaking frankly about his sexuality, though he doesn’t think his revelation is particularly shocking. “I don’t think it should be a surprise for anyone to hear that I’m gay,” Lambert says in the new issue of Rolling Stone, hitting newsstands this week. The flamboyant Idol singer hits our cover and bares all, talking about his childhood (”I started to realize I wasn’t like every other boy,” he says), the drug-fueled Burning Man epiphany that led him to AI (”I realized that we all have our own power, and that whatever I wanted to do, I had to make happen,” he tells RS) and his run on the show (”I was like, ‘I’m going to glue rhinestones on my eyelids, bitch!’ “). And yes, he talks about his sexuality. “Right after the finale, I almost started talking about it to the reporters, but I thought, ‘I’m going to wait for Rolling Stone, that will be cooler,’ ” he tells us. “I didn’t want the Clay Aiken thing and the celebrity-magazine bullshit. I need to be able to explain myself in context. “I’m proud of my sexuality,” Lambert adds. “I embrace it. It’s just another part of me.” Ultimately, however Lambert tells RS contributor Vanessa Grigoriadis that there are other parts of his life that he’s trying to keep front and center. “I’m trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader,” he says. It was that mission — and his Burning Man “psychedelic experience” — that lead him to Idol after years in musical theater. “I knew that it was my only shot to be taken seriously in the recording industry, because it’s fast and broad,” he tells RS. He details his experience on Idol, his true thoughts on winner Kris Allen and how his sexuality impacted his Idol run in our cover story, “Wild Idol: The Psychedelic Transformation and Sexual Liberation of Adam Lambert,” which hits newsstands this week.

I’m happy to hear that Adam is proud of his sexuality and choosing to openly discuss a personal matter like that on the cover of a major magazine is pretty much proof of that fact. I completely understand why he wouldn’t want to talk about any of his personal biz while he was competing on American Idol. While it works to the advantage of some competitors to talk to the voting audience about their wife/husband and kids, we still live in an age where discussing your homosexuality would still work against you. In any event, it’s very cool that Adam is finally feeling free enough to talk about his life as openly and honestly as possible. After the jump, check out a few behind-the-scenes photos from Adam’s Rolling Stone covershoot …

Adam talks with the mag a bit more in a behind-the-scenes video from the shoot which you can watch in full HERE. So … Adam’s out, no one is surprised and now he can go about his biz of carrying on with his music career. I gotta say tho … I wonder what Kris Allen is feeling that his runner-up scored the cover of Rolling Stone magazine before he did.

[Source]

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has been a hot actor for some time but it seems like folks are finally waking up to the fact that he rules … here’s hoping his stint in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra doesn’t undo all of the hard work he’s done over the years. Bat for Lashes has to be one of the most exciting new artists to burst on the scene. While Lady Gaga is trying really hard to stand out and be different, Bat for Lashes is actually standing out and being wonderfully different. Her album rules. Rupert Grint is really a very cool sidekick for Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter, as anyone familiar with the movies should know. He really brings Ron Weasley to life. You can click HERE to read Rolling Stone’s thoughts on his awesome sidekickness. After The Oohlas (who are my fave LA band), I’d have to pick the Silversun Pickups as my second fave band. They are so the Mazzy Star/The Sundays alternarock band of the times. I’ve loved every song they’ve ever written … their sound hearkens back to my shoegaze youth and makes the experience feel new all over again. Rolling Stone doesn’t always get the “hot” things right every year but this time, they’ve picked a few winners. Kudos for them for finally gettin’ their fingers on the pulse.

[Source]