Dazed & Confused January 2014: The Modern Myths Issue

By working with fearless directors and consciously avoiding the corseted wasteland of quaint English period dramas, Carey Mulligan has become one of our generation’s most exciting actresses. Following an 18-month sabbatical, she returns next month as angsty folk singer 
Jean Berkey in the Coen brothers’ superb Inside Llewyn Davis. Hannah Lack went to meet the 28-year-old in the depths of Dorset to find out what motivates her to choose such uncompromising scripts – and how she coped with singing opposite Justin Timberlake.

Inspired by the Coens’ passion for folk tales, 
the rest of the issue is filled with Dazed’s favourite storytellers and mythmakers – the people changing and challenging the narrative form. Authors Tao Lin, Gabby Bess, Joe Stretch, Ben Brooks and Alissa Nutting are five such literary provocateurs. We asked each of them to write a new piece of short fiction about modern culture, and the results are astounding. In the inimitable words of our books editor Stuart Hammond, expect “celebrity, self-harm, MacBook sex games, teen suicide, Sylvia Plath misquoted on the internet and the particular type of crushing ennui that only a smartphone can induce.”

In fashion, we profile suburban outsiders in The Rookies, a SS14 story photographed by Fumi Nagasaka and styled by Robbbie Spencer; Matthew Stone pays tribute to his seminal 00s art collective !WOWOW! in a collaged story photographed by Stone and styled by Katie Shillingford; and Drew Jarrett shoots an enchanting suede-focused shoot for SS14, styled by Emma Wyman.

Elsewhere, Jon Savage and filmmaker Matt Wolf trade teenage tales; Junya Watanabe and leather-loving architect Peter Marino dissect fashion mystique; Dave Hickey and fabled cult screenwriter Joe Eszterhas muse about their lives spent spinning yarns; the Alan Lomax of crate digging, Madlib, talks about alien overlords and how sampling can bring the dead back to life; Brian DeGraw takes us on a tour of his Woodstock retreat; legendary journalist John Pilger attacks political progaganda merchants; and exiled Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani speaks movingly about artistic repression and her love/hate relationship with her motherland.

I also travelled to Amsterdam to interview one of the most influentual lyricists of the last 20 years, Snoop Dogg. Or as he’s now known, Snoopzilla. Astonishingly, even though he and his producer DâM-FunK blazed through three huge kush blunts in under 30 minutes and sunk a few tequila slammers, their knowledge of G and P-funk, keytars, Jheri curls and one-piece suits remained unimpeded. I may have nearly missed my plane home because they turned up three hours late, but what good is a story without a few unexpected twists along the way?

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