Frannie Kelley
Frannie Kelley is co-host of the Microphone Check podcast with Ali Shaheed Muhammad.
Prior to hosting Microphone Check, Kelley was an editor at NPR Music. She was responsible for editing, producing and reporting NPR Music's coverage of hip-hop, R&B and the ways the music industry affects the music we hear, on the radio and online. She was also co-editor of NPR's music news blog, The Record.
Kelley worked at NPR from 2007 until 2016. Her projects included a series on hip-hop in 1993 and overseeing a feature on women musicians. She also ran another series on the end of the decade in music and web-produced the Arts Desk's series on vocalists, called 50 Great Voices. Most recently, her piece on Why You Should Listen to Odd Future was selected to be a part of the Best Music Writing 2012 Anthology.
Prior to joining NPR, Kelley worked in book publishing at Grove/Atlantic in a variety of positions from 2004 to 2007. She has a B.A. in Music Criticism from New York University.
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Once he was an aspiring rapper, now he represents Ali, Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples and the estate of Biggie Smalls. He's also worked with Michael Jackson, Prince and Stevie Wonder.
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When we sat down with Iamsu, the Bay Area rapper had just as many questions for Ali Shaheed Muhammad as we had for him.
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The Texas rapper's experiences as, at once, a member of an all-girl posse, the only woman in the room and a person strangers underestimate are fundamental to her formidable style.
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Public Enemy producer Hank Shocklee talks about hip-hop's often overlooked influence on technology and the current state of the genre with Microphone Check.
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"It's when you step out of the community that you get to look at it through a lens where you might be able to help," says the Queens rapper. "But then you're so far out of it, how do you get back in?"
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A writer and producer of Empire spoke to Microphone Check about which subplots on the TV show come from hip-hop history and the ways its central storyline is particularly American.
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Jean Grae is a rapper, a singer, a writer, a comedian and an actress. She doesn't run out of ideas. Her most recent album is called That's Not How You Do That: An Instructional Album For Adults.
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"This is the first thing that I've said that I fully stand behind," the 21-year-old rapper says of his new album. "I've never been this transparent with myself or with music."
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The pillar of New York's ASAP Mob speaks about his aesthetic choices, the way he imagines our far off future and what he's learned from Missy Elliott.
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Steinberg began managing Tupac Shakur in the late '80s and stepped away from that role in 1993. She didn't manage another musician for almost 20 years, until she started working with Earl Sweatshirt.