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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The musician and NPR host on his motives, his rituals, Lucy Pearl and his one regret.
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We spoke to the rapper, producer and head of Awful Records, while we were in Atlanta in May. Our onstage conversation was brief but covered a lot of ground fast.
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We went to Atlanta to talk to the three-man production team behind some of the greatest songs ever: Ray Murray, Rico Wade and Sleepy Brown.
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We put our legendary co-host in the hot seat and he spoke on how he evaluates music, how his faith influences his work ethic and how much he cares about getting credit. And that's just the first half.
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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.