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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Our producer, David Luke, father of David Luke III, put together this podcast, in which past guests like Danny Brown, Solange Knowles and T.I spoke about fatherhood and father figures. It's OK to cry.
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When people speak on Kanye, they show themselves. I don't know if that means he's a superior artist or not; I do know that's why we're spilling all this ink.
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The artist and thinker, who just released a new album, takes us from the drummers of Burundi to Adam Ant, Octavia Butler to David Bowie, Rakim to Young Thug.
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Grappling with the event, the album and the artist, under different circumstances — none ideal.
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The rise of the rapper from Paterson, N.J. with a trio of feel-good hits has felt inexorable and hilariously American. His debut album, finally here, is proof he did it his way.
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Don't call Hamilton unlikely: Lin-Manuel Miranda's lauded musical about the life of the Founding Father is Broadway crafted by an artist who knows rap to be our cultural lingua franca.
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The death of the highly respected hip-hop figure prompted an outpouring of tribute and personal stories from his community this weekend.
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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.