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, .
Kelley worked at NPR from 2007 until 2016. Her projects included a series on and overseeing a feature on women musicians. She also ran another series on and web-produced the Arts Desk's series on vocalists, called . Most recently, her piece on 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 Virginia Beach denizen spoke about the reverse troll he laid on Def Jam, what it's like to go back and forth with Puffy, the fallacies of textbooks and the perils of ignoring the youth.
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"I'm telling the fans what I'm trying to tell myself because nobody was telling me at the time," says the rapper, who hails from Maryland. -
"It's liberating to realize you have the freedom to make mistakes. You have the time," says the Pittsburgh rapper, who lifted himself out of a dark period. "Because you're so small."
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Masta Ace had his first drink at a Cold Chillin' Christmas party. He began his career surrounded by the greats, and he continues to push himself to operate on a higher level. -
"In Flushing, Queens, where I came from, we're right down the block from this fair, the Globe. Something about that town, it's just Olympic, Olympiad kind of a — we wanted to jump the highest." -
The death of the highly respected hip-hop figure prompted an outpouring of tribute and personal stories from his community this weekend. -
One of the foremost architects of New York rap has been decorating this planet since the late '80s.
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The Long Beach, Calif., rapper made his debut album, Summertime '06, so that people who hear it will know how he felt then. "That's when we understood the power we had in fear," he says.
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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.
