Frannie Kelley

The aftermath of a Korean Air executive's rage over how a steward presented macadamia nuts in her airline's first-class cabin has had an immediate side effect: sales of the nuts have risen sharply in South Korea.

From The Wall Street Journal:

"Sales of the nuts from Monday through ...

On the day before Thanksgiving, Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley sat down in Los Angeles with Rick Ross. First things first, they talked about food, but quickly got into the Miami musician's early rap fandom, the importance of imagery in his work and what his mentors ...

It's fair to wonder why anybody would make an album today, much less a group of musicians who've proven themselves several times over. There isn't much money to be had, and what little there is can be got by other, less exhausting methods than touring to break new songs. Kool ...

If this is the first time you're hearing of somebody called Your Old Droog, don't even trip. Some people know the name; those people spent the spring and summer speculating if an unknown entity who posted a better-than-it-should-be debut EP on Soundcloud was in fact Nas, our (hip-hop's) ...

Killer Mike and El-P, underground kings from Atlanta and New York, respectively, met four years ago, made an album together, and then joined forces under the name Run the Jewels, something far beyond the sum of its parts. "We're a group comprised of two dudes who met at ...

From boom bap to EDM, we look at the line between hip hop and not, and meet a defender of the genre that makes you question who's in and who's out.

Dante Ross, A&R man extraordinaire, keeper of stories about everyone from ODB to De La Soul to Cypress Hill, the Beastie Boys, Queen Latifah and Pete Rock, sat down with Microphone Check to remember the old days and stare down the present.

ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: What up, Dante?

DANTE ROSS: ...

T-Pain's fingerprints are all over pop and R&B and hip-hop. He wasn't the first musician to use Auto-Tune as an instrument — he noticed it on a Jennifer Lopez remix, and remembers "Deep" well — but it was, as he says, his style. For a while, ...

The hometown shows the duo played had a bittersweet quality because people thought it might be their last chance to see one of the most-respected and best-loved groups of all time together.

Andre 3000 — née André Benjamin, sometimes Three Stacks and always one half of the mighty OutKast — sat down with Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley before a screening of the just-released Jimi Hendrix biopic in which he stars. He spoke about his current work with ...

On Sunday, Sept. 14, 20 years and one day after Biggie Smalls' debut album, Ready to Die, was released, Microphone Check gathered four of the musician's friends in Brooklyn to recall the man they knew.

Hubert Sam went to elementary school with Chris Wallace and was his very first DJ. ...

The Brooklyn rapper spoke to Microphone Check about the music business, the old neighborhood, staying in the studio, the appeal of supergroups, the kids and a theoretical campaign to be Mayor of New York City.

ALI SHAHEED MUHAMMAD: Joell Ortiz, what up?

JOELL ORTIZ: What's up? How y'all feeling, man?

...

On a steamy morning upstairs in a record lover's paradise KING laid down a gorgeous version of one of the songs that lit up Twitter three years ago and put the trio on Prince's radar. Sisters Paris and Amber Strother and partner Anita Bias couldn't believe it when ...

Souls of Mischief, the Oakland group most widely known for the ageless "93 'til Infinity," is, in many ways, the best of us. They are compassionate and kind and loose and sharp. They are artists. They work together. The quartet has long been intertwined with A Tribe Called ...

There's too much happening in New Orleans' French Quarter — especially on a holiday weekend, and especially when hundreds of thousands of people are in town for the annual Essence Music Festival. There are living statues and five-piece bands and drinks a foot-and-a-half tall and people from all over the ...

A rap duo from New York City is being talked about as a continuation of the golden era of hip-hop — a time in the late '80s and early '90s when groups made songs that noted police brutality, elevated conversation and filled dance floors. Issa and AK are at a ...

"I feel like Lady MacBeth, constantly scrubbing my hands," says Nurith Aizenman, global health correspondent for NPR. She arrived in Liberia this week as part of a team covering the Ebola outbreak. In the capital of Monrovia, hand washing is an obsession, not just for her but for many of ...

A few blocks from New Orleans' Superdome, just off Canal Street, there's a barber shop called Clear-Vue, which has been in business since 1948. While we were in the city for the Essence Music Festival, we asked Jazmine Sullivan to meet us there.

When she walked in, patrons ...

In the spring of 2013, songwriter and R&B singer Sevyn Streeter released a song called "It Won't Stop," which she's called her "baby." Over the year and change that's followed, the song has sunk into our collective consciousness through commercial radio play and a music video viewed more ...

"I ain't just rhyming," Issa Gold, one half of The Underachievers, says in "Chrysalis." "Keep up." He's rapping, which is much more difficult. Rapping requires him and his partner AK to choose a flow, or melody, for their lyrics; something they can use to parry the beat or run it ...