Frannie Kelley

To make Extended Play, producer and DJ Statik Selektah put out the bat signal and more than 40 rappers turned up. They range from middle-aged, battle-scarred pros like Prodigy, Black Thought and Bun B (Raekwon calls them "the vets in the sweats") to the next wave, like ...

In 1987, a vanguard Top 40 radio station in the Bay Area put on a concert called Summer Jam. KMEL 106, under program director Keith Naftaly, played pop next to hip-hop next to dance and R&B, an ethos evident in that first year's headliner, Lisa Lisa ...

Fat Tony calls himself a smart ass, but he's not a showoff. The Houston rapper sounds at ease on the mic, delivering droll and conversational bars with a level stare. His tone is more lighthearted than that of Texan forebears such as Scarface, Z-Ro or Bun B. He's been around ...

What happened over the weekend? At 8:34 on Friday night, Kanye West tweeted. He said he'd be premiering a song in a half hour and we'd have to do what he said to hear it – we'd have to go to a particular address and stand outside with other ...

Erykah Badu doesn't think she's old enough to be anybody's godmother, and the first time somebody asked her to fulfill that role (Solange, because of course) she said, how dare you. Badu was onstage at the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesday night, an event that's part of the Red ...

Ghostface Killah is a compulsive storyteller. His fiction is painterly, and he delivers it in a headlong rush. On "Impossible," from the 1997 album Wu-Tang Forever, he rhymed, "He pointed to the charm on his neck / With his last bit of energy left, told me rock it ...

The group's 1993 debut was the opening shot of an audacious plan to open the music industry to hip-hop made way outside the mainstream.

Twelve Reasons to Die is a rap album that begins with an overture and ends with an instrumental coda. The songs were composed by Adrian Younge, a producer and musician who's fairly new to the scene, recorded live and authored by a rapper with 20 years in the business, the ...

If you listen to hip-hop, you're listening to The Delfonics — a singing group from Philadelphia whose members are now in their 80s. When Lauryn Hill sings the hook in Nas' "If I Ruled the World," she's lifting a couple lines from their 1972 song "

This past week Barbra Streisand, born and raised in Brooklyn, played there for the first time since she was eight years old. She followed Jay-Z, making her the second performer ever at a new arena.

Last Friday the first performance in a new arena signaled a change in both Brooklyn and hip-hop.

The host and executive producer of the long-running show died Wednesday morning.

After our look at how early reviews and reporting are changing how audiences experience Broadway productions, we turn to the world of music. Frannie Kelley, editor of NPR’s blog "The Record," talks about how release dates are quickly becoming a thing of the past in the recording industry.

"New Music Tuesday" is still an accepted fact in America, but no one really knows why. Frannie Kelley, an editor at NPR Music's "The Record" blog, helps unpack this mystery.