Frannie Kelley

The Los Angeles rapper has lived a lot of life in his 27 years. "I call myself All-American," he says. "I done been an athlete, a gang member, drug dealer. I done been a kid that was kind of living on the fortunate side when my mama was starting to ...

Within Black Hippy, the Los Angeles-based crew consisting of Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock and Ab-Soul, ScHoolboy Q is the fun-loving middle child who taunts you with a straight face but can't always help cracking a smile. He's a wildcard who put out two highly-regarded independent albums and has ...

During the reporting of our story about the legacy of Comin' Out Hard in Memphis rap, we spent time in the city with MJG, Young Dolph and Drumma Boy. We met Yo Gotti in New York and got Eightball in a studio in Atlanta. We didn't have enough ...

Two decades ago the essence of adolescence was leaving hip-hop. In 1993, the wild success of cinematic albums like The Chronic and Doggystyle had shown corporate America just how large the appetite for rap was, but the next wave of musicians had something more serious in mind. A pair of ...

Back in 2011 two rappers from Tennessee, Starlito and Don Trip, made a mixtape called Step Brothers. They were rhyming over original production and had sprinkled clips from the Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly movie of the same name throughout the tape. Step Brothers outperformed everything the two of ...

We all listen to music differently. What we hear is shaded by our history, our knowledge, our equipment, our mood, our taste. But every year there are moments when everybody who lives and breathes hip-hop is talking about the same thing.

In June, when Jay's Samsung/Magna Carta Holy ...

All year Morning Edition and NPR Music have been running radio pieces about rap albums released 20 years ago, in 1993. For a special episode of Microphone Check we invited a group of people who were working in hip-hop back then to meet us at the

Nashville rapper Starlito and Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth crossed paths at just the right time. The sound of southern rap has become more and more melodramatic, the rasping edges of the ever-present 808s and 909s doused in dreamy strings and squelchy bass. In the video that documents a collaboration between ...

What does the concert-ticket buyer want? If we're accepting that the market for albums — physical and digital — won't ever rebound, that digital singles will never make up for the loss in revenue and that streaming can't be profitable under current licensing laws, professional musicians (and the labels that ...

Marley Marl is one of the most important people in hip-hop history. He's the one who figured out how to sample — how to get pieces of songs off vinyl records and into a drum machine. More than 30 years later, and 25 years after his first album, 1988's In ...

Goodie Mob is a quartet from Atlanta, Georgia, that debuted in 1995, when New York and Los Angeles dominated rap. The group came out of The Dungeon Family, a loose collective of musicians including OutKast and Organized Noize that favors humid production and heady subject matter relayed with flair. Their ...

Last year, Quentin Tarantino's movie Django Unchained resurrected a word with a lot of ugly associations: mandingo. It's the word we use for a group of people from West Africa who call themselves Mandinka, several hundred thousand of whom were sold into slavery. This year, three black musicians have claimed ...

Session musician Stephen Bruner has played bass in other people's bands for more than a decade. He can play metal, R&B, hip-hop, jazz. And he's been folding all that into his own music, which he puts out under the name Thundercat.

Now, with his second album, he's stepping to the ...

NPR Music editor Frannie Kelley looks back to what was happening in the world of hip hop during the summer of 1993. 

Ka is a rapper and producer who hails from Brownsville, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, with mostly unhappy stories to recommend it: for one, the Jewish hit-men who made up Murder, Inc., in the 1930s lived there. He's been making music for 20 years but his most recent work ...

Prodigy began his career as one half of New York hardcore duo Mobb Deep more than 20 years ago. He and rapper-producer Havoc made classic songs like "Shook Ones Part II," "Survival of the Fittest" and "Quiet Storm." Since then Prodigy has worked with ...

Producer and engineer Mike Dean has worked with everyone from Kurupt to Devin the Dude, Selena to Z-Ro, Young Jeezy to UGK. In the early 1990s, he helped create the sound of Rap-A-Lot Records and the bones of Dirty South rap.

In 2002, while working on Scarface's The ...

Rapper and producer J. Cole put out his second major label album, Born Sinner, this week, on the same day Kanye West officially released Yeezus. Both albums leaked before their street dates, and both were the subject of rapid-response reviews. Cole spoke to Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed ...

Statik Selektah, the producer who's made collaborative albums with Action Bronson, Freddie Gibbs and Saigon and DJ who's spun for Q-Tip, Nas and Joey Bada$$, put out his fifth solo project this month. Except it's not really solo. Three dozen rappers recorded verses for his tracks and the result, called ...

The singer and songwriter Terius Nash writes and performs under the name The-Dream. Over the past decade he's had a hand in some of the biggest pop songs on the Billboard chart: Justin Bieber's "Baby," Rihanna's "Umbrella," Beyonce's "Single Ladies" — the list goes ...