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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She's the one behind the curtain of the biggest and best-loved rap and R&B songs in recent memory.
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"I don't want anybody to do exactly what I'm doing," says the Atlanta rapper. "I want people to look at why I'm doing what I'm doing. And if you agree with that, you go do what you do about it."
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"My job is only to be a servant of the community, and just to inspire. That's it. That's my whole job, and I know that."
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His songs make your brain briefly unbound and unwieldy. Same goes for this conversation.
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The young soul singer refuses to take sides in R&B's generational divide, so his songs all sound familiar, even when they're several things at once.
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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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Crown Heights came to North Hollywood so we could talk about crossed signals on the highways between artist and industry.
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Seven of us share our initial reactions to the songs we're receiving as some form of preamble to SWISH with each other and with you.
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The new father spoke about his inspirations, including the memoirs of Rick James and George Clinton, his business acumen, what the war in the streets is really about and, of course, Gucci.