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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A high-concept collaborative album by a veteran rapper and a film composer knits together hip-hop and soul music. -
The death of the highly respected hip-hop figure prompted an outpouring of tribute and personal stories from his community this weekend. -
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. With his second album, he's stepping to the front of the stage. -
Three black musicians — a punk bassist, an L.A. rapper and a part-time guitarist — took on a name with ugly associations to make music that can't be categorized. -
After he helped to develop the bluesy, driving hard bop style in the '50s and '60s, his funkier commercial hit recordings shaped black pop music through the advent of hip-hop. A committed music educator, the Detroit native was 80 when he died last week. -
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. -
Our series about rap's greatest year begins with the album that drew directly on cultural and social upheaval to make one of the most popular rap albums of all time. -
Two bands, Los Angeles-based A House For Lions and Maine's The Mallett Brothers, add up what they've spent while asking you for money. -
Musicians have to spend money and a lot of time to hit their crowd-funding goals, so failure is expensive. But for some people, at specific moments in their careers, crowd funding can be a piece of the puzzle. -
Gospel, R&B, politics, family and commerce (and 400,000 fans) all merge at a music festival in New Orleans.
