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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"The best way to represent the places where you from is be yourself, completely," says the musician and actor.
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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.
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Standing on a balcony in her hometown of New Orleans, the singer stops an unsuspecting crowd, and all the hustle and bustle of the French Quarter, dead in its tracks.
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To a roomful of captivated men, Sullivan sings "Stupid Girls," a new song that warns women to be careful with their hearts.
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The lyrics to the R&B singer's "It Won't Stop" are warm and unpretentious, while the performance demanded by the music is not for the meek. In a boxing gym, she executed with muscle and grace.
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In almost every Hollywood depiction of the American military, at some point a bunch of guys will jog past the camera, singing and stepping in unison. That rhythm infiltrated the Army in 1944.
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The rapper from Gary, Ind., moved to L.A. 10 years ago, where he met Madlib, a producer revered for his collaborations. The two of them have now made an album Gibbs thinks can't be touched.
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The rap duo OutKast launched what may be its farewell tour over the weekend at Coachella, but the group and its fans, who have waited a decade for the reunion, might not have the same expectations.
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We couldn't fit everything into Thursday's story about the legacy of Comin Out Hard, so here are some extras, including Eightball on touring in a rental car, MJG on Eazy-E and Yo Gotti on mentorship in the Memphis rap scene.
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From the birthplace of Stax and Sun Records, and the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the pair of rapper-producers snatched soul music and put it to work for a new generation.