Microphone Check

Since 2008 XXL Magazine has put out an annual issue highlighting new acts that the editors predict will go on to impact hip-hop — the music and the industry. In the beginning, the 10 musicians chosen for the cover of that issue were called the Leaders of the New School. Over the years the people who land what's now called the Freshmen cover — as well as the people who didn't, not to mention the people who turned it down — have become the topic of conversation all over the place, including in song. The debates and turf wars that the Freshmen issue manifests — What are the effects of music journalism's current turbulent epoch on the prospects of musicians themselves? What is the role of the New York City-based music business in a now worldwide culture and industry? What does it take to make it? — are felt and grappled with by the people who make the issue at every step of their process. For their perspective, Microphone Check co-hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley sat down with Vanessa Satten, the editor in chief of XXL who's been with the magazine since 1998, and senior editor Dan Rys, who's been there 11 months, making this his first Freshmen cover.

Freddie Gibbs moved away from his hometown of Gary, Indiana, more than 10 years ago. He went to L.A., where he became friends with Madlib, the producer revered for his work in The Lootpack, as a solo artist under the name Quasimoto, for that time Blue Note Records let him do whatever he wanted in their vault and the albums he's made collaboratively, with heavyweights J Dilla, MF Doom, Percee P and Talib Kweli. Gibbs and Microphone Check cohost Ali Shaheed Muhammad are quite certain that Piñata, the album Madlib has made with Gibbs, is the most gangster project Madlib has ever worked on. He couldn't join us in the studio, but Gibbs sat down to talk about what he calls his "homiefied" album.

The rise of the rapper, singer and songwriter given the name Future when he was a teenager being fostered by the legendary Dungeon Family looks meteoric from the outside. In reality, the musician has reinvented himself a couple times, pored over his predecessors' work and, he says, recorded more than 10 albums worth of songs. He spoke to Microphone Check about working with Andre 3000, the politics of features and the studio life.

On April 19, 1994, Columbia Records released the debut album of a 20-year-old from Queensbridge Houses in New York City. It was deft, wise, deadly serious and matched the babyface with unparalleled promise to beats made by the era's preeminent producers. Two decades after Illmatic, Nas sat down with Microphone Check for a conversation that moved from his love for Ali Shaheed Muhammad's group, A Tribe Called Quest, to music journalism ("If you're Sade, it doesn't matter. She does what she does. But for all of us, journalism is a huge deal.") hearing himself on the radio for the first time and his audience: "My surroundings. The hip-hop community also," says Nas. "So that meant I made it for other rappers, I made it for other MCs, I made it for other hip-hop groups. I made it for artists, singers, people in the arts — that's who I made it for. But it comes from the street, so my surroundings wrote that album. I made it for them."

E-40, from Northern California, is widely known for creating slang, flouting the rules and knowing everybody from everywhere. 40 spoke with Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley about Lil Jon, T-Pain, Tupac and Too Short. They started their conversation talking business and in particular, the model that 40 provided New Orleans' own Master P when No Limit Records was just a twinkle in his eye.

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 do good, and I was hustling just to hustle because, dude, my homies was doing it, you get what I'm saying? But then I ended up actually really needing to hustle. And out of all that s--- I done did, I had a job — worked a job for two years. I worked at the railroad. Go to jail, get a strike. All this s--- happened before I was even 21." And then he started rapping. ScHoolboy Q has released two mixtapes and, just this week, his major label debut — but he says he's got two more albums all planned out. As a part of Top Dawg Entertainment, the company that gave rise to critical phenom Kendrick Lamar, ScHoolboy Q has played the role of the hard-boiled cut up. With Oxymoron, he says he wanted to make "a gangster rap L.A. dark album from a good student's point of view." When we sat down with him, the night before he performed brand new songs from the album, he spoke thoughtfully about addiction (his own and his uncle's), why he used to think rappers were fake and how he grew up.

This week, NPR Music is launching an R&B channel called "I'll Take You There," hosted by Jason King, a professor, writer and musician. It's a lot like the 24/7 stream of hip-hop that Ali and I host. So for this episode of Microphone Check, we're adding some R&B to the mix and talking to Solange Knowles. We start our conversation in hip-hop: Solange tells us about getting suspended in middle school over a Nas poster in her locker, compares her singing style to Silkk the Shocker's flow, and says she still can't believe she got Bun B and Mannie Fresh to dance in the video for her song "Lovers in the Parking Lot." This fall, Solange started a label called Saint Records — what she calls a "passion project" that will primarily house R&B artists. We talk about her hopes for the label, the relevance of gospel to R&B, recent journalism around the genre and, of course, Lucy Pearl. You can get all of NPR's coverage of R&B on Twitter @NPRandB.

Four or five years ago Microphone Check co-host Ali Shaheed Muhammad told Danny Brown that he's the hip-hop Richard Pryor. "And I got it, too: making things funny that don't supposed to be funny," says Brown. "It's like putting the pill in the pudding." Since then Brown has released three albums under his own name (with October's Old being the most recent), fully infiltrated the festival circuit, and become both a regular fixture on critics Best Of lists and a character in GrandTheft Auto V. He spoke to Muhammad and co-host Frannie Kelley about his grandmothers, reading bad reviews and what he would do with $100,000.

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 them had released previously and everything they did on their own after it, until this fall, when they released an album called Step Brothers 2. While in New York on business, Don Trip and Starlito spoke to Microphone Check co-hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley about where they come from, their definition of trap music and relationships, both working and romantic.

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 Grail ad aired during game 5 of the NBA finals. A Thursday in April when Pusha T's "Numbers on the Boards" dropped. A Friday night in May, when Kanye's face appeared on buildings all over the country. The middle of September, when Drake's Nothing Was the Same leaked. The evening in August when Funkmaster Flex dropped — with his bomb sound — Kendrick Lamar's verse on Big Sean's "Control." For this episode of Microphone Check co-hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley are joined by their social media manager, Cedric Shine. All three of them experienced those disruptions differently — and their opinions of both their meaning and the quality of the music at their root are not unanimous. Their conversation ranges from Ali's inside track on Magna Carta to Troy Ave, ASAP Ferg, music journalism's involvement in Kanye's year and how the quality of life in New York City is affecting the music being made there.

This month Bun B, one half of the Underground Kingz, of Port Arthur, Texas, released his fourth solo project and celebrated the 21st anniversary of his group's first album, Too Hard To Swallow. The road Bun has walked over those years hasn't always been smooth. In 2007 his partner Pimp C died, and, in their early days, the duo's musical and critical success wasn't hitting their wallets. "I had literally the No. 1 record in the city and was delivering soul food dinners because we were making absolutely no money from the record company," says Bun about the period between 1992 and 1995. "We went to the radio station, asked them could we go on the air, and told the public we were broke. Our record company had us in a crazy contract, management had us in a crazy contract, so if they see us and we don't look a certain way, don't think it's a misuse of funds on our part. We're not getting it. If you're paying the record company for this music, the money's not getting to us." Bun B also spoke with Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley about Lil Boosie, Ed O.G. and the real meaning of trill.

The rapper and producer Earl Sweatshirt put out his first major label album, called Doris, this summer. Earl came up with the free-wheeling, button-pushing rap group Odd Future, then disappeared, sent by his mother to boarding school in Samoa. His friends mourned his absence loudly and when he came home in the winter of 2012, no one was sure he'd be able to deliver on his earlier promise. Earl produced almost half the songs on Doris, which features many of his friends, including the rapper Vince Staples. Vince joined Earl in a conversation with Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley. They spoke about the music business, how to tell if a song is any good and an encounter with Sir Paul McCartney that happened right before they sat down.

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 Ace Hotel in New York City and tell stories about that productive and creative year. Our guests were: Faith Newman — A&R at Def Jam and then Columbia, who signed Nas. Ralph McDaniels — host of Video Music Box, music video director and producer. Prince Paul — producer for De La Soul and the Gravediggaz, member of Handsome Boy Modeling School and solo musician. Mike Dean — engineer and producer at Rap-A-Lot Records. Stretch Armstrong — DJ for WKCR's Stretch & Bobbito radio show.

In the second part of an interview with Pusha T, Microphone Check co-host Ali Shaheed Muhammad is dragged into a public battle over which A Tribe Called Quest album is better — Low End Theory or Midnight Marauders. Pusha details his frustrations with the music industry in general, and one fashion company in particular, and says his dream for hip-hop is for legacy acts to tour like The Eagles. "I don't think I will ever put any other music before it, so I need to see it all the way through. I need to see it in all of its splendor," he says. When co-host Frannie Kelley tries to end their conversation on a high note, Pusha recalls the making of the last song on his new album, a song that comes from a hard truth: "I don't necessarily want to hear rap anymore that doesn't give me — if we're talking about the streets — we can't just glorify it. We have to tell the whole story."

This week rapper Pusha T released his first solo album after years of writing and performing as a duo, with his brother Malice in the Clipse. But he's not all on his own. Pusha is part of Kanye West's conglomerate — the two of them made Yeezus and My Name Is My Name simultaneously — and still works closely with Pharrell, who he's known since they were in high school in Virginia Beach. In the first part of an interview with Microphone Check hosts Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Frannie Kelley, Pusha decries the current state of hip-hop, saying he looked to rap made between 1994 and 1999 for inspiration while making My Name Is My Name: "Hip-hop to me right now is really easy listening. It's very easy listening, like there's nothing abrasive about it. There's no album that I put in my car that makes me roll down the windows — all the windows — and ride past the club line three times before I get out the car. The Purple Tape made me do that."