‘Microphone Check’ on Atlanta: Ali Shaheed Muhammad digs OG Maco
And Frannie Kelley reveals the NPR podcast’s dirty little secret”“
Photo credit: Orlando McGhee/Courtesy @NPRHipHop on Instagram
If you haven’t already reserved tickets for Microphone Check Live, tonight’s Atlanta taping of NPR’s hip-hop podcast at Terminal West, you’re too late. But don’t beat yourself up about it. Online registration for the tickets opened last Monday and before we could post the feature story from my interview with co-hosts Frannie Kelley and Ali Shaheed Muhammad (A Tribe Called Quest, Lucy Pearl, etc.), they were long gone. No surprise considering tonight’s guest lineup. It includes a chat with Father of Awful Records before the main event, an interview with Atlanta’s iconic production unit and Dungeon Family founders Organized Noize (Ray Murray, Sleepy Brown, and Rico Wade).
The initial CL feature, “How ‘Microphone Check’ brought hip-hop through NPR’s back door,” focused on the challenges and successes that have come with expanding NPR’s hip-hop coverage. But we talked about so much more — including Frannie and Ali’s thoughts on Atlanta’s rap landscape, and their overall thoughts on the states of hip-hop and journalism, respectively. So here are some outtakes in preview of tonight’s event. Go ahead and guess the most surprising revelation.
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Ali: My perspective on Atlanta as an artist is it’s such a city with flavor. And diversity. And there was always a warm welcome for what I’ve done musically out of Atlanta. One of the most exciting things that I used to look forward to was the Jack the Rapper conventions — just to go there and to be in that environment. But then outside of spending time at a huge centralized event like that, you can go to different parts of the city and it will be different. I think as Atlanta began to have it’s own voice musically, the diversity was loud. I remember one time almost 10 years ago — I can’t believe time is flying like that — I went to visit Jermaine Dupri on his radio show. I might have been there for 45 minutes, I didn’t know one song he played. Frannie and I laugh. Not one song. Not one. And so, I was just like, Man, what’s going on down here. It’s crazy. And the content was raw — as raw as NWA was or as raw as Wu-Tang was. It was raw, but not in that New York or L.A. kind of way. It was Atlanta raw, like something I’d never heard before. It was powerful. That was that long ago. And the music that comes out of there is still representative of just the rawness of Atlanta and how diverse it is and how musically rich it is in the sounds that come out of the South — and the spirit and the struggle and the poverty and the oppression. It’s different. But still powerful and meaningful.
Frannie: I have family in Atlanta and I go sometimes. I was there a couple of years ago to report a story on OutKast and I was staying with my second cousins in Buckhead. They were so excited that I was there for OutKast. Like, they felt as proud of OutKast as anybody from any neighborhood in Atlanta. And my uncle knew where Stankonia Studios was. He knew the exact intersection. He’s a surgeon from Augusta, Ga. and he’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I can tell you where that studio is, I know what’s happened there, I know how important it is. I’m so happy that you are using your national news eight minutes to talk about them.’ So I love going to Atlanta because people are so proud of what they’ve made. I like to wear really bright colors and sometimes people look at me like I’m crazy but not in Atlanta.
Laughs That’s funny. I don’t know if that’s a compliment or not.
Frannie: I like it. I think it is.
Ali, how are you feeling about hip-hop and where we are right now as a culture.
Ali: I’ll give you the mature, adult answer to that. I think that it’s in transition. It’s trying to find itself. It’s like at some point you had these fatherless homes, right. I’ll use that analogy, and so trygin to find who you are as an individual with one parent, or one piece of the puzzle missing means there is gonna be handicaps in who you are as a person developing…. So I feel that the state of hip-hop right now is like two pieces of the puzzle — kids are orphaned and they’ve been trygin to figure out who they are with two main parts not a part of their life. It’s just trying to find itself….
The artists and I think the fans are at that point where they’re like enough with the garbage. So we’re looking to have something of more substance and I think that’s what the future of hip-hop is going to be. Not just hip-hop but music in general. Everyting is so homogenized. We talk about it in a category but it’s really all one in the same at this point, at least for me….
EDM had its moment, but now it seems like people are trying to get back to that organic. Something that is real, right. So the content has to be something real. Right now, I’m feeling OG Maco. As crazy as that sounds I think there’s a lot of substance in something like that and it’s dynamic and in-depth. So if you’re looking for someone that’s really raw and talking crazy and you think for a moment it’s not really offering something, OG Maco is offering a lot.
How did you get exposed to him because I think a lot of people would be surprised to know a cat like that is even on your radar?
Ali: Sometime last year producer Adrian Younge actually put me up on him. laughs I’m not trying to expose Adrian like that, but Adrian has the truly analog way of recording. So we put in a lot of hours working on a song with Adrian that I haven’t really experienced since the age of recording on the computer…. So we were having a break and he played the OG Maco and I was like what the heck is this? I just was like, I don’t know. I had a lot of emotions. And I started digging it. I was like, there’s something about this dude I love. The video for “Bitch You Guessed It” was just so rude and had such an outlaw vibe. And I’m for freedom of expression, but I’m also for, We will lock your ass up cause you’re disrupting the peace. So I saw him as he’s just disrupting the peace and rocking the balance. But there was something in the feeling of his music that was just so infectious. So I went looking and listening for his other stuff and not too long after that he did a show in L.A. where everybody was singing every word. And even though he wasn’t like a household name, I said man there’s something special about this artist…. So that’s why I’m feeling him.
Frannie: So then what happens is after Ali goes digging, then he texts me and he’s like, “Frannie, book OG Maco!” And I’m like, “What? Who stole Ali’s phone? WTF?” And I want you to know that I have been trying, she says to Ali.
Do y’all ever debate about guests or your individual tastes in music?
Ali: We’ve had a couple.
Frannie: You mean booking-wise?
Ali: Just like why we should and why we shouldn’t? Uh-huh.
Without naming the artists, what do those conversations tend to sound like?
Ali: For example there are some artists who are top 40 who have been making an impact and are superstars. And the base of the genre is not really feeling them, but they have a place in the history of hip-hop. I use that word loosely, because it becomes rap vs. hip-hop. And we talk about our feelings on who these artists are. And again, more so for me, less for Frannie, I don’t want to call myself a snob but I listen to certain things and it’s where my heart is. And so, going back to what you asked earlier, that’s a perfect example of me not getting in the way of the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is to reveal who these artists are, whether you love them or hate them. And I’ve seen certain comments on some of the interviews that we’ve done. And at some point we made a shift, and I think that was a deliberate decision to open up “Microphone Check” a little bit wider once we realized the potential of who we could communicate to. And I’ve seen certain comments that weren’t favorable to some of the people we’ve been speaking to, but yeah it’s a matter of having that dialogue with those artists and them being able to reveal who they are differently than they have in other media forums.
Frannie: I think that journalism is going through a transitional phase, also. I keep thinking we’re about to arrive at some decision and we’re still like hanging out in this kind of hazy, confused, but mostly inconsequential time. I think that there are many reasons for that. In journalism and the music business, the margins are so small that it is most logical to do the last thing that made anybody money. So, like, you have to post about the motherfucking dress, right? You have to. If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table. Everybody did it. NPR did it…. So this comes back to NPR’s audience and our audience and how they relate to each other. At a certain point, people expected a hip-hop show at NPR to be about the classics and the legacy and the golden era. And that was partly my fault because of the ’93 series. But there has been resistance when we’re talking to newer acts, acts that may have slightly different values or priorities, right. But then we are implicated and can’t get away from the same struggle to cover our costs that all journalists deal with — which is, like, we know which interviews are going to perform better than others. We know what’s going to play well on Soundcloud as opposed to iTunes as opposed to the NPR site. All we can do is have the best conversations with the best people we can book. By ‘best people we can book,’ I mean everybody we are at all interested in we’re trying for. And we can’t always get who we want because of logistics, or people being unaware of NPR, or people feeling disrespected by NPR in the past and they don’t want to do it, or don’t think NPR is a good look for them, or whatever. But it’s such a losing battle that we’re just not fighting it anymore. We’re just talking to who we want to talk to. And sometimes people get mad. And sometimes people really like it. And that’s kind of the dirty little secret of “Microphone Check,” is that it’s just me and Ali talking to who we want to talk to.