Microphone Check

Microphone Check — the place where artists can talk about whatever concerns and interests they have, where they feel free to sound off and fan out on Ali Shaheed Muhammad and tell stories they’ve never told in public before — is back. February 27, only on Spotify.

Ill Camille was born and raised and still resides in Los Angeles, for the moment, and in March she released an album called Heirloom that we really love. We spoke to her about all her various jobs in the music industry, a path that eventually led her to stepping out in front and telling her own story.

You can read the transcript of our conversation on our web site, frannieandali.com, where you’ll also find our full archive.

We taped this interview before we had any idea Z-Ro would later announce his retirement from music – he's said the album he's releasing on June 30th, No Love Boulevard, will be his last. It's our loss, especially because you can tell here (back then) that he was excited to release new work, and felt like he was sitting on heat. But he also details his frustrations with the industry in our conversation, so his retirement is not a total surprise. 

We're grateful he spent some time with us when he was still in the game, we're so thankful for the music he gave us while he was, and we wish him the best of luck in all his future pursuits.

To situate you in this episode, we left off last week when kris asked Ali how it would feel for his work today to be criticized and Ali’s response began with him saying he’s not worried about it because he’s right with himself, brought it back to Kendrick and "DNA." and ended in him saying Fox News is meaningless.

Doc McKinney, the Minneapolis-born, Toronto-living producer and manager who's worked with Lucy Pearl, The Weeknd, Drake, Young Buck, Esthero and thestand4rd spoke with us about brands and music — he had a reluctant hand in the Hamburger Helper mixtape that popped off in the spring — Canadian hip-hop past and present, the ways having kids affected his business and his art, the ideal circumstances for collaboration, Spongebob, Lee Scratch Perry, Janet Jackson, the pitfalls of interviews and J Dilla.

Last summer we linked with Warren G for the last interview we tried to do bicoastal. And it's fitting that one of the main instigators of G-funk music was the one who convinced us to move operations to LA. We're airing it now, because despite some disconnect, the insight and the tempo is too good to bury.

We spoke about "Deeez Nuuuts" and payola and the best places to dig. Warren G is smooth as ever in conversation with somebody from the other side of the country who first met him when everything was getting started, Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Our producer, David Luke, father of David Luke III, put together this special edition of Microphone Check, a compliation of times when the musicians we've sat with over the past couple years spoke about fatherhood.

When we interviewed these guests — Danny Brown, Solange, Cormega, T.I., Killer Mike and El-P, Big Sean, Terrace Martin and Mr. MFN eXquire — we didn't always directly ask about their fathers; they brought up the idea and the men themselves when we were talking about getting put on, deciding how to structure a career and the ways growing older affects music-making. We're not only talking about biological fathers here. These moments are about the reverberations of father figures, mentors, uncles, teachers.

And, of course, some of our guests relate stories about raising kids themselves, the emotional roller coaster of it, and the fiercely kept promise inherent in there.

We hope that in this episode you can really hear the real life people who create and perform the music we all love.

Shout to Frannie's dad, Larry Kelley, and to Ali's dad, resting in peace. Happy first Father's Day to Cedric Shine, our voice on socials and whose beautiful daughter adorns this page! And happy seventh Father's Day to David, who made this for you.

The music industry veteran, former manager of the RZA, the GZA and ODB, as well as D'Angelo, Raphael Saadiq and A Tribe Called Quest, met up with Microphone Check in LA, where she told us what Wu-Tang taught her and how she thinks of her role: "I'm a manager. I am in the service industry. The service industry. I'm Midas f****** Muffler."

Gizzle is the one behind the curtain. Quiet as it's kept, she's written many of the biggest and best-loved rap and R&B songs of the recent past, in the course of working with everybody from Puffy to Nicki to Teddy Riley to Pharrell, Snoop, Chris Brown, Trey Songz, B2K and, most often, Ty$.

"Music is a collaborative thing," she says. "Life is a collaborative thing. No one can do anything on the levels of greatness — and that's what we going for — by themselves. It just doesn't work that way."

The Atlanta rapper spoke with us in March, between the first and second of the three tours he's booked this year. We got into perspective, influence and frustration, but the point we kept returning to was agency. "I don't want anybody to do exactly what I'm doing," he said. "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."