Rodney Carmichael
Rodney Carmichael is NPR Music's hip-hop staff writer. An Atlanta-bred cultural critic, he helped document the city's rise as rap's reigning capital for a decade while serving on staff as music editor, culture writer and senior writer for the defunct alt-weekly Creative Loafing.
During his tenure there, he won several Association of Alternative Newsweeklies awards for column writing, longform storytelling, special projects, investigative and feature reporting on gender and economic inequality issues ranging from strip club class-action lawsuits to harm reduction needle exchange programs. "Straight Outta Stankonia" — a cover-to-cover look at Atlanta's gentrifying cultural landscape through the lens of OutKast, which he conceived and co-wrote — was honored as one of the Atlanta Press Club's Top 10 Favorite Stories of the Past 50 Years in 2014.
A Georgia State University alum (journalism/playwriting) and former Poynter Fellow for Young Journalists, Carmichael started his career in Waco, Texas, where he received a Cox Rookie of the Year nomination for his enterprise reporting and feature writing on religion, health and social services at the Waco Tribune-Herald. Even then, race and culture lay at the heart of his coverage.
Back in Atlanta, a three-year stint at the urban lifestyle weekly rolling out deepened his commitment to cultural reporting. After covering red carpets (BET Awards, MTV VMAs), profiling Black business leaders and penning cover stories on artists ranging from Ciara to Andre 3000, his passion for storytelling led him to the alt-weekly world. During his first five years at Creative Loafing (Atlanta), he led local music coverage as music editor of the alternative weekly with the third-highest readership in the nation. During the next half-decade, Carmichael dug deeper by covering his hometown from the underground up. As it underwent cultural upheaval and shifting socioeconomics, he used Atlanta's creative economy — expanding from music, film, TV and tech — as a lens to explore the city's oft-competing identities: New South gateway, human rights hub, Black Hollywood, strip club capital and hip-hop hotbed.
Now, covering hip-hop from a national perspective at NPR, he continues to work at the intersection of race and culture. The stories he tells combine reporting and criticism to focus on black cultural production and all its sociopolitical implications. As creator and co-host of the podcast Louder Than A Riot, he and co-host Sidney Madden trace the collision and interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration in America.
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Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the news on Twitter Sunday night.
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With both eyes trained on the absurd, the underrated veteran rapper parses ideologies that drive so much animus around the world.
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The artist came to the Tiny Desk masked up, as always, the better to catch a glimpse of her soul.
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A misplaced Grammy nomination meets classic blaxploitation as hip-hop's rising star recalls the watershed period in her journey to self-discovery.
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The preacher's son from Compton brought his flair for the dramatic, and an air of rebellion, to the Tiny Desk.
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The Dave Meyers-directed visual is a kaleidoscopic view into Scott's psychedelic, whiplashing Astroworld, with an assist from Drake — and the entire city he's from.
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Before embarking on a tour of Australia and Asia, the Chicago native brought the squad that helped make Care For Me one of 2018's best — along with a very special guest.
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A debate was sparked on Twitter when someone pointed out that the curator of the hip-hop archive at the National Museum of African American History and Culture is white.
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Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh-born rapper who developed a ravenous following over the course of five successful albums, died Friday of an apparent overdose in his San Fernando Valley home, multiple outlets have reported. He was 26.
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Two of Kansas City's finest — and indie hip-hop's trailblazers — deliver a dose of Strange Music.