Rodney Carmichael
Rodney Carmichael is a storyteller, journalist and cultural critic, covering hip-hop at NPR Music since 2017. He often works at the intersection of race and inequality, telling stories across mediums that combine reporting and criticism to spotlight the sociopolitical significance of Black cultural production. As co-host/co-creator of NPR's first narrative music podcast, Louder Than A Riot, he and co-host Sidney Madden traced the collision of hip-hop and inequality across two seasons that respectively exposed how mass incarceration and misogynoir impact the culture. Louder's investigative reporting helped former No Limit rapper Mac Phipps gain clemency in 2021, after serving 21 years in prison for a murder he maintains he didn't commit. In 2024, Louder Than A Riot became the first podcast team to receive Journalist of the Year honors from the National Association of Black Journalists.
An alumnus of Poynter's News Writing and Reporting for College Graduates Fellowship, Carmichael's early journalism career featured staff-writing positions covering religion and public health at the Waco Tribune-Herald and Black pop culture at rolling out Urbanstyle Weekly. During his decade-long tenure at former Atlanta alt-weekly, Creative Loafing, he was an award-winning music editor, culture writer and senior writer. His most impactful stories use hip-hop as a lens to interrogate rhyme and punishment, gentrification and erasure, masculinity and Black identity.
He will be in residence at Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute as the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year.
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A sanded-down biopic about the King of pop and propaganda has resurfaced his music on the charts — along with questions about how his enduring magic became make-believe -
With his first major solo output since his battle with Kendrick Lamar in 2024 ended, Drake does what Drake has always done: puts out more music than most people could reasonably consume.
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2016 was a complex year for Black music, between the last year of the Obama presidency, and the numerous high-profile deaths of Black people at the hands of police.
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We look at how "Sean Combs: The Reckoning," an explosive Netflix docuseries, is affecting the public's opinion of music mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, convicted last year after a highly publicized trial.
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Known as a perfectionist, the singer emerged in the 1990s during the neo-soul movement with his classic debut, Brown Sugar. He made just two more albums, Voodoo and Black Messiah. Both were treasured.
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The show's suspension comes amid broader efforts to curb diversity at the institutional level. The next attempt to canonize the movement must learn lessons from its successes — and its missteps. -
Don't Tap the Glass is a bit of a left turn: a hyperkinetic, summertime LP with an urgent appeal to move the masses.
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More than 30 years after the release of Enter the Wu-Tang, the group is finishing its 27-city North American farewell tour billed as The Final Chamber.
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After six weeks of testimony, prosecutors and defense attorneys delivered their closing arguments in the federal sex trafficking and racketeering trial of Sean Combs last week. While the jury deliberates his judicial fate, one verdict we don't have to wait for is the one coming from the court of public opinion. NPR Music's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento and Rodney Carmichael explain why discussion of the trial within an ecosystem of podcast and YouTube hosts have made it loud and clear that we're in a post-MeToo era.
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Lamar's performance was dense with narrative and guests, but for some, the weight of the show rested on one question: whether or not Lamar would play his hit "Not Like Us."
