Hip-hop

Rock critic Ken Tucker offers up his top 10 lists of the best albums and singles of 2008.music. Here's his look at some of his own favorites.

In an interview recorded onstage, Amir Questlove Thompson the cofounder and drummer of the Roots, the houseband for The Tonight Show talks with Terry Gross about music, his father doo wop singer Lee Andrews who died last month, and about Prince.

Fresh Air music critic Ken Tucker says the rapper's second album has an excitingly adventurous sound.

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, the co-founder of and drummer for the hip-hop band The Roots, has been a musician since he was a teen. In Mo' Meta Blues, he explains how his musician father groomed him for a life in show business from an early age.

Spaghetti Westerns, Philadelphia soul, opera and the Wu-Tang Clan all come together in the music of Adrian Younge. He has produced and composed two new albums — one with William Hart, the lead singer of The Delfonics, and another with rapper Ghostface Killah.

Jay-Z is one of the most successful hip-hop artists of all time. On Fresh Air, he discusses growing up in Brooklyn surrounded by drugs and violence, and the stories behind many of his famous songs.

Moran's new album, Ten, is like a stack of progress reports -- on his personal growth as pianist and as a composer, on the development of a trio with stable personnel for a decade, and on how jazz itself has progressed over the last 10 years.

Drummer Ahmir Thompson, also known as "Questlove," talked with Fresh Air in 2003 about his career in the hip-hop group The Roots.

Director George Tillman Jr.'s Notorious, which follows the life and death of the rapper Biggie Smalls, opens in theaters this weekend. David Edelstein has a review.