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Touré (born on March 20, 1971) is an American novelist, essayist, music journalist, cultural critic, and television personality based in New York City. He is the host of Fuse's Hiphop Shop and On The Record. He is also a contributor to MSNBC's The Dylan Ratigan Show and serves on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominating Committee.

Early life

Touré was given his name by his mother after she read an article in Time magazine about Sekou Touré, then President of Guinea. In 1989, Touré graduated from Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts.

Career

Writing career

In 1992, his junior year at Emory University, Touré dropped out of college and became an intern at Rolling Stone magazine. He was fired after a few months but weeks later was asked to write record reviews and then feature stories. His first feature was about Run-DMC. Since 1997, he has been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, writing primarily about hip hop. He has written cover stories about Snoop Dogg, Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, Eminem, Beyoncé, DMX, Lauryn Hill, Fergie, and, in December 2005, Jay-Z, a story called "The Book of Jay". In April 2011 he wrote the Rolling Stone cover story about Adele.

Touré has written three books: The Portable Promised Land (2003), a collection of short stories, Soul City (2004), a magical realist novel about life in an African-American Utopia, and Never Drank the Kool-Aid (2006), a collection of his writing from Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Village Voice, The Believer, Playboy, TENNIS Magazine, and others, written between 1994 and 2005.

In September 2011 Free Press will publish Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?, a look at modern Black identity that will include a forward by Michael Eric Dyson and excerpts from over 100 interviews with people like Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, Glenn Ligon, Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Mooney, New York Governor David Paterson, Harold Ford, Jr., Soledad O'Brien, Aaron McGruder, Greg Tate, Stanley Crouch, Kamala Harris, Chuck D, Questlove, and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

He has also written about Dale Earnhardt Jr., a story that ended up in the Best American Sportswriting of 2001.

In 1996, upset that a feature story he'd written for The New Yorker was rejected, he enrolled in the graduate school for creative writing at Columbia University. He took a fiction writing class and wrote a story about a black saxophonist in Harlem named Sugar Lips Shinehot who loses the ability to see white people. The story was called "The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land". The second story he wrote, about a dangerously sexual preacher, was called "A Hot Time at the Church of Kentucky Fried Souls and the Spectacular Final Sunday Sermon of the Right Revren Daddy Love". After it won an award from the magazine Zoetrope: All-Story, he embarked on a fiction writing career. After a year at Columbia, Touré left to write a biography of rapper KRS-One. He traveled with KRS to London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and New Jersey, interviewing him for more than a year, until KRS abruptly shelved the project.

Television

Touré is the host of Hiphop Shop, a hiphop music video and interview show on Fuse. Guests have included T.I., Rakim, Ludacris, Raekwon, J. Cole, Swizz Beats, Ne-Yo, Trina, and Melyssa Ford. He is also the host of On the Record a one-on-one interview show. Guests have included Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, 50 Cent, Courtney Love, Snoop Dogg, Diddy, Kid Rock, Ice Cube, Puffy, Cee-Lo, the Foo Fighters, and others.

His television career began in the late 1990s with occasional appearances on talk shows like The Today Show, Dateline NBC, CNN's American Morning, Paula Zahn Now, Anderson Cooper 360°, Topic A With Tina Brown, and The O'Reilly Factor. In 2003, he became the host of Spoke N' Heard on MTV2, a weekly half-hour interview show. Guests included Zadie Smith, Kanye West, Nas, Puffy, Professor Cornel West, Lenny Kravitz, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Questlove, Talib Kweli, Alicia Keys, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and Jay-Z.

In 2004, he became CNN's first pop culture correspondent, covering the Oscars and the Grammys and talking about pop culture on a recurring segment on American Morning called "90 Second Pop," hosted by Soledad O'Brien and Bill Hemmer. In 2005, Touré left CNN and became a correspondent for Black Entertainment Television (BET), where he hosted a show called The Black Carpet and did special interviews with Dave Chappelle, Jay-Z, Nas, and R Kelly.

In 2008, he left BET and became a Contributor to MSNBC. In September 2009, he became the host of the Hip Hop Shop on Fuse.

Touré has filled in as occasional substitute host of the arts and culture interview program The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, New York City's largest public radio station.

His show I'll Try Anything Once aired on Treasure HD. The 13-episode, half-hour series featured Touré attempting challenges each week. He entered a demolition derby in Indiana, worked as a bull-dodging rodeo clown in Wyoming, assisted an extreme pest control man in the Florida panhandle in extricating 60,000 bees, chased a 15-foot boa constrictor, attended movie stuntman school and had to jump off the high tower backwards, studied lumberjack sports like log rolling and boom running in Wisconsin, and played a game as a wide receiver on a women's semi-pro American football team called the Tucson Monsoon.

He has hosted several shows on Tennis Channel including Top Ten Hottest Shots and Community Surface.

Touré was one of the journalists interviewed for biographical insight into the life of rapper Eminem on the A&E A&E Biography episode devoted to that musician.

Personal life

On March 19, 2005, Touré married Rita Nakouzi on a beach in Miami, with Rev. Run from Run-DMC as the officiant and Nelson George as the best man. Touré and his wife live in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. They have a son named Hendrix and a daughter named Fairuz.

References

1. "The Book of Jay" at Rolling Stone
2. "Community Surface", Tennis Channel, accessed May 24, 2011.
3. Biography: Eminem, A&E
4. Navas, Judy Cantor. "Rita Nakouzi and Touré", The New York Times, March 27, 2005
5. Copage, Eric V. "Rita Nakouzi and Touré ", The New York Times, May 22, 2009

External links

• Official website
• Touré on Twitter
• Touré on Facebook
• The Career Cookbook Touré profile

Template:Persondata

• 1971 births
• Milton Academy alumni
• African American writers
• American essayists
• American journalists
• American music critics
• African American novelists
• American novelists
• American short story writers
• Living people