Mogul Gimlet Media

Kelly Rowland was just a teenager when she and the rest of Destiny’s Child came to New York to audition for a record deal. Over 20 years later, she’s been all over the world, met her idols (including the legendary Whitney Houston), lived out so many of her musical dreams—but the stuff she heard in those early years still makes her weak in the knees. In this episode, Kelly talks us through the music that made her, from Tribe Called Quest to Sade to Pebbles to Salt-N-Pepa.

In our new interview series The Mogul Mixtapes, we’re talking to some of our all-time favorite people about their most treasured hip hop memories—the craziest parties, the nastiest beefs, and the most brilliant verses ever. 
This episode features the dynamic hip hop personality Mouse Jones. If you ever wondered how to win a beef, Mouse got you. He takes us back to the early 2000s, to tell us what he learned from one of the most iconic, pettiest, and longest running beefs in Hip Hop history. 

In this episode of Behind the Beats we go behind the scenes and find out how Nana Kwabena wrote the music for the second season of Mogul. It’s a wide ranging conversation that touches on Nana’s creative process, his thoughts on the Miami bass movement, and the history of African talking drums.

This is Behind the Beats. In this series we’ll go behind the scenes to discover how Mogul got its distinct sound. In this first episode we’ll hear from the woman behind the show’s sound design, So Wylie. Her inspirations, her process, her beats.

On September 10th 2001, Miami lost a local legend: DJ Uncle Al. In this episode, we hang at home with DJ Walshy Fire of Major Lazer, and he breaks down why Al was so special. It’s a tale of perseverance, positivity, pirate radio, and songs about Santa Claus.

Miami bass may have been thriving, but lyrical hip hop was still struggling to find a foothold in Miami. And with little chance at getting airtime on popular stations, Miami DJs have to find a way to get their music heard—and the best way to do that was to set up an illegal pirate radio station. In this episode: a pimped-out tour bus, a barrel full guns, and a lunchbox full of cocaine.