Guest Host Toure Checks In
Filed under: Inside The BPP
Toure, photographed by same.
Music writer, TV personality and all-around great guy Toure is guest-hosting the show today and tomorrow -- part of our audition process for filling the shoes of one Luke Burbank.
Toure sends this note after his first day behind the mic:
This morning I drove into NPR from Brooklyn at 4.45 a.m., which was lovely because there wasn't a stitch of traffic. I was all but alone on the road. It was very I Am Legend-ish. If only New York were like that more often.
That early road peace contrasted starkly with the hyperspeed that was the first few minutes of doing the BPP with the awesome Alison Stewart. It was all happening so fast and yet so much was going on it seemed to last a long time and there were so many verbal fumbles and feelings of being lost, and it seemed to take forever. I assumed an hour had gone but then I looked at the clock and it was only 7:12. What? Just 12 minutes have passed? I couldn't believe it.
It was kinda like someone showed me to the cockpit of a gigantic, expensive, fragile spaceship and said OK, you and your co-pilot are gonna drive it. Go. It took me half an hour just to figure out where all the buttons were and how to avoid crashing into other ships. But things calmed down from there, largely because there's nothing as nice as sharing a mic with Alison. She's a real pro so it's like dancing with someone who can anticipate your mistakes before you make them. She kept me safe the whole show -- i.e., kept me from making mistakes as best as she could -- which helped me relax and get into it.
Once I got a little comfortable with the exercise I was able to indulge in the exhilaration of working live. Whether on TV or radio it's exciting, it's adrenaline. I love it live. When it's live you just don't make mistakes that you'd make non-live. You just tap into another part of your mind and you just go. It's like flying.
I'm a writer first and foremost. I started at Rolling Stone, I've written three books (my last is Never Drank the Kool-Aid, essays about hiphop), and I'm working on two more. I went from RS to CNN as their first pop culture correspondent, to BET where I host their entertainment news show, The Black Carpet.
I'm still auditioning, so cross some fingers and toes for me -- but no matter what, I'm happy to get my toes in the door at NPR because it's a media outlet that's actually providing something valuable to its audience. And it's a media outlet that's occasionally mentioned on 30 Rock.
--Special to the BPP from Toure.
12:49 PM ET | 12-17-2007 | permalink
