The Austin 100: Hook

By Stephen Thompson

Published March 17, 2020 at 5:00 AM EDT

Hometown: Riverside, California

Genre: Hip-Hop

Why We're Excited: Rapper Hook named herself after her own aptitude for writing catchy choruses, but she's the farthest thing from a source of mindless earworms. If anything, the combative raps on Crashed My Car bark and crackle so discordantly, you don't really find yourself nodding along so much as clenching your teeth approvingly.

Listen to Hook's "Yes Man"

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Stephen Thompson

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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