New Mix: Remembering Sean Price, Plus Girl Band, Diane Coffee, Bikini Kill, More

VPM | By Robin Hilton, Katie Presley and Timmhotep Aku

Published August 11, 2015 at 4:40 PM EDT

Updated February 20, 2024

Clockwise from upper left: Sean Price, Diane Coffee, Girl Band, Bikini Kill

This week, the All Songs team picks songs that sound like revolutions. Bob Boilen is out, so co-host Robin Hilton is joined by Katie Presley in D.C. and Timmhotep Aku in New York. The trio shares big, smashy music that lets Robin engage in his once-yearly purge of emotion.

The show opens with a remembrance of Sean Price, the beloved Brooklyn rapper who died last weekend at 43. The revolution in Price’s music is that he described his life as it actually was, resisting the urge to inflate his own ego or polish his circumstance to make for a slicker image. From there, Robin has two songs that contain an album of material each, Katie has an activist punk time capsule and a shiny, groovy treat from Brooklyn, and Timm has some sly R&B from a singer trying to pass his heartache off as automotive nostalgia.

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Robin Hilton

Robin Hilton is the Senior Podcast Producer for NPR Music and hosts the New Music Friday episodes of All Songs Considered. He is also a composer and multi-instrumentalist whose original scores have appeared in podcasts, films, radio programs and other works. He arranged and performed the theme for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered and composed and performed its elections coverage theme. You can hear more of his music here.

Prior to joining NPR in 2000, Hilton co-founded Small Good Thing Productions, a non-profit production company for independent film, radio and music in Athens, Georgia.

Hilton lived and worked in Japan as an interpreter for the government, and taught English as a second language to junior high school students.

From 1989 to 1996, Hilton worked for NPR member stations KANU and WUGA as a senior producer and assistant news director and was a long-time contributing reporter to NPR's daily news programs All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Along the way, Hilton worked as an emergency room orderly, a blackjack dealer and a fruitcake factory assembly lineman.

See stories by Robin Hilton