“I didn’t know how I was going to get from Kalamazoo to the music business,” Sowmya Krishnamurthy told her hometown magazine in 2023, “but I knew it was going to happen.”
She was thirteen when she decided. This was the mid-nineties, and the plan consisted of running home after school and flipping between MTV, BET and VH1, plus whatever of her allowance survived a trip to Record Town. There was no route from there to here. She has said that when she was growing up there was not much Indian American representation in journalism or anywhere else, and that the only benchmark she had for getting out of Kalamazoo at all was Derek Jeter.
By her junior year at Kalamazoo Central she was second in the state in Impromptu, an event that hands you a topic, gives you a few minutes and then asks you to stand up and say something worth hearing. She has been doing a version of that ever since.
Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor, New York
Her writing career started at the Kalamazoo Gazette before she had left for college. At the University of Michigan she studied business at Ross and wrote an opinion column for the Michigan Daily, two years of it, on affirmative action, on grade inflation, on what her own high school had and had not given her.
Then New York, by the long way round: internships at Bad Boy Records, CNN and American Express, and the William Morris agent training programme, which is to say the mailroom.
The writing is what took. She has bylines at Rolling Stone, TIME, Billboard, XXL, Complex, Vibe, the Village Voice and NPR, including, in 2018, the NPR essay calling Nicki Minaj the century’s insatiable hip-hop monarch. In 2012 she was a panellist on MTV’s Hip Hop POV. In 2021 she became the host of The Lookout by SoundCloud on SiriusXM. She has been the guest expert on NPR’s 1A, WNYC’s All Of It, WBUR’s On Point and The Breakfast Club.
On how it was done, to the Kalamazoo Gazette in 2012: “I was working a full-time job, going to see a concert and turning around 500 words, going to bed and getting to work in the morning.”
Two books
Fashion Killa: How Hip-Hop Revolutionized High Fashion came out in October 2023 from Gallery Books, grown out of a story she had written for XXL. It traces how a culture that the fashion houses spent two decades ignoring ended up running them. Kirkus and Booklist both named it a best book of the year.
Her second, The Blueprint: Inside the Business of Roc-A-Fella Records, is due on 1 December 2026. It follows Jay-Z, Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke and the label they built.
She teaches too, after a fashion: she has spoken at NYU, Parsons, FIT, UCLA Anderson and, of course, Michigan.
Asked what she had wanted to be as a child, she said a teacher. “I remember having my stuffed animals sitting around, and I would tell them things. I’m not sure what I was teaching them, but I kind of liked this idea of having a platform.”
What she credits
“You have to have a lot of confidence in yourself, be your biggest cheerleader, fan and advocate, because often you don’t get that from the people around you.”
On record
Our results archive is still being built and has gaps, so this is simply what we hold today.
