My Voice: A Memoir (14 page)

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL

M
y career as a solo recording artist got off to a rocky start. There was a lot more sinking than swimming from the get-go.

I booked a few sessions and paid a few producers to come in and sit with me and try out a few things. That did
not
go well. Then the label sent me to Virginia to work with the Neptunes.

The Neptunes were a production team made up Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams. Yes, that Pharrell. The future singer of “Happy,” judge on
The Voice
, and BBC mogul. And they were on fire at the time, producing everybody from Mystikal (with hits coming like “Shake Ya Azz” and “Danger”) to Jay Z on “The City Is Mine” from earlier and “I Just Wanna Luv U” around this period. They’d produced hits for artists like the Lox and had a slate of new stuff coming up with Lil’ Kim and Shyne. The list went on and on. What was I doing here? My self-doubts kicked in as soon as I got to Virginia Beach and tried to settle in at some damp hotel
that felt dark and lonely. Maybe it wasn’t really that bad, but I was so out of my element. And I was nervous as shit.

Since the Neptunes were so in demand, they had several projects going at once and I was told to just stay put until they were ready for me. Time passed way too slowly until finally, the label rep called to say, “Hey, your car is going to pick you up and bring you to the studio around ten p.m. The Neptunes are there finishing up with Kelis . . . Then they will start with you.”

Sure enough, the car came and got me to the studio. As I walked in, music was
blasting
, playing a beat that sounded dope as shit! Pharrell stood there over the boards, bopping his head, while everyone in the room did the same. He looked up and saw me and came right over and gave me a hug.

“Yo, that’s dope, right???” It turned out to be Ray J’s “Wait a Minute.” Then he gestured to the other room, saying, “C’mon, let’s go talk in there.”

I’d met Pharrell a few times and he had been a guest on my show. But the two of us had never really hung out, and I wasn’t certain why he’d even agreed to work with me. As we sat down, he was super flattering, explaining that he was a fan of me on the radio and was totally open to hearing my ideas.

The problem was . . . I had no ideas!!! Like, none!

“Okay, no worries. Let’s just vibe and see what happens.”

For the next two days I was a guest in the Neptunes’ creative genius world. I watched them make beats and do their wizardry, tweaking other people’s songs. They played me raw audio of an Ol’ Dirty Bastard session, where he spit like a thousand bars of bizarre drug-induced brilliance. At one point that second day, when we all got hungry, Pharrell and I ventured out on a Fuddruckers run to get some food. On the way, we listened
to everything from some unreleased Kelis to Steely Dan. He put me on to this song called “Three Roses” by the seventies folk-rock group America that I love to this day. He pointed out how ill the guitar change in that song was and played it like five times in a row to ensure that I fully understood.

I love people who love what they do. How could you not be inspired by that?

Back to the studio. I was fed, we vibed, I was inspired, and then Pharrell uttered the five words I had been dreading for two days: “You ready to get started???”

Welp, here goes nothin’. “Let’s do it.”

“I was thinking something like this,” he said, and plays me a beat called “Dem Things.”

“You got somethin for this???” he asked.

“Nah, not yet, but it’s dope,” I said. That was my best attempt at playing it cool. He told me to take it to the other room and sit with it for a little while, so I did. For four hours! Annnnd . . . nothing. I mean nothing. Not a verse, a hook, a bar. Nothing.

I was in a full-tilt panic. I couldn’t handle that much pressure, and now I was cracking in front of everyone. Pharrell, God bless his soul, was cool about it. He offered to have Pusha T and Malice from his new group Clipse help me. But as dope as they were, they were rappin’ about drug life, and as desperate as I was for help, “pushing weight from state to state” was just not gonna fly. I asked Pharrell if I could take the beat home with me to New York and spend some time with it on my own. He agreed.

So I went back to New York, feeling defeated and with a full understanding that I was in way over my head. That’s when I went looking for Salaam.

“
Salaam, I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can, Billy.” (Salaam and I call each other Billy—no clue why or when it started, but it’s our thing.) “Get all the stuff you’ve done so far and meet me at my studio,” he said. “We will figure it out.”

Whatever had caused me to freeze up started to thaw. Salaam and I talked about some of the things I wanted to say, and he asked me what was going on in my life. Then he suggested we go outside and jump in my car so he could hear what I had in my CD changer.

The answer was waiting there all the time, the minute we hit play and heard,
“Suavemente, besame, Que quiero sentir tus labios . . . Besandome otra vez.”
Of course.
“Suavemente”
by Elvis Crespo was my shiiiit!!

Salaam said, “Okay, so we will do a hip-hop version of this . . . Let’s call Clef.”

Now that Wyclef and the Fugees were bona fide superstars—and Salaam had been an instrumental part of that—getting Clef on the phone was easy.

That was the magic moment. From there I reached out to others who were artists and friends to help as well. At this point in my career, my relationships were solid, so when I asked the artists to come, they just all showed up. It really was humbling. Not to mention that ultimately I’m a fan, so to have the opportunity to be in the studio with most of them was like a kid getting to toss the ball around with his favorite baseball player. Pretty fuckin’ cool!

It was everyone from Snoop Dogg, Jay Z, Mary J. Blige, Jadakiss, Busta Rhymes, Styles P, and La India to Q-Tip, Kool G Rap, Lil’ Mo, Beanie Sigel, and, of course, Fat Joe, Cuban Link, and the rest of the Terror Squad. Well, most of the Terror Squad.

Sadly, in early 2000, a few months before I even started recording my album, Big Pun had passed after suffering a massive heart attack. He
was so talented, so funny and irreverent, and had that larger-than-life persona. Even though he was a big guy, he seemed like he could just weather anything. Or maybe it was just that he was so young, only twenty-eight at the time, that it felt so incomprehensible.

One of my favorite radio drops ever was made by Pun: “Angiiie, come downstairs—the pump is open. . . .” I included it on the album. He was definitely with us in spirit.

My schedule was pretty insane. I would do my radio show from three to seven p.m. and then be at Salaam’s studio till the morning. As all-consuming as it was, I knew that if nothing else, this experience would make me a better radio personality. From that point on, whenever an artist came to my show with their new album, I would have a much more developed understanding of what it took to make that album.

Granted, that still put me in the position of knowing that there were people out there sharpening their knives, ready to put me on the chopping block of extreme criticism. And I was probably my own toughest critic. Oh my God. I would write a verse and in my head it sounded good. Then I would get in the booth and hate the fact that I was not seasoned enough to execute it the way I’d heard it in my head. I would do it a hundred times over and over and over. “I want to do it again. I want to do it again. I want to do it again.”

Why is this so fucking hard?

God bless the poor sound engineer, Gary, who would sit there with me all night, redoing every verse.

All that pressure aside, however, getting to do the album led to some truly great times, man . . . lots of weed, take-out food from the Jamaican spot, jokes for days, and an opportunity to make music with my friends. The lesson to be learned was that rather than being so hard on myself, I should have let that moment be what it was. Sometimes you have to get past the fears and insecurities that may actually hold
you back from being great or from truly experiencing something the way it was meant to be experienced. Since then I have tried to do that more just by being in the moment—maybe as my imaginary mentor, Oprah, could have told me.

In any case, I finished! I made a muthafucking album. When the decision was made to hold the album release party at Jimmy’s Bronx Café, I was psyched! After years of attending and hosting countless album release parties for other people, I was actually having my own, and I couldn’t think of anywhere that would be more perfect than the birth place of hip-hop, the Bronx. When I pulled up that night, I saw a billboard with my picture and album cover on the side of this big building, so you could see it from the highway that runs by.

But the night was far from perfect. Before the party started, I’d gotten wind that Cuban Link had asked Fat Joe to be released from his Terror Squad contract. Apparently, Cuban was unhappy that his own solo album release had been delayed. The truth was that with Big Pun gone, the Terror Squad had been falling apart.

The last thing I expected was to have that tension spill out at my party—where Joe and Cuban and everyone else were there to show me love—but that’s exactly what happened. What wasn’t clear was who exactly started the fight. The only clarity I had was that I was downstairs feeling
pissssed offff
that they were upstairs fighting.
C’mon,
I felt like telling them,
if you want to fight, go somewhere else and fight!

There were different versions of what happened next. I don’t know what happened, but all I know is the fight ended with Cuban Link getting his faced sliced open by a blade.

The night went down as one of those reminders that there was a dark side to this journey I was on. Behind the mic, on the radio or in the studio, there was lots of drama, yet it was more contained. But
the ride wasn’t only about those highlights. There were also some lowlights—people fighting, getting stabbed, and shot. The violence and dysfunction.

Although the release party hadn’t gone as planned, when we released the album, it debuted at #7 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop album rankings—buoyed by lots of play for the three singles, “Mi Amor,” “Dem Thangz” and “Coast 2 Coast (Suavemente).”

Now that I had to build from there and needed a manager, I turned to my friend Shawn Pecas. We called him Pecas because he had a face full of freckles, and
“pecas”
means freckles in Spanish. By this point Pec and I had known each other for years. He did rap promotions at G Street Records back in the day, helped break Peter Gunz and Lord Tariq, and was now working at Arista. I had no reason to think Pec would be a good manager, but I trusted him. I felt connected to him, and I liked the way he carried himself and treated people. That was good enough for me. He agreed. He then hired Yvette Davila to be my road manager. The three of us quickly became a family. Pecas and I would fight like brother and sister and Yvette would have to intervene. Pec and Yvette would bump heads and I’d have to jump in and tell them to knock it off.

All that said, we trusted each other and I knew they had my back. And I needed it. I had never in my life worked so hard. My radio show was in full gear and now, somehow, I was going to have to hit the road to promote this album.

•   •   •

T
raveling across the country was eye-opening. Whether I was doing in-store signings or club appearances in major markets or small towns, the first thing that really struck me was the separation of blacks
and Latinos. In New York, we all grew up together in the same neighborhoods. We liked the same hip-hop. There was no disconnect.

Out on the road, not every town was like that. I’d hear questions like, “What are you, Mexican?” Somebody asked me once if I was related to Lisa Lisa. I quickly realized that being a young Latin girl at a hip-hop club wasn’t as common everywhere else. That was one more reason to feel lucky to grow up in a city where we weren’t so separate.

Now in 2016, being a Latin girl at a hip-hop radio station is pretty common. If you’d let Salaam Remi tell it, he says every one of those stations tried to put an Angie on-air and that’s why it’s the norm now. When I need an ego boost I let him tell it.

But I will say, while touring for the album I did meet all these different radio personalities around the country, who would tell me, “Wow, I listen to your show.” “I tape your show.” “I got into radio because of you.” It was super flattering and a surprise to get that type of love.

So while the album itself met with mixed reviews, it was a big win in terms of strengthening my career as a radio personality. Everywhere I went, I got the message that my voice mattered to other people in the radio world. Amazing.

At Hot 97, Tracy Cloherty—who was in charge at the time—made it possible for me to work only four days a week so I could tour with the album. That was unbelievable. Most radio stations don’t support their talent that way; it’s unheard of. I’d be on the radio Monday through Thursday and then I’d fly out Thursday night to do shows on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. And no matter where we were in the world, we had to get on a plane Monday morning so I could be back on the air by three p.m. This was a new type of grind . . . even for me.

But whatever. The last thing I was going to do was complain. Or slow down. This was my time to shine, right? So I just kept grinding.
That is, until this one really late night in June when I was getting ready to head home after hosting a party at a club and suddenly I felt like something was wrong.

Two days ago I had begun shooting my video for “Dem Thangz.” The label had only given us a budget for a one-day shoot, but trying to get the most out of it . . . we were going to squeeze two days’ worth of video into a one-day shoot. That meant four wardrobe changes, three different locations, and twenty-four hours of nonstop shooting. After a day like that, the smart thing would have been to go home and collapse. Instead, after a Red Bull and a quick shower, I went straight to the Puerto Rican Day Parade. And that is not an event where you can just call it in. The parade goes from Forty-Second to Eighty-Second Streets, and on every block there is a new group of people, so you have to show each of them the love—screaming on the mic, waving the flag, performing and engaging the crowd.