My Voice: A Memoir (5 page)

This was right around the time that Rakim became one of the greatest MCs I’ve ever heard. That has never changed. But back when I was seventeen, on albums like
Paid in Full
and
Follow the Leader
, I started to listen with new ears. Rakim spoke to me in a way that I felt he was saying some shit I needed to know—like he had answers to deep questions—and I felt a different kind of connection.

After that my relationship with hip-hop changed. Listening to Rakim, I cared more. He sounded so strong, and he made me want to learn about what he knew. Hip-hop wasn’t just fun music anymore. It felt to me like it mattered.

HI, IT’S ANGIE MARTINEZ

T
he first person to open a door for me was my mother, who was able to get me an internship at Power 96 in Miami, where she was settling in as music director. The station played mostly freestyle and dance music; it was an eye-opening experience of things I could learn, things I could do.
How does this all work
? I was open and eager to find out.

While I was getting my act together and finishing up high school, my first job at the station was doing research, cold-calling people at home and quickly introducing myself. “Hi. My name is Angie Martinez, and I’m calling from Power 96 . . .” before getting to the question, “Can I ask you what kind of music you listen to?” And if they happened to listen to the type of music that Power played, or something close to it, I would do a music survey and play them little clips of songs off of a recorder. They’d tell me if they liked it, didn’t like it, or were tired of it. That was good old-fashioned music research.

Besides the cold-calling, I would listen to music on the adult urban
contemporary station and handwrite a log of the different songs. I’d sit and listen for hours to tapes of recorded music from the station, and as I wrote down the title of the song and the artist on the log, I’d expand my knowledge of music outside of hip-hop. In the late eighties there were groups like Cameo and Surface in this category of adult black radio. It was interesting to learn how music reached different audiences. All of that was new to me.

My job responsibilities also included answering the phones and helping the deejays with whatever they needed. How cool was that? Like hitting the big time. Of course, looking back I can see that the station was a small operation—very
WKRP in Cincinnati
. We were housed in a short-story office building with a drive-through KFC next door. We had one control room and downstairs they had two tiny Power 96 vans. And just like on the TV show, the jocks were all larger-than-life, over-the-top characters with names like “Tony the Tiger” and “Bo the Party Animal.”

The first time I met the late Bo Griffin, I was starstruck. A big, beautiful super-chocolate brown-skinned woman with an even bigger personality, she dressed to the hilt every day, wearing super-tight leopard-print dresses, lots of jewelry, red lipstick, and always some sort of fur, all in keeping with her party-animal image. As a popular on-air jock, Bo was something of a celebrity, and she drove a white Porsche around town. When she walked into a place, it was like, “Oh, there’s Bo!” I was slightly infatuated with her.

Bo Griffin wasn’t my mentor per se, but by watching her, I learned a lot about leadership and team-building. She used her presence in a way that brought you in as she looked you in the eye when she spoke to you and called you by name. It wasn’t like, “Hey you, intern girl, go do this,” but rather, “Good morning, Angie! Would you do me a favor?” As the
center of attention in any room, she had that rare ability to make everybody feel important—which is how she definitely made me feel.

In fact, I don’t know how it happened, but one day I looked up and Bo was standing there, holding the keys to her white Porsche, and she proceeded to ask me to go get it and pull it up to the station for her
.
I almost passed out.

Me? Drive your car for you?!?!?!

Seventeen years old, driving Bo the Party Animal’s white Porsche, for those two blocks with the window rolled down, you couldn’t tell me shit! The fact that she trusted me enough to do this “favor” for her—that was crazy to me. And then there was that first taste of the good life and that flash of seeing myself one day behind the wheel of my own dream car. Yeah, I might have stretched out those two blocks to six, hoping someone I knew would see me. After that first time, Bo would ask me to go get the car for her on a regular basis. She may not have intended to plant seeds of possibilities in my imagination, but that’s what happened.

And thanks to the internship at Power 96, I got to know Miami better—which, contrary to my first assumption, had a hot music scene that included hip-hop. It turned out that Margarita—one of my coworkers who was around the same age as me and answered the phones at the front desk—had the same love for hip-hop that I did. She was a Miami native whose family was Colombian. Together we found out there were a couple of underground hip-hop clubs on the beach as well as a hip-hop night at Cameo, a well-known club. We went religiously. We’d go in sneakers and dance all night! And I don’t mean like two-step dancing; I mean like we watched Big Daddy Kane videos all week and couldn’t wait to get to the club to run through all of the moves we saw his dancers Scoob and Scrap do!

Man, I still remember the day we heard A Tribe Called Quest for
the first time. “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” was our shiiiit! Sonically, it was nothing like anything I’d ever heard before—even if I wasn’t sure what the lyrics were about:
I left my wallet in El Segundo / I gotta get, I got-got ta get it . . .
But it didn’t matter because it was just infectious. I played it over and over on repeat. And I for sure noticed Q-Tip while reading about Tribe in
The Source
! He was
cute
. Strong, broad-shouldered, cool. And his voice was
ill
. I was a fan.

That was an exciting time in hip-hop . . . the Black Medallion, Native Tongues movement was
everything
. It was just a creative, fertile period with De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Tribe, the whole thing. And it was all happening in New York. We still heard it in Miami, but we were getting stuff later, and I spent a lot of time wondering what I was missing back in New York. I missed home!

Then came BIG NEWS. After work one day my mother announced, “Well, I was offered a program director position at CD 101.9.” CD was a jazz station in New York and this was a great opportunity for her. But still she had to ask, “How do you feel about moving back to New York?”

How did I feel? “Yes! Please, for the love of God, take me back!” I was so ready.

She made me a deal that she would try to help find me another internship at a radio station because she saw how much I loved it, but that I would have to go to school and get a job, too.

“Okay, okay, okay!” I agreed. My wish had come true. I couldn’t wait to get back to my city.

•   •   •

I
t had been only ten years earlier that I’d first heard “Rapper’s Delight” at my aunts’ uptown house party. But here I was, age eighteen, seeing how much had changed and how quickly hip-hop was moving from house parties and the streets into the clubs and the nighttime social scene.

I’d barely had time to go check it all out when my mom finds out that Hot 97, a freestyle dance station at the time, is looking for interns.

“The program director’s name is Joel Salkowitz,” she says. “See if you can apply.”

Compared to Power 96 in Miami, the station—then on Thirty-Eighth Street in the Garment District—was a big step up. Nothing fancy. But when I went in to apply for the internship, I got really excited as I looked around at the New York version of a radio station.

Joel Salkowitz—a white guy with thick glasses, dark hair, beard, and mustache, which he tugged at a lot—glanced down at my application, asked me a couple of questions, and then said I could start working a few days a week and then we’d see how it went. Just like that I got the job!

I started at the bottom. I did everything, whatever they needed me to do—running to get coffee, office work, errands, and the same kind of market research as before, only this was New York, so cold-calling people at home and asking them to name their favorite songs, I’d get hung up on all the time. But I did it. Whatever anyone asked, I was
on
it. Pretty soon everyone knew if they needed something, they could ask me. “We’ll get Angie to get it. She’ll do it.” I was that kid at the station.

Looking back, it’s strange that I still wasn’t sure what I wanted my future to be. But then again, at eighteen years old, neither did any of my friends. I did like being in that environment. I liked the idea of radio and the fact that everything was live and it was happening now. You could come up with an idea and execute it the same day, just get on the radio and do it. All that energy was exciting to be around.

Before long I’d found my way into every department as I tried to learn as much as I could about all the moving pieces that made a radio station go. Then I wound up getting hired part-time to work on their street team. It was not glamorous. For something like three dollars an hour, I’d drive the van, hang up posters at events like sales appearances
and whatever other outside errands needed to be done. Every day I would come to work looking like a member of TLC. My uniform of choice was oversized tees and baggy pants and kicks. Nobody else at the station dressed like that. That was just me . . . I was a hip-hop kid working at a dance station.

•   •   •

T
he lessons of hard work were starting to pay off. But I had a lot more to learn about time management and setting priorities. I had kept my agreement with my mother that if she helped me get an internship, I’d go to college. But after enrolling in a full load of classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College, I was failing. Between school and the radio station, I clearly cared more about my job than about my classes. For a while I did enough to avoid getting kicked out of community college. And then my mother started paying less attention, so I started dropping classes. And eventually I stopped going altogether. There was no way I could keep taking on more and more at the station while trying to pretend I was going to college.

I was doing too damn much. If I would see my younger self right now, my advice would be: “You need to sit your ass down for five minutes. Focus. Set some goals.”

Did I have any goals that I was working so hard to achieve? Not really. Maybe I had an instinct that I was somehow going to run into my goal and find what it was that I was supposed to do. But for the time being my attitude was just that I was happy to be there and I was eager to do whatever was asked of me so that I could learn everything. My motivation came in the form of wanting to go above and beyond because, why not? I had all of that young, dumb energy to give. Never underestimate the value of that passion.

Too often I see interns starting at entry level, trying to move up from
there with minimal enthusiasm. I have to wonder—where’s your fucking energy? You may not know what you want to do, but so many opportunities are in front of you that you can’t waste a moment. You will not be young forever. So when you are, when you don’t have big responsibilities yet, and you have an opportunity, you should do it till your knuckles bleed. You should keep going hard until somebody peels you up off the floor and is like, “Go take a nap.” Why wouldn’t you?

While I was in that zone of hyper-energy—working in the office, getting coffee, being on the street team, driving vans—I had to drive one of the radio personalities, Deborah Rath, all the way to Great Adventure for an event she was hosting. Tall and thin and blond, Deborah was known for playing dance music and did lots of events like this. The drill was that after driving her in the Hot 97 van more than sixty miles to Great Adventure, I was supposed to drive back to Manhattan and then down to some dead-end, rat-infested parking lot in Midtown. When I parked there, I would stomp my feet so the rats wouldn’t come running my way.

As usual on that particular day, after driving back from Great Adventure, I was supposed to park the van in that nasty lot. Well, I had been going nonstop, from school to work and back to work again. I was on no sleep. And the next morning I was supposed to pick up the van and show up at another event. So instead of putting the van in the lot for a few hours, I thought,
I’ll keep it, go home, and get a bit of sleep
. It was against the rules for a street team member to do that, but I was exhausted. It was the only thing that made sense. I had to.

At that point I lived on the Upper West Side with my mom. I was still living at home, not even a full adult yet. What a relief when I drive the van home, go inside, and go to sleep.
Ah . . .
But as soon as I wake up and go outside to get going, what a shock: There’s an ominous piece of paper on the windshield of the van!

Holy shit, I got a ticket
.

Obviously, when the station received notice of the parking ticket, they’d know that I’d kept the van. But for some dumb-ass reason, I just didn’t tell them, and I waited until they got the ticket in the mail. Maybe I was hoping it would never come.

Cut to a few weeks later:

“Angie, did you take the van home? You know that’s against the rules.” I’m standing in the marketing director’s office and he’s giving a speech that’s going on and on.
Blah, blah, blah
. Then he says, “You know we have fired people for that.”

Shiiiit!
Two thoughts cross my mind. Number one—
I don’t want to get fired
. But number two,
I understand what he’s saying and I know this is the rule, but let’s just talk about common sense here
. I wasn’t confident enough to verbalize it at that time, but from common sense I knew that what I did wasn’t wrong. Well,
I
knew that. But even so, I was written up and sent home.

It felt like the end of the world.

A few days later I was back at the station for a meeting with the general manager, Judy Ellis, where it would be determined whether or not I was going to get fired. Judy was this little five-foot dynamo. She was tiny, yes, but she could be in a room full of six-foot men and dominate. She demanded your attention, your respect. She was fierce. She was smart. She was a big part of what Hot 97 would become.

At the meeting, I’m sitting there in front of the powers that be—the marketing director, the promotions director, and the general manager. They’re going back and forth about how this is not acceptable; it’s against the rules; we’ve fired other people for this; what are we supposed to do; we’re gonna have to let her go.