My Voice: A Memoir by Angie Martinez Read Free Book Online

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 forthe 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