Free My Voice: A Memoir by Angie Martinez

me in different time slots. I did someweekend shifts and even did a midday slot for a month or so. And then, when the opportunity opened up—holy shit, I got it! I was the new nighttime jock!
    That’s when I felt the difference. The six-to-ten-p.m. slot was prime time. This was a big deal. Everyone was so happy for me and offered to help in any way. The only downside was I would no longer be able to work with Flex because, as Steve explained, I’d need to give my full attention to this new opportunity—and that I did!
    I immediately started brainstorming what the show would sound like. To give it something different, I wanted to come up with a feature where I could play new music. I had an idea for a segment where I would play two new songs and then listeners could call in to vote on which song was better. Salaam and I stayed on the phone all night trying to come up with a name for it, tossing around a bunch of stupid ones, until finally we hit on “Battle of the Beats.”
    It felt right.
    Salaam offered, “Yo, I’m gonna do a promo for you. I got an idea.”
    The timing was ideal. He had just worked with the Fugees on the “Nappy Heads” remix, so he had a sense before the rest of the world of how dope Lauryn Hill was. He asked her to sing the intro for me. Lauryn was on the come up and was happy to get on anything she could at the time, so she sang,
“It’s the baaattle of the beats,”
and she killed it! I could not
wait
to play it on the air!
    Battle of the Beats took off. We broke so many new records on the air, the word of mouth was over-the-top—all in the days before social media. There was nothing more interactive than radio at the time, where you could call up and hear something happen live and experience it all together. Radio was the 1995 version of Twitter. Listeners were engaged and passionate about it. And so was the station.
    Hot 97 also became one of the few places to find hip-hop artists. There were
The Source
and
Vibe
magazines, and you could catch
Yo! MTV Raps
once a week. But for people who wanted it all day, every day—it was Hot 97. And as hip-hop culture and its audience grew, so did our ratings. We turned around to see that Hot 97 had become New York’s number one station in the ratings.
    This was all happening at a time when hip-hop was not only flourishing but when the music industry at large was exploding. Everybody—major labels and homegrown independent labels alike—started to add to or expand their hip-hop rosters.
    Battle of the Beats gave a nightly platform to new voices and new work from the more established artists. Needless to say, promoters hoping to break their latest records started to seek me out more and more, hoping to get their releases in a battle. One night that I’ll never forget was when I put on the first single release from a little-known Brooklyn rapper by the name of Jay Z. The song was “In My Lifetime.” It eclipsed whatever the other record was that it was up against. I was floored by how many calls this virtually unknown artist got.
    This was rare because part of the reason more established artists often won the battles was because once you’ve already adopted an artist, their next release sounds familiar and you feel it even more. Not so in this battle. We were looking at numbers we’d never seen from an unknown.
Who the fuck is Jay Z?
    The answer came a couple of weeks later when Jay Z and Damon Dash—Jay’s manager and business partner on their newly formed Roc-A-Fella label—showed up at the station to thank me in person for playing the record. They pulled up in front of the building in a white buggy-eyed Benz that had their Roc-A-Fella logo on the hood.
    What in the hell is that?
    Nowadays in New York, it’s pretty common to see trucks and vansplastered with artists’ logos all over town. But at the time it wasn’t the norm and this was the first time I’d ever seen it done on a Mercedes-Benz.
    When I went to meet them, Dame handed me a