My Voice: A Memoir (15 page)

And this is June, and it’s hot. But feeding off the energy of the people along the parade route, I’m running on adrenaline. So I keep going for hours.

Everything culminated at four, and then we went and grabbed something to eat—me, Pecas, Yvette, DJ Enuff, Monse, and a few other guys from the station. Only, I wasn’t really eating because I was taking some over-the-counter diet pills—to keep my energy up and my appetite down. After that, around seven o’clock, we headed to Carbon, where I was hosting the after-party. When we showed up, I felt myself fading fast, and I said to Pecas, “Could you get me an apple martini?” hoping it would put me in a more festive mood.

Two hours later, after just that one drink, we hopped in the SUV and started home. I began to feel queasy in the backseat, like I’d had too much to drink.

“Pecas, pull the car over.”

“Huh? You didn’t even drink that much.”

“Pec, just pull the fuckin’ car over.”

As he did, I opened the door and stuck my head out of the door as if I were going to vomit. That’s the last thing I remember.

When I opened my eyes, I was staring at a paramedic as I lay on a stretcher on the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Tenth Avenue. He kept talking to me and asking me questions. I could hear him, but I couldn’t muster the energy to speak back. He kept repeating, “Can you hear me? Did you take anything?”

All I could remember were the stupid diet pills. But I can’t form the word “Xenadrine.” I could only say, “It starts with an X.” As the words were slurring out of my mouth, I realized how this was going to be misunderstood; someone was going to think I’d taken ecstasy but I didn’t have it in me to explain. And so I went back to sleep.

When I woke up, I was in the emergency room with an IV pumping me full of fluids. Along with Pecas, the girls were all there—Nikki, Tracey, Liane, and my mom.

It took me half a day to convince my mother that I wasn’t doing drugs. The doctors reassured her that there was nothing in my blood. I had just pushed my body to the absolute limit. To this day my mother likes to remind me of that night whenever she sees me pushing myself too hard.

Apparently, I was not invincible. Not that I believed in limiting myself, but clearly there was only so far you could push your body without putting something in the tank. Or, as I started to say at the time—and still do—you have to respect the temple. Even if I’d wanted to keep up the pace, I knew that this had been a warning and had to decide what was really important to me. Being an artist and performer was
something I really loved doing, and I wanted to do it more and grow. And, in fact, pretty soon after that incident a second album would be in the works.

But the real question that I started to have was whether I had the same hunger to be famous that I saw in others who were. The truth is that deep down I had this small fear of being too famous. Of course, I could appreciate the perks that come with fame. But there was a part of me that liked having my own normal life. A lot of people close to me by then had lived with fame 24-7 and they did not have normal lives.

Around the same time, during that summer of 2001, when I was really trying to pull back and find more balance, everybody else in the hip-hop world was having a crazy year. Shyne had been sentenced to ten years in prison for a shooting at Club New York involving Puffy and J. Lo. At Summer Jam, Jay Z debuted “Takeover” and dissed Prodigy by projecting a photo on the big screen of P as a kid in dance class. At the same time he set off his beef with Nas: “Ask Nas, he don’t want it with Hov, no!”

In fact, even before that Jay had stopped by the station to play me
The Blueprint
album and get feedback before it dropped. There was no denying that this was Jay’s best work to date. As much as I loved his first album,
Reasonable Doubt
, this album was more mature on every level. Lyrically, creatively, and from a production standpoint. It was just Jay at his finest. And then he played me “Takeover.” He saved it for last. For dramatic effect, I’m sure. Not that it needed it. And with no warning he pressed play:
Had a spark when you started, but now you’re just garbage / Fell from top ten to not mentioned at all . .
 
.

“Are you talking about Nas?!”

He smirked.

And then the most disrespectful line of all—
’Cause you know who
did you know what with you know who . . .
Was he saying that he had sex with Nas’s girl??? It sounded like it. Wow!!! Could Nas recover from this?

On-air and in the streets, all summer long, I was getting an earful as all sorts of shit was brewing. And then all of a sudden, everything stopped.

HEART OF THE CITY

A
sk anyone about the day before in New York and they’ll usually talk about how normal everything was. That Monday night my mother had stayed at my apartment in Hackensack, as she had just traveled back from Paris. That next morning, September 11, we woke up and saw on TV that one of the two World Trade Center towers had been hit. Like everyone else watching that morning, we thought it was a terrible accident—that a plane had crashed into one of the towers.

Then a short time later, when the second tower was hit as we all watched in horror, it was beyond terrifying. What was happening? Immediately, I tried to call Nikki, who worked down there in the Financial District, but I couldn’t get her on the phone.

Oh my God, oh my God. Why doesn’t she answer? Why can’t I find Nikki?

Many hours later I would learn that Nikki was one of the people who had to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to get out of there. But in the
early hours of not knowing where she was and listening to the news coverage, I went into a full-blown panic attack.

The terror that everyone felt watching it happen in real time was that you didn’t know how far this was going to go. You didn’t know if your building—the one you were sitting in, watching TV—was next, that all of a sudden the explosion was going to come through your window. You didn’t know if we were going to be in a nuclear war. And then they said the Pentagon had got hit, and I just remember sitting there thinking,
This could be it for all of us
.

So many years later you hear all of these different stories, and everybody talks about the loss and the sadness and the devastation. Or they talk about how the city came together afterward. There are so many different perspectives about that tragic day, but we don’t talk a lot about those moments of feeling like,
This could be it for everybody
. I remember sitting there with my mother, thinking,
This could be it
.

Early that day Q-Tip had called. We had been broken up for almost two years by now and our friendship was as strong as ever. Something was wrong with his TV and he couldn’t see what was going on, so he asked if he could come over with the girl he was dating at the time. Of course it was okay. The four of us sat in front of my TV for hours, watching in horror.

Even if I’d wanted to go to work that day, I couldn’t. Everything was shut down. You couldn’t move. The station was on-air—Sunny Anderson had just started working with us and was at the station when it happened, and she just kind of stayed there. We also did a feed of the ABC News station as the emergency system started to kick in. So if you were a Hot 97 listener, and you turned Hot 97 on, it sounded unfamiliar. Because either you would hear Sunny, who was an unfamiliar voice, or you would hear the feed of the news.

Nothing made any sense. We were numb, we were scared, and we
were all glued to the media—phones, e-mail, TV, radio—as we tried to account for friends and relatives. Each time you breathed a sigh of relief that someone was okay and at home, you’d hear of someone else who had a loved one who was missing.

I woke up on September twelfth and thought
, I can’t go anywhere
. I’d heard that you couldn’t get into the city, especially downtown. The station was no longer in the Garment District but had moved to a fancier building on Hudson Street, about fifteen blocks away from Ground Zero. It was impossible to get there.

That may have been true, but Tracy Cloherty had other thoughts when she called and said, “You have to come to work today.”

“I can’t even get in the area.”

“Angie, you have to figure it out. You have to get here. People need to hear you. Everybody is freaking out. Your listeners need to hear you. They can’t turn on the radio and have it sound foreign. Everything is already foreign. They need to hear your voice today.”

And something about what she said hit me in my core.
Got it
. “Oh my God, you’re so right. I’m on my way.”

The least I could do was make the effort to be there. I didn’t know how to handle anything like this. What do you say on the air? What are the guidelines? What’s the protocol? I didn’t know. But I knew that you just fucking show up. And so I did. Monse—the little brother of a friend of a friend I’d helped get hired at the station and had mentored—met me at Thirty-Fourth Street because every street below that was closed down. Monse was one of a handful of assistants I called my “sons”—in the loving sense of the word, not patronizing. He was always right there with me in the studio all night if that’s what I needed. He always had my back and he had a bright future in radio. He gave me a hug and the two of us got going, but we were stopped right away by cops on Thirty-Fourth and Fifth Avenue.

“Look,” the officer informed us, “nobody can get in from here.”

An emotional Monse spoke right up. “Yo, that’s Angie Martinez,” he told the cops. “She’s gotta talk to the people. We gotta be on the radio.” So then we showed them our IDs and they let us through, and we started the long walk from Thirty-Fourth Street toward Houston Street.

Walking downtown, we passed through throngs of people, and everybody was just looking up. Those Learjets would pass overhead but way too low, and each time, all of us just stopped and stared. Everybody was jumpy and scared. It was a terrifying sight you never wanted to see, you never wanted to experience. The soot, the smell, the smoke, and the horror. Everybody’s face had fear on it. And you could see it. Everybody was walking around in shock.

You had to show your ID not only to get past Thirty-Fourth but also to get past Fourteenth. Law enforcement had to be told where you were going and why you had to get down there. In fact, we had to show FCC validation so that I could get down there. And they let us go. And the closer we walked, the closer we got to downtown—Houston Street—the stronger the smell. It was something you never forget—the smell of dead bodies.

Inside the station the mood was somber, and I went straight to the studio and got on the air. I opened the mic and took calls all day—people talking, people crying, and people asking other listeners to help find their loved ones. I let anybody get on that wanted to get on. I was glad this was something I could do and glad to just be there. Other than relay emergency info, there was nothing I could do to help anyone really. But if being there made anyone at least feel a little bit normal, a little less alone, then that’s what I would do.

All of the other parts of life and career pale in moments of crisis when you’re faced with a challenge you have no clue how you’re supposed to handle. Unless you’re trained for that, there is no right or wrong thing
to do. You just have to show up, face the moment head-on, in a way that is real, and let the moment dictate what happens. There were other crises that I’d have to face, and all I could do was show up.

To be able to have a platform and use my voice that week and for a while to come, that was a privilege for me. My job was not to know everything, only to share the mic and give others their voices, too. What is it? What are we doing? I’m here, guys. What do you want to talk about? How do you feel?

After I went off the air that day, instead of going home, I talked to Monse and my show producer, Paddy Duke. The three of us decided to walk farther downtown together—as far as we could go. We wanted to feel it. Walls of buildings and barricades were plastered with
M
ISSING
P
EOPLE
posters. We stopped at the firehouse and looked at all the posters there. There was so much sadness. People’s faces, and the smell, and the soot. And the loss.

The stories of that day are endless. It was as if the whole city had suffered a death in the family. Whether you knew someone who died that day or not, everyone felt the pain.

For months after that, driving down the West Side Highway on my way to work every day, it was amazing to see that day after day, people continued to line up on the sides of the streets, applauding every time a police car or fire truck passed by, heading down to the World Trade Center. Every day the good people of New York came out in any weather to stand there—cheering and holding signs that said “Thank You.”

Thank you to the police, the firefighters, the EMTs. Thank
you.

BEYOND RADIO

2001 TO
2014

ETHER

W
hen I think back to 2002 and everything that happened in culture and media, my head fills with competing voices. These were noisy times. Technology was dramatically changing the music business. Even though Napster was found guilty for illegal use of file-sharing technology, the possibility that consumers could get their music for free and online was out there. And the industry was starting to panic. On top of that, while Twitter and Instagram were nowhere in sight, this was the beginning of social media sites like BlackPlanet and MiGente, which let users connect and share information without needing the radio. They were the precursors to sites like Myspace, where emerging artists could showcase their music without radio or record labels. This was also the year that
American Idol
debuted—with Kelly Clarkson as the first winner. So now radio’s job of breaking new artists was being shared with network television, and they had the power to engage
millions
of viewers to call in and vote.

Nobody knew where any of this was going, but those of us paying attention were very aware of the fact that we’d no longer be the only source for immediate information, no longer the only place you could hear your favorite hip-hop artist be interviewed. Now the artist would have a platform where they could speak directly to their audience, so neither would need us in same way they always had. The writing was on the wall. To stay afloat you’d have to make noise.

Entertainment in general had become noisy. Everything was epic. Like the big movies of the year Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter,
Star Wars
, and
Men in Black II
. The same was happening in hip-hop. Eminem, Missy, and Nelly all dropped huge albums that year. Eminem even went platinum in his first week, beating Snoop’s record for albums sold by a solo artist in one week.

In that noisy, competitive atmosphere, a new battle was getting under way in my business, and few people really understood the implications. The moment happened on March 14, 2002, when Jammin’ 105, the oldies station down the dial, changed formats. Power 105.1 was born. There was another hip-hop station in town, and the game was about to change. Up until that point, at Hot, we had always been able to do what we wanted. There had never been any competition. Since 1994, we’d been the only hip-hop station in the city. All of a sudden that would no longer be the case. What pissed me off about Power coming was not the threat of competition but the belief that its sole purpose was to split the hip-hop audience in two so that their sister station, the pop station Z100, could sit comfortably in the #1 slot. So the idea was not for Power to add to the vitality of hip-hop radio. Far from it. And we were prepared to fight.

We were not completely blindsided when the announcement was made. A couple of months before, an internal e-mail from Clear Channel had mistakenly ended up in the hands of Judy Ellis, our general
manager. The e-mail had outlined their plans to launch Power, and although we couldn’t stop it, Judy sure as hell wasn’t going to make it easy for them. She quickly bought the main URL addresses that listed Power 105.1 and linked them to Hot 97
.
Judy was such a G. Even today if you go to www.power105.com or www.power105.1.com, you will be greeted with the front page of the Hot 97 website.
Pretty good!

I wasn’t necessarily afraid of competition, but Clear Channel’s strategy infuriated me. The very notion that they valued their pop station more than their hip-hop station should have pissed people off, but no one seemed to care or notice. In my soul I knew this was going to ruin hip-hop radio. We could no longer take the chances we used to. We could no longer break records from new hip-hop artists because the competition would be down the dial playing a hit. We had to play smarter. For a long time we were able to keep them at bay because Power 105.1 had no history with the audience. They had no real hip-hop credibility. But then, that summer of ’02, they found their opening as the Jay Z–Nas battle began to take on epic proportions.

Let me recap how this all happened. First, when I say “battle” or others say “beef,” those words don’t even begin to capture one of the most highly publicized wars of words in hip-hop history. It had been brewing for a while. As soon as “Takeover” started circulating, everyone was wondering if Nas was going to respond. At first he didn’t. Well, not for a few months.

Nas’s career had been kind of quiet at the time, and there were definitely people that had at this point begun to write him off. It had been two years since his
Nastradamus
had come out, and the reception for that was mixed. Perhaps “Takeover” had finished him? Nope! The truth was, it did the opposite . . . It reignited him. The consensus was that it woke a sleeping giant. On December 4, 2001, Flex debuted Nas’s single “Ether”—which Nas dropped strategically on Jay’s birthday. He answered
“Takeover” directly, and people went crazy. This was arguably one of the best dis records we’d ever heard. “You a fan, a phony, a fake, a pussy, a Stan. I still whip your ass. You thirty-six in a karate class . . .”

Feeling the pressure, I’m sure, Jay responded almost within the week with “Super Ugly.” It wasn’t “Ether.” It wasn’t even “Takeover.” It felt slapped together, and people felt Jay crossed a line when he referenced having sex with the mother of Nas’s daughter:
I came in ya Bentley backseat / Skeeted in ya Jeep / Left condoms in the baby seat . . .

The war of words became painful to hear. Jay and I, without a doubt, had become friends over the years. But I was also a Nas fan.
Illmatic
was one of my favorite albums of all time. And through the years we had developed a great relationship. But now there was this war and everybody wanted blood.

When Flex debuted “Super Ugly” on the radio, he played it and “Ether” all night back-to-back over and over. The phone lines were going crazy; people were eating it up. Not only in New York, but we were getting calls from all over the country.

At this point Flex wanted to make sure that we made the most of this moment and that, as a station, we owned it: “We’re gonna bring Battle of the Beats back, Ang!!!! We’re gonna let the city decide who wins this!!! And we’re gonna do it on your show tomorrow!!”

My show? Why?! Flex said my voice was one of authority, and the contest could start at night with his show and could go into the day and end with me in the afternoons when I would announce the winner. The thought made me uncomfortable, but Flex convinced me that with Power looking to capture our audience it was important to remind people that if it happens in hip-hop, it happens here. And he reminded me if we didn’t do it, someone else would. So I agreed. Although I didn’t know how the vote was going to go, you could feel the Nas wave building.

In all this, Nas was being portrayed as the real MC, the underdog.
What I’ve noticed in our culture is that everybody roots for the underdog, myself included. The only thing about the underdog theory that bothers me is for some reason we feel the need to knock somebody down to build someone else up. In general, this is something that has always irritated the shit out of me. It’s such a terrible, dysfunctional way to treat anyone successful who comes from where we come from. I have always made it a point not to subscribe to that mentality. We should celebrate success and be inspired by it, even while we’re championing someone new. But nobody wants to hear that shit when you’re in the middle of a battle.

We sat there and hand-counted the votes until the winner was clear—sixty percent of our listeners chose “Ether” over “Super Ugly.” As much as it irritated me to hear the venom toward Jay, I agreed that “Ether” was the better of the two records. I’m literally getting ready to announce the winner when I look into the hallway of the station and see Jay Z walking into my studio. “And the winner is ‘Ether.’” I had to deliver Jay that blow while he was standing right there.

To say he was uncomfortable is an understatement. I couldn’t really figure out why he’d agreed to be interviewed in this moment. But evidently he had been under pressure. Like I said, a lot of people felt he had gone too far. Even his mother felt that way. She was the one who suggested that he apologize for getting a woman and a child involved by even mentioning them.

I can see him sitting there like it was yesterday—defeated. I had never seen him like that before. He’s somebody who’s always so big and confident. And I hated to see him down. This is a friend, and I was part of the machinery that brought him to this point.

After the interview, we walked outside the studio to talk alone. “Yo,” I said. “Are we okay?”

“Of course. I don’t blame you for this,” he said. “This was just something that you kind of got sucked into. I’m clear. It’s cool.”

I wasn’t sure if it really was, but I hoped so.

The hype of that lasted for some time, and Jay took a much-needed vacation. By the time he came back, he was ready to talk again. He walked into the studio and announced, “Hovi’s home!” We had one of our most fun interviews that day. He had shaken if off. He was back.

That was not the end of the drama, however. The competition between radio stations was about to kick into another gear. Power 105.1 began to get a little traction by going commercial free for what seemed like months. They had the massive war chest of Clear Channel to fund their launch. But they still hadn’t gained any real hip-hop credibility. In 2002 they finally found an opportunity. Nas was slated to perform at Hot 97’s Summer Jam and had something planned for Jay, still fueled by winning the battle. He was planning to hang a Jay Z look-alike doll from a noose onstage while he performed. Our program director was like, “No fucking way. We’re not hanging anyone in effigy on our stage.” She didn’t say he couldn’t dis Jay, but she just didn’t want a noose on the Summer Jam stage. Nas got pissed and didn’t show up to perform. We were all there waiting for him to close the show when people started calling us to say he’s on Power 105.1 instead, talking shit about everybody at Hot, me included.

It was supposed to be Hot 97’s biggest night of the year. But all you could hear in the Summer Jam parking lot was everyone in their cars listening to Nas on Power 105.1. This was not good. That same night I must have been on the phone with Flex for, like, three hours. What the fuck was this guy thinking? “This is after the battle, after you played the shit out of his record and I did everything I could to be fair. Nas won the fucking battle!!! What is his problem?” Apparently, Nas felt like the station in general was loyal to Jay and didn’t allow him to express himself the way he deemed to be appropriate. Hanging a noose around Jay Z’s neck in front of sixty thousand people was the expression in question.

Not only did Nas go after Hot 97, but the Power interviewer was a disgruntled ex-employee of ours, egging him on. And Nas willingly took the bait:

“I’m letting my people know why I’m not at the Summer Jam. I’ve been bamboozled, hoodwinked, and the whole nine. I was told and begged to do the Summer Jam. I was begged to come to Hot 97, ’cause I had a hot new record that nobody wanted to support except for the streets. I was told to come there and save Angie Martinez’s job. I was told to come there and help the ratings at Hot 97 by Flex and the rest of the crew over there. I’m here to let my people know, all my hip-hop community people know that I was dissed this morning by Hot 97 and told what I couldn’t do on the show. It’s really outrageous and really shows that the wrong people are in power. This hip-hop thing comes from the streets. We need our freedom . . .”

It went on. I never actually listened to the whole interview. But I heard enough to know that he was mocking the music I was making, questioning my credibility, and accusing me of being unfair. At the same time, Nas also gave validity to this competitive radio station. It was a one-two punch.

Like I said, these were noisy times. That’s something that’s been a constant in my career, my life—that I’ve always had to be aware of, that noise is just noise, good or bad. I just had to know that this was one of those times and it would pass. In these moments, I always try to get quiet and stay focused on whatever matters most in the long run. If I have a great interview and everybody’s telling me, “Wow, that’s amazing; you’re the shit,” I try to hold that middle line—“That’s really nice. Thank you.” But really, it’s just noise. They’re just excited about this one moment. It
doesn’t mean I’m straight in five years. It means I had a moment that’s noisy in a good way. And when it’s bad, that doesn’t mean you don’t feel the sting. But you feel it and then move through it.

It’s a tough lesson but a powerful one.

And fortunately for me, I was able to tune things out and be gracious about it, because I knew ultimately that Flex was going to get on the radio and handle this as only he could, and he did. Not that I agreed with everything he said all the time, but when Flex went to war on the radio, it gave me the opportunity to take the high road, to not have to defend shit. It’s like having a big brother who will do it for you. That’s what Flex was for me.

Getting quiet and falling back was not my way of not having any feelings at all. No, I hated that Nas did that. I was disappointed that he had made it personal. I would have thought we were cool enough that, if he had a problem, he would come to me first, as opposed to getting on the radio and talking shit about me.

I would never do that to you. Why the fuck would you do that to me?

Yeah, even as I detached, I was annoyed for some time. Then I got calls from magazines like
XXL
and
The Source
. My statement was simple. “Listen, I wish the best for Nas. But, you know, I wish he would have come to me.”

There was still blood in the water. People had taken sides across the industry—record reps, artists, managers, everyone. None of that really bothered me. But what did hurt was that Salaam was standing so close to Nas. He had produced songs on
Stillmatic
, the album “Ether” was on, and through the whole ordeal, he had never reached out to me to see if I was okay. Nas tried to shut my lights out, and to not hear from Salaam was like being left for dead. We’d reconnect in the future, but for the time being, I was disappointed.