Radio Veteran Angie Martinez Is Releasing a Memoir

Angie Martinez, radio pioneer and host of New York’s Hot 97, is ready to tell all in a new memoir detailing her triumphant 20-year career in hip-hop. Starting as an intern, Martinez hastily carved a name for herself with a highly sought out segment called “Battle of the Beats,” which provided platforms for artists such as Jay Z. The radio personality’s enthusiasm and candor allowed her the unique opportunity to sit with some of hip-hop’s greatest for some of the most interesting celebrity revelations.

Not to mention, her personal relationships with the music heavyweights enabled the journalist to mediate controversial beefs in hip-hop including the infamous riff between R. Kelly and Jay Z and the late Tupac and Biggie Smalls. In fact, Angie boasts about an unreleased two-hour interview with the slain Cali rapper coming at the peak of the East Coast/West Coast rivalry. She initially only aired 12 minutes of the two-hour interview.

In a recent interview with People, Martinez stated that [Tupac] was “charming and amazing, but he was also angry at certain people. And aggressive. I just felt that the time was so sensitive that some of the things he said would have made the situation worse. He felt like he had been done wrong. He was on a mission. He had an agenda about what he wanted to say, what people wanted to know, and he was very aggressive and poetic.” In her memoir, My Voice — set to hit shelves on May 17 — she also discusses her last days at Hot 97 and her unprecedeneted move to Power 105.1.

She also spoke on Rap Radar’s podcast about receiving many personal anecdotes from colleagues and friends, but once she saw what J. Cole wrote, she knew why his statement made a perfect foreword: “What he says it’s so — I can’t even read it to somebody without getting choked up. Like dope like that. He just f**king nailed it because it’s not just about me, but people like me and our careers and what this game means to us and just hip-hop in general. He’s just poetic with it. He hadn’t even read the book yet and he just wrote the perfect foreword for what my conversation was… I’m so grateful for his presence in the game.”

Preorder the book here.

(Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Roc Nation Sports)