Hot 97, championed the sound to its heavily suburban and white, working-class listenership, a pivotal first step in delivering Puerto Rican-accented acts like TKA and the Cover Girls to unlikely national chart success. Along with Shannon (“Let the Music Play”), Nayobe (“Please Don’t Go”), and Exposé (“Point of No Return”), Brenda K. Starr had been among the first wave of acts to break the genre onto the charts with 1985’s “Pickin’ Up Pieces.” Starr was the daughter of Harvey Kaye, co-founder of the Spiral Starecase, the California rock band known for their 1969 hit “More Than Yesterday,” but she’d grown up in a Manhattan housing project with her Puerto Rican mother. She was the exact sort of artist Sal Abbatiello had in mind when marketing the music his DJs played at the Devil’s Nest as “Latin hip- hop”: young, Latina, and streetwise, but with cross-cultural appeal. In 1987, Starr, who’d jumped from Jerry Greenberg’s indie Mirage Records to a deal with MCA, was crossing over from dance to the pop charts with “I Still Believe,” a ballad produced by Deodato, and she was putting together a band to perform the single on tour. An eighteen-year-old Mariah, only a few months removed from the parking lots of Long Island, was nevertheless thrilled when Tony
One of those sessions—with the band Maggie’s Dream, fronted by a then-unknown Lenny Kravitz—opened the door to Mariah’s first major break: singing backup for Brenda K. Starr. I STILL BELIEVE If one were to visit any mall, roller rink, or other teen hangout on Long Island during Mariah Carey’s senior year of high school in 1986-87, the sound they’d most likely hear coming from the Camaro IROC-Zs in the parking lot would be the 808 thump and languorous vocals of Latin freestyle, or simply freestyle, as the young genre was becoming known. Freestyle had developed from electro, and crystallized inside New York City nightclubs like the Funhouse and Devils Nest, guided by a set of largely second-generation Latin- American producers, DJs, and artists. (Sal Abbatiello, the Italian- American owner of the Devil’s Nest and Fever nightclubs, as well as Fever Records, marketed the genre early on as “Latin hip-hop”). WQHT, a few years before its move down the dial from 103.5 to 97.1 and eventual metamorphosis into the hip-hop juggernaut
100 WaxPoetics
( top ) Mariah Carey with Ben Margulies (at left), Clarissa Dane, and Chris Toland (at right) in the 1980s. Photo courtesy of Chris Toland.
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