Kendrick Lamar has sampled my track. I’d love to ask him if he knows my story
G
rowing up in North Miami Beach in the 1980s was a lot of fun. We might not have had TikTok, but we weren’t bored: we would ride our bikes around and blast music from our boomboxes all weekend. In my mid-teens, I did a work placement at a record store. I loved it, and became something of an expert in R&B and rap, listening to Grandmaster Flash, Run-DMC and 2 Live Crew on repeat.
One day in 1984, when I was 17, a record producer named Tony Butler – better known as “Pretty Tony” – came into the store. He heard me speak and asked me whether I wanted to make some music. I thought, “Why not?!”
Tony was well known in Miami for a new genre called freestyle – a kind of electronic music with elements of disco, funk and Latin, which was all the rage at roller discos. My voice and lyrics jived with his beats, and we made two songs that would be my first singles as Debbie Deb on Jam Packed records: When I Hear Music and Lookout Weekend. I looked up to Tony a lot – he was a fantastic producer.
