Experience: my record company replaced me with an ‘impostor’

Kendrick Lamar has sampled my track. I’d love to ask him if he knows my story Growing 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 rec...

By Deborah Wesoff-Lopez-Kowalski