Two years ago, Trinidadian-American Grammy-winning songwriter Angela Hunte underwent heart surgery, temporarily stalling a multi-decade career defined by commercial singing and songwriting success. It prompted deep soul-searching about her life and legacy, reinvigorating her drive to make her mark in the global entertainment industry, and catalysing her evolution as a multi-disciplinary artist.
That two years between the surgery and the launch of her new CD Mango (released in July and reviewed in the September issue of Caribbean Beat) was like a renaissance. “I began to unravel my life in a way that I had never done before. It was the beginning of the truth, the unveiling of emotions,” she declares. She determined that she needed to do things differently.
Born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian parents; raised in Barataria, Trinidad; and now a working wife and mother living in Miami, Hunte exists in two worlds efficiently and effectively — without taking on the veneer of a Naipaulian “mimic man”.
“Everywhere I go, I carry my flag with me,” she told the Trinidad Express. Quite literally, she’s worn a Trinidad & Tobago flag pin on her gowns at award shows, close to her heart — including at the Grammys in 2011, where she won Best Rap Song for “Empire State of Mind”.
For her, it’s also a symbol of Trini pride. “Even though I wasn’t born there, I was raised there,” she says. “It is my heritage. It’s the blood that flows through my veins, and I am very, very proud.”
That duality of being Caribbean and American has allowed Hunte, over time, the ability to easily move between here and there, culture and commerce. That word culture has many meanings — but for Caribbean people, it means a sense of self, a sense of heritage.
“We’ve got to bring the culture to the people, because they want it,” she told popular American radio host Ebro earlier in 2024. “When I make music for myself, it’s such a different process than when I’m in the room with other people doing it for them.”
“Drums call out to me all the time, melodies dance around me when I’m just walking down the street,” she continues. “I had no idea how to put it together, to fuse all these sounds from everywhere together, but I knew culture would play a great part in this.”
Mentorship from major music players overseas laid the foundation for her music ecosystem knowledge. Hunte began her music career writing and performing in R&B girl group 7669, releasing one album on Motown Records in 1994. Label head Jheryl Busby told her that her future lay in songwriting — not as a backhanded compliment, but as a prophetic observation.
Busby, along with super-producer Salaam Remi of Amy Winehouse and Nas fame — like Hunte, a child of the Trinidadian and Caribbean diaspora — guided her early music career, positioning her to take advantage of songwriting and publishing opportunities in the United Kingdom and Sweden.
Writing, singing, and producing electronic and pop dance hits there in the 2000s led to more opportunities back in the United States, with credits on songs by Britney Spears, Diddy, and Melanie Fiona, among others, and leading to her penning “Empire State of Mind” — the New York anthem and hit single with one billion streams, diamond-certified by the RIAA — for Jay-Z and Alicia Keys in 2009.
After that, she added Grammy- and Oscar-winning rocker Melissa Etheridge, Miley Cyrus, and Snoop Dogg (Snoop Lion at the time) to her client list. And the shifting goalposts and nearly insurmountable hurdles of the American music industry were challenges her island upbringing readied her for.
That word culture has many meanings — but for Caribbean people, it means a sense of self, a sense of heritage
Hunte asserts that she is a “genre-less writer, but a global performer”. Her two albums, R.A.W. (2017) and Mango (2024) — the latter featuring collaborations with Wyclef Jean, Fay-Ann Lyons, Yemi Alade, Tarrus Riley, and Christian Alicea — reflect a Caribbean aesthetic. The former is a reggae album, while Mango takes on the rhythms of many Afro-diasporic genres — dancehall, soca, zouk, reggaeton, hip-hop.
“You never see anybody unhappy eating a mango,” she says. “And if you show anybody a pommerac, a tamarind, they may ask, ‘What’s that?’ But if you show them a mango, everybody knows what that is. It’s global. The music on this album is global. It’s not just one genre … The resilience of a mango — if you hungry, you know if you eat a mango, you will be good. Resilience is one of those things that represents Caribbean culture and life to me. If I could call my music a fruit, that’s what it will be.”
Her forays into Carnival music — the singles “Party Done” (2015) with Machel Montano, “Like So” and “Mon Bon Ami” (2016) — showed that she was willing to innovate and bring her knowledge of the global pop music scene to move Caribbean music into a more mainstream position.
“I am a hybrid,” she explains. “I am always going to continue to bring my love of all forms of music from Trinidad & Tobago and the Caribbean. I will never stop no matter what.”
But after the effusive response to “Party Done”, the response from promoters and audiences to her work the following year was more subdued. Undeterred, she took it as a challenge to broaden her appeal in markets beyond the islands — including the United States, the largest music market in the world.
“My relationship with Trinidad & Tobago is not love-hate, but like a love-love — because love can be very dangerous too,” she says. “If things were easy, then we’d all do it. Nothing is going to be easy.”
Resilience and determination are two of Hunte’s defining characteristics. “As Caribbean people, we have this thing: no matter what we do, we go do it, and we go do it good,” she muses. It also triggered a desire to let her voice, and vision, be heard and seen in international markets — much like during her earlier songwriting career.
Her reputation as a casting director in the mid-to-late 1990s for prominent music videos by Billboard Hot 100 artists, and as an award-winning stylist for many artists, led both to opportunities to direct and an understanding of the film industry.
“I am setting off to be different from a lot of the other female directors out there,” she says of her more recent career moves into film. “I don’t think I would have incorporated my culture if I had done it [when] I was younger. I am so glad I am doing it now, because I am so much more experienced and I have a better sense of who I am, and what I want to talk about.”
Here again was the importance of mentorship early on, this time by prominent video and film director Lionel C Martin, as she helms a documentary about a steelband from the Meyer Levin School for the Performing Arts — her Brooklyn alma mater.
The film looks at the children of Caribbean parents in Flatbush, how Caribbean attitudes to parenting differ from Black American parents, and the role steelpan music and performance play — both as a social tool to keep kids out of trouble, and as a meaningful way of keeping Caribbean heritage alive in these communities. She is working towards film festival distribution in 2025.
Her now diversified career has brought her celebrity outside of music, as she also stars in a NY Emmy-nominated New York City Tourism + Conventions short documentary, NYC Local Legends: Angela Hunte in Flatbush, in which she guides viewers through the Caribbean culture, food, and life of New York.
She understands the difference between Caribbean life, Caribbean-American life, and American life; the choices parents make to avoid the dangers of big city living; and how a diasporic life is an endless opportunity to be an ambassador, a pioneer, and a “girl from Barataria” who did good, and wants to give back.