Radio personality. Rapper. Businesswoman.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of who P La Cangri is.
Growing up in New York and Puerto Rico as the daughter of a Cuban family, P has woven many cultural influences into her style.
“Puerto Rico is a huge hub of Latin Music and reggaeton and everything that is Latin Hip Hop,” she explains in a phone conversation with HipHopDX, “and having the background and the grittiness of being raised in New York, it’s a great cohesiveness. It just adds to the music to have that New York thing and that Puerto Rican swag.”
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She was given the title “La Jefa Del Bloke” when she joined Miami’s El Bloke Radio in 2014. As soon as she hit the airwaves, she had the highest-rated show, truly living up to her name.
One of her major interviews was with Wack 100 after he punched Stitches in Miami during his beef with The Game. She connected with Wack through a series of mutual friends on the West Coast and the interview was posted to WorldStarHipHop, where it now has more than 600,000 views.
“It was huge for me. It put me in a whole different place,” she says of the attention that the interview received.
She is hesitant to celebrate freely because of the fierce criticism in the comments section on WorldStar.
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“Somebody put, ‘Oh my gosh, she must be ugly.’ Who says that?” she says. “Someone said, ‘Obviously, she’s not a Harvard graduate,’ like I sounded stupid. I was like, ‘C’mon, man, this is an interview. It’s not that serious. It’s not like I’m running for presidency of the United States.’”
Despite all of it, P brushes off the negativy. She knows with the nature of the industry, she did the best job possible and is proud of her work.
“Sometimes when that interview comes, you don’t have the time to say, ‘Hey, hold on, let me call you back. Let me get a better line. Can we do this tomorrow?’” P continues. “It wasn’t that type of moment where I could have said, ‘Hey.’ So I took it for what it was. It was an interview, nobody else was able to achieve the interview but me. Ok, it was rushed, maybe it wasn’t the best sounding, but it was big. And Wack is nothing but a gentleman I love him to death.”
P describes herself as a jokester and “completely insane,” explaining how El Bloke Radio isn’t censored, which allows her to have fun on air. On the same episode as the Wack interview, she asked if Stitches was sorry for his antics before playing Justin Bieber’s “Sorry.” On a more recent episode, she played Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” while joking about his recent sex tape scandal.
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“You can either be serious all the time and freeze up when things don’t go your way or kind of be insane and work it out, so I’d rather be insane,” she says of her personality and view on life.
And it has gotten her far as she’s been able to pursue a dream that her grandmother wasn’t able to.
“She wanted to be a singer,” P says as she reflects on what an incredible woman — and cook — her grandmother was. “That’s what she aspired to be, but because she had to raise a family, she took the back road and worked and wasn’t able to pursue her dream, so I picked up a lot of her influences, a lot of her singing and a lot of her voice. We have similar voices. So I guess I’m living the dream that she wasn’t able to live. She’s my biggest influence.”
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After pounding the pavement for some years, including releasing the single “Si Lo Quieres” with her artist Sotto, P signed a distribution deal with Empire last year for her label, Gutierrez Enterprises. The company’s first single, which P calls a “tester,” was “Dale Activate.” It already has solid momentum and was actually the source of her stage name (her birth name is a secret).
She was working with Puerto Rican producer Timelezz on the song when he commented, “Eres una Cangri, P,” referring to the Puerto Rican slang for an important person based on the word for Congressman.
“I said, ‘Huh? Isn’t Daddy Yankee el Cangri?'” she recalls. “He said, ‘Yes and you are La Cangri you have that presence.'”
And now the signature line she sings is “Yo soy una Cangri. Pa tienes que verlo” (which she says translates to “I am a Cangri, baby boy, you have to see it”).
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“Dale Activate” is just the beginning for Gutierrez Enterprises as P is seeing more and more opportunities come up through the distribution deal.
“I’m super, super excited,” she says. “It’s crazy. You dream of these things. Something so simple as having a distribution deal, people now pick up the phone more. It opens up the door to be able to talk to people like you. I was always taken seriously, but now I’m taken even more seriously now. ‘She’s with Empire, so let’s see what she needs or what she wants. How can we help?’”
P credits her whole team for helping build the label. She surrounds herself with people who have a vision bigger than themselves, including her manager, Domingo Cesar, and her artist, Sotto.
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“I saw a male clone of myself,” she boasts about Sotto. “He doesn’t sleep. He’s up at five in the morning with some incredible idea. He does everything. He’ll edit videos. He’ll do artwork. He’ll write. He’ll produce. There’s always an idea. What I like about Sotto, what I like about our company, it’s more like a family. It is a label, but it’s family-oriented meaning that Sotto is a part as well as my manager, Domingo Cesar. And we all wear different hats. And Sotto is a person who’s up 24 hours a day, seven days a week just living and breathing music and every aspect of how not only to make his career better, but how to better my career and also move the label forward because it’s for the benefit of all. And that’s what I saw in Sotto. That he’s a complete team player. And talented.”
As a woman, P has faced extra challenges that the men surrounding her haven’t had to deal with. She explains how hard it is for women to establish business relationships when sexual advances are rampant.
“That’s been one of the most difficult things and learning how to deal with men with finesse and still have them on your team helping you move your career and move your music forward without having to compromise your dignity,” she says. “I think there’s a way of handling this without offending anybody or having to do what some women choose to do and that’s their issue. The problem that I run into is you go into a meeting and you’re meeting with someone and you’re having this incredible meeting about music and all of a sudden, it turns into some kind of sexual thing that wasn’t part of the conversation. And then you get aggravated and you look for blame in the man because he came on to you, but that man is letting you know that there has been 10 other women before me that have slept with him or have done something compromising. So I’m the weirdo because I won’t. It’s not that I’m a weirdo. It’s that like I said, I don’t choose to exchange my dignity for a contract or for money.”
But she hasn’t let the frustrations faze her as she continues to cross goals off her list of dreams. Gutierrez Enterprises is now registered with the Latin Recording Academy to submit its music for the Latin Grammys. And P is a member of the Latin Grammys as well. She has her eyes set now on getting a nomination for her music, hopefully with a new song she plans to release in March called “Acelera.”
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“Acelera” made its debut at a recent awards show in Brooklyn where the event coordinator was surprised P showed up, which had the rapper scratching her head, but gave her extra motivation to wow with her performance.
“I’m sitting at the bar with my manager we’re having — I’m a Johnnie Walker Blue girl — we’re drinking blue label and he says, ‘Perform and let’s get it over with,’” she explains as she sets the scene. “And I said, ‘Ok let’s do that new song called “Acelera,” which isn’t out yet.’ And it became a complete rave. It was crazy. I shut it down. I dropped the mic. It was crazy. One song.”
She describes “Acelera” as a trap song with a theme similar to that of Fast and Furious, all about having fun.
As P reflects on all of her accomplishments so far, she is proud of the work she has done and hopes to serve as a role model for other women trying to make it in the music industry. She knows her mission is about something greater than herself and knows there’s so much more to come.
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“It means the world to me,” she says of everything. “It means that I haven’t been living my life in vain. It also means that what my parents dreamed of coming to this country for a better future, if you work hard you can attain it. I’m achieving it. I’m living it. And the best message I guess, every time I achieve something I usually tweet or I put something, I say, ‘Ladies, if I can do it, you can do it. Work hard. Have incredible work ethic. Believe in yourself. When someone says no, just get up and keep it going.’ To say that I’m a member of the Latin Grammys, that’s insane. Everyone said that I couldn’t get a distribution deal. That I had to have a million sales, that I had to be as huge as J-Lo. No, I have talent and I’m intelligent. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t give it to me. The only reason I don’t have a million sales is because I don’t have the proper exposure, but if I did, I’d be just equally the same. Now I have the platform to do it, so it’s incredible to be able to help other artists. Sotto’s all the way in Colombia. He’s coming here this year to finish recording his album and to be able to take artists that possibly never dreamt of traveling or doing something and maybe to mentor another woman to do the same thing that I’ve done. Those are the things that I look forward to.”
