Freestyle Legend Debbie Deb Discusses Being Sampled By Kendrick Lamar

Last Friday, Deborah Wesoff-Lopez-Kowalski, better known to fans of freestyle music as Debbie Deb, received a phone call from her son. His wife was going into labor with Debbie’s granddaughter, but that’s not why he was blowing up her line.

“Mom, Kendrick just released a song,” he said. “You’re all over it!”

He was talking about “squabble up,” a gleefully confrontational standout off Kendrick Lamar’s surprise-released sixth studio album, GNX. The track samples Debbie Deb’s 1983 club smash “When I Hear Music,” one of two undisputed classics the singer released four decades ago, when she was a Miami teenager who somehow lucked into a recording career.

The other is 1984’s “Lookout Weekend,” and together, these singles helped to lay the groundwork for freestyle, sometimes called Latin freestyle, a genre that pairs bumping electro beats with spooky minor-key synth flourishes and wonderfully overwrought lyrics about finding and losing love, often in the club. Freestyle thrived from the mid-’80s to the early ’90s, when house and hip-hop stole its thunder, but the music remains imprinted on the souls of those fortunate enough to have grow up during its heyday.

Over the years, artists like Janet Jackson and Black Eyed Peas have reworked Debbie’s jams, but this Kendrick thing hit different.

“I freaking love the song!” Debbie says of “squabble up.” “And not for nothing, I’m into hard rock. Korn. That’s my jam. That’s pretty much all I listen to. But I do love Kendrick Lamar’s stuff.”

Debbie was more of a hip-hop and R&B girl back in the early ’80s, when she was a student at North Miami Beach High School. A huge fan of rap pioneers like Run–DMC and LL COOL J, she worked at the record store chain Peaches, which is how she met Pretty Tony Butler, a local DJ-turned-producer who’d come in to buy the latest singles out of New York City. One day, Tony complimented Debbie on her speaking voice, which somehow betrayed the fact she was born in Brooklyn, even though she’d lived her whole life in Miami.

“He’s like, ‘Can you sing?’” Debbie says. “I said, ‘Truthfully, I don’t sing bad, but I don’t sing great either.’ He’s like, ‘Well, just come to the studio. I’ve got some good music that I need some lyrics written to, and let me see what you can do with it.’ And I’m like, ‘Sure, I’m down for it.’”

According to Debbie, Butler played her the backing track for the song that would become “When I Hear Music” and tasked her with writing lyrics. Moved by the crisp, thumping beat and eerie keyboard riff, she composed a song about a young woman venturing into a nightclub and getting lost in a scene she doesn’t quite understand. Embedded in her spare lyricism are lust, excitement, and a hint of trepidation—the mix of emotions a 17-year-old girl might be feeling. Her guileless vocal performance is just as convincing.

Went to the disco, couldn’t believe my eyes
I looked on the dance floor, saw so many guys
I asked myself, “could this really be?”
Whether it is or not, I’m going to see

“When I Hear Music” took off in the clubs, and the following year’s “Lookout Weekend” offered more of the same, with Debbie delivering a young working girl’s anthem. Her job sucks, but at least she can fantasize about Saturday night, when the “jumping music” and “slick DJs” will make it all worthwhile.

I work hard, everyday
It’s all work, there’s no play
With the boss on my back
He don’t give me any slack
I sit down, I daydream
Of how my weekend’s gonna be, be, be…

“When I did those songs, I was so young, so innocent, and it was so real and so raw,” Debbie says. “Nothing was planned. It just happened so naturally. I never wanted to be a singer.”

Debbie agreed to record the songs for $100 each and didn’t think to ask for songwriting credits. Tony Butler has maintained in interviews that he wrote the lyrics, and the songs are credited solely to him.

With the success of “When I Hear Music” and “Lookout Weekend” came opportunities to perform the songs live. Debbie says she was overweight and terrified of singing on stage, and she’d never signed up to be the next Madonna. The label, Jam Packed, had a way around this.

“They had this blonde chick go out and do shows as me because nobody knew what I looked like,” Debbie says. “You can get away with it at the time. That’s when the industry totally soured me.”

The fake Debbie even recorded a pair of songs, “I’m Searchin’” and “Fantasy,” boilerplate freestyle tunes that fail to conjure Deb’s early magic. All of this went down years before similar imposter scandals involving Milli Vanilli and C+C Music Factory.

Soon after, Debbie left the music business entirely and moved to Pennsylvania to be a hairdresser. One of her clients was an attorney who, upon hearing she was 17 when she made her initial deal, suggested she sue for some of the money she claimed she was owed. Debbie settled out of court for a “minimum sum.”

“I think I bought a car maybe with it,” she says. “Nothing of the severity of how worldwide [‘When I Hear Music’] is now.”

Given what she’s been through, Debbie says she’s “not affected” by the music industry. Although she returned with a full-length album, She’s Back, in 1995 (check out her choice cover of Connie’s freestyle gem “Funky Little Beat”) and later began playing freestyle package shows for diehard fans unable to forget the songs that soundtracked their adolescent longings, she’s got nothing resembling an ego.

“I can go to a bar and sit and talk to anybody,” says Debbie, who now creates art and jewelry in New Port Richey, Florida. “I’m not a diva. I don’t even have a fucking rider when I go do [shows]. I’m probably the easiest artist every promoter says they’ve ever worked with. I’m just very laid back. I think I’m probably a little too laid back. I should be more of a bitch [laughs].”

It remains to be seen how the Kendrick sample will change her situation. When Janet Jackson covered “Lookout Weekend” in 2006, Debbie earned some extra royalties from people downloading the original, but there was no major payday, and there might not be this time, either.

“I am going to talk to a lawyer and just see if I have anything to stand on,” Debbie says. “I’m not asking for everything, but I feel I should be given something.”

Debbie’s social media has been going crazy since “squabble up” dropped, and she even wonders if she might hear from Kendrick himself.

“I think that would be so amazing if there was some justice for me,” Debbie says. “Just so I can say, ‘Yeah, I feel good now about it.’ Because I always felt like I’ve had a raw deal with it, and I’ve come to accept it. We’ll see. I hope that [Kendrick] hears me. I hope that he realizes what happened to me, and he’s got some heart about it, and he realizes, Damn, she was robbed. That bitch was robbed.”

“And if he doesn’t, then that’s all good,” Debbie adds. “I’m going to be fine either way.”