On Tuesday at 4:10 a.m., the Kid Mero was crouched by an orange traffic barrier on a quiet Chelsea street, tagging his name with a fat marker.
It was his first day as the new morning host on the foundational rap radio station Hot 97, and he’d just trudged over from a nearby hotel, sunglasses on though the sun had yet to make an appearance. He was tired, but also frisky.
A couple of minutes later, the station’s assistant program director, Katrina Barilla, arrived to let him in the building.
“You see what I was doing when you got here?” Mero asked mischievously when everyone had made their way up to the studio. “Advertising!”
Hot 97 (WQHT-FM 97.1) is perhaps the most storied radio station in New York. Mero’s new show, “Hot 97 Mornings With Mero,” effectively replaces “Ebro in the Morning,” hosted by the Apple Music personality Ebro Darden along with Peter Rosenberg and Laura Stylez, which was canceled in December.
Mero is both a likely candidate and a risk. A flamboyantly foulmouthed podcaster and comedian with a rich vein of political agitation running through his work, he’s a graffiti writer turned Twitter comedian turned podcasting superstar turned radio novice.
His hiring was a bit of a savvy coup by Hot 97, which has been engaged in a tug of war with iHeartRadio’s Power 105.1 (WWPR-FM 105.1) for years.
In Mero — born Joel Martinez — the station both bolsters its credibility with internet-savvy listeners familiar with his rise to fame, and also restores an ineffable air of New York to the proceedings.
“It didn’t really come up in conversation like, yo, we need a guy from New York,” Mero, 42, said in an interview just after the conclusion of his first shift. “It was just like, a bonus. Like, I bought this used car. Oh, there’s a brick of cash in the trunk.”
Mero said his vocal patterns — in podcasting, and now on the radio — were influenced by radio and mixtape D.J.s like Funkmaster Flex, DJ Clue, DJ Whoo Kid and others, who specialize in ecstatic interjections and feverish enthusiasm: “All the D.J.s I used to listen to that would have crazy drops. Or like rappers with ad-libs, where the ad-lib was more important than the bars.”
That approach has brought him far — from his early work with the comedian Desus Nice, including the “Bodega Boys” podcast and the “Desus & Mero” show on Vice and Showtime, to his current “Victory Light” podcast and his role alongside the basketball legend Carmelo Anthony on the “7PM in Brooklyn” podcast.
“Hot 97 is on the bucket list of media situations,” Mero said. “Growing up on it, man. Blunt rides in the car listening to Flex. Like, bro, I remember listening to Cormega’s jacking-beats freestyle in the back of a Buick, smoking a Newport and being like, yo, this is the pinnacle of life.”
To make sure he wasn’t late for his first day at work, Mero stayed at a hotel a few blocks away, and was awaked by his publicist pounding at his door. “I showered like I was on Rikers,” he said.
Dressed in a royal-blue Awake NY track suit with matching Awake NY Jordan 5s, he took the host chair surrounded by station stalwarts — Barilla; Shani Kulture on the boards; Miabelle as a comedic foil; and DJ Kast One who, coincidentally, was a high school friend of Mero’s, when both were writing graffiti.
“We used to be like little dirtbags running around the Bronx,” Mero said, “and here we are.”
The station has been owned by Mediaco Holding Inc. since 2019. The studio — a satellite location from the company’s main offices nearby — is spartan. There’s a signed placard from Jay-Z dating back to the ’90s, and Darden’s platinum plaque for Gnarls Barkley’s “St. Elsewhere” album still hangs on a hallway wall.
Funkmaster Flex, the station’s best-known host and institutional memory, said Hot 97 is in a molting, evolutionary phase. “You can tell by the reactions, you feel something happening,” he said. “People passionate about DJ Enuff getting let go, people passionate with me saying I was gonna retire. People passionate about Ebro getting let go, and people passionate about Mero being here.”
“Radio is not dead,” he added.
Terrestrial radio is a highly regimented format — in a four-hour block of time, there was only around 30 minutes of talking, a good portion of which came from listeners calling in to congratulate Mero.
Mero had also solicited some favors, soliciting congratulatory messages from the “Saturday Night Live” star Kenan Thompson, the former Yankees and Mets pitcher Dellin Betances and the Bronx rapper French Montana.
Looking over the sheaf of papers placed in front of him with details of the show, Mero noted a theme: “All these papers say ‘Do not curse,’ bro.”
It won’t be hard, Mero said, even though ornate and lusty profanity is key to his art. He was already instinctually reshaping his material to fit the PG-13 format. Before the show started, when it became clear that there was a dearth of printer paper in the office, he recalled how when he was an aide in a Bronx school, “A ream of paper was like a brick of coke.” When he revisited the topic during his first live on-air segment, he reconfigured the thought: “I’m coming in tomorrow with a felony amount of paper. Call me the Pablo of paper.”
Conversations before he was hired did touch on the topic of Mero’s political stances. He is a vocal supporter of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and speaks out on X against the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and more.
“I was like, you know where I stand. I am who I am and I’m not changing that,” he said.
“I think that’s what they were worried about — like, is this guy gonna be unwilling to sit with certain people,” he continued, noting that sometimes morning radio hosts are thrust into political conversations. “I’m like, bro, unless you’re literally Benjamin Netanyahu, holler at me.” Donald Trump? “Come through. I’ll talk to you. I will ask you what is going on as a dude who is living in the United States of America today.”
In the wake of his show’s cancellation, Darden posted a video suggesting his own “anti-Netanyahu, anti-government, progressive” politics had been a factor in his dismissal. For his part, he posted support for Mero on X after he was announced as the new host.
“Political conversation would have never been a check box for a morning host, but it is now,” Funkmaster Flex said. “The Ebros and the Charlamagnes set the table.”
Mero spent much of his first day learning about the quirks of radio. Getting excited at the prospect of the dump button, which is used to theatrically dispatch with rowdy live callers, he asked if he could get a toilet flush sound effect and was told yes.
As his show develops its personality, tone and recurring segments, Mero wants to lean in to the station’s traditions. He said he’d been poking around in Hot 97’s online archives — on-air freestyles and also, perhaps less promisingly, “Smackfest,” a mid-2000s recurring affair that involved contestants slapping each other to win prizes. The promotion was canceled after the station was fined.
For now, he’s content to insert mischief into the room one burst at a time. When Kast One went into the adjoining studio for his live mix, Mero scribbled a sign that read “FCC violation on deck!” in all-caps and flashed it to him. When Barilla offered around gummy bears, Mero asked, “Are they infused?”
He spent much of the downtime between live hits testing out banter with callers, the morning-radio equivalent of a stand-up comedian doing crowd work. It’s a task that demands spontaneity and an at-the-ready capacity for empathy or schadenfreude, whichever might be called for.
He answered each call with gusto: “‘Hot 97 Mornings With Mero’ weekdays 6 to 10 a.m., baby. What’syournamewhereyoucallingfrommmmmm?” Most callers seemed to be from the Bronx. At one point, he played a message left for him by his daughter, Azalea, reminding him to not be late.
“I just drank a Mountain Dew to the neck,” he said around halfway through the four-hour set. He appeared to be getting looser, figuring out where the spots for improvisation were.
“This is the Google of hip-hop radio stations,” he said. “My eyes are no longer bloodshot.”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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