When he learned that a rap and hip-hop station was finally coming to Atlanta radio, Chaka Zulu was thrilled. It was 1995, and rap and hip-hop were all the rage at skating rinks and teen clubs. But V-103, “the people’s station,” was all but ignoring a growing audience. Hot 97.5 would play all r ap and hip-hop, day and night. Zulu, who was working at the community station WRFG 89.3, convinced Hot to give him a graveyard hosting slot on the weekends. “I was doing whatever could give me an opportunity,” Zulu says, laughing. “I guess it was an internship, because I didn’t get paid.” Hot 97.5—now called Hot 107.9—celebrated its legendary First Birthday Bash 30 years ago, with The Notorious B.I.G. and Outkast in attendance. It changed the music scene in Atlanta and helped put the city on the map as a hip-hop proving ground—and in its early days, it was powered largely by young people. In fact, the city is full of well-known DJs, music industry executives, and media personalities who parlayed their internships and entry-level gigs at the station into careers in music and beyond. Chaka Zulu became a well-known music executive and artist manager. Actress and former MTV video jockey La La Anthony got her foot in the door working under Zulu in the mid-’90s. Another intern, Christopher Bridges, sweet-talked his way into hosting a late-night show in 1996, which he used to broadcast his own tracks under a stage name: Ludacris. I interned there, too, in the early 2000s, which put me on the path to becoming a music journalist. “Hot’s internship program feels like a fraternity in itself,” says Brian “B High” Hightower, who interned at the station in the late ’90s and worked there until 2020, before launching his own YouTube channel. “When you came into that radio station, you were building up networks with everybody.” The brainchild of Washington, D.C.–based Radio One (now Urban One), a Black-owned media conglomerate, Hot 97.5’s arrival in the summer of 1995 was prescient. The children of the civil rights generation were forming their own cultural identity, largely through hip-hop. That meant that locally, Jermaine Dupri’s So So Def Records held as much cultural cachet as Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As a new station breaking into the competitive Atlanta market, Hot 97.5 had few resources, so it relied on unpaid interns and low-wage workers, all of us music-obsessed and under 25. Some were college students earning credits; others were chasing a dream. Chris “Ludacris” Bridges (left) and his longtime manager Chaka Zulu. They met as Hot 97.5 interns in the late ’90s and have been close collaborators ever since.Photograph by Prince Williams/WireImage Christopher “Ludacris” Bridges, who was attending Georgia State University, spent two months trying to get inside Hot 97.5. “I would go to the front desk every two days, and they were always like, We’re not looking for an intern. We don’t need anybody,” Bridges recalls. He persisted until luck turned in his favor. “I guess somebody got fired, and they allowed me the opportunity to come up there, and the rest is kind of history.” Bridges’s “internship” eventually became an unpaid gig hosting a nighttime show under the moniker DJ Chris Lova Lova with fellow DJ Poon Daddy. But Luda had bigger plans: He used the gig as a covert way to get his music played on the radio. After Bridges met Zulu at Hot and hired him as his manager, they used industry connections from the station to produce and independently release Ludacris’s debut album, Incognegro, in the summer of 2000. “Ludacris was a blessing and curse at the same time,” Jerry Smokin’ B., former Hot 97.5 program director and Atlanta radio legend, told the podcast Atlanta Is . . . , which covered the station in one of its first episodes. (Full disclosure: I helped produce the podcast.) “The curse is, every intern who comes through the radio station now wants to take this huge leap and in a couple of weeks become this big superstar.” The summer that Ludacris left to become a Grammy-winning rap legend was my first year at Hot. I interned there for three summers, bouncing between the promotions and programming departments and doing everything from hanging posters outside of nightclubs to editing request-line phone calls to be aired. Interns didn’t get paid, but for us, the work was the perk: access to private music industry parties and Hot’s annual Birthday Bash. I didn’t enter a career in radio, but I did meet people who introduced me to Munson Steed of Rolling Out magazine, which led to my first writing opportunities. Brandon “Trendsetter Sense” Douglas interned at Hot in the early 2000s. He’s now back at the station as the host of “Chosen Journey,” a Christian rap show that airs Sunday mornings.Photograph by Paras Griffin/Getty Images “Interning there, you just felt a certain synergy,” says Brandon “Trendsetter Sense” Douglas, an early-2000s intern who returned two decades later to host a Sunday morning Christian rap show at Hot 107.9. “I just think it was a centralized location for the culture and the community.” Douglas, who heard about Hot 97.5 when he arrived at Clark Atlanta University from Philadelphia in 1996, initially thought the new station was an expansion of the New York rap powerhouse station Hot 97 FM. “But [Atlanta] had DJs like Mars, Emperor Searcy, and Nabs doing mixshows,” Douglas says. “I got to hear what Atlanta and Southern culture was all about.” After interning at the station, Douglas and fellow Philadelphian CAU students DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon secured a slot hosting the radio show Gangsta Grillz, which later became their culture-changing mixtape franchise. Shyneka Maxwell—now better known as Mz Shyneka, host of a morning show over at Streetz 94.5—applied to be an intern at Hot while a senior in high school but didn’t get a call back. But she had a connection with the station’s DJ Kay Slay, which led to an interview. “I don’t really think that anybody knew what they were doing, honestly,” says Maxwell, laughing. “The FCC must not have been involved yet, because they were definitely playing the raw and uncut versions [of songs].” In November 2001, Hot moved its frequency to 107.9, which gave it a stronger signal. Though it has stayed in lockstep with the trends of hip-hop, streaming and competition from other stations have eaten into its popularity: Hot now ranks 16th in the Nielsen ratings for Atlanta listenership, dwarfed by Majic 107.5 and its old rival V-103. But it shaped Atlanta’s hip-hop scene forever—just as it shaped those of us who worked there. As for the most famous intern among us, Ludacris never stopped loving Hot 97.5, the scrappy station that gave him his start. “People ask me, if I wasn’t the rapper that I am today, what would I be doing,” he says. “I always say I would definitely be working at the radio station.” This article appears in our August 2026 issue. The post The radio station Ludacris helped build appeared first on Atlanta Magazine. ...read more read less