Eddie Martinez is an American guitarist, born and raised in New York City and of Puerto Rican ancestry, who mainly performs as a session musician.
He has recorded and toured with dozens of musicians representing numerous styles (including rock, jazz, rap, and R&B) but he is probably best known for work he did in the mid-1980s.
Those were: Riptide, Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, and then I played on David Lee Roth’s EP Crazy from the Heat, with "California Girls" and "Just a Gigolo".
"Rock Box" is commonly cited as the first rap video played on MTV, whose influence continues to reverberate today.
It was one of the six songs chosen for an AMC series Hip Hop: The Songs That Shook America, and Martinez's "distorted guitar sound that runs through the entire "Rock Box" record was one Questlove deemed the sound of the 1980s that connected Prince and Def Leppard to ... LL Cool J ... and Fat Boys’ “Jailhouse Rap.”[5] In a 2015 list of "The Top 10 Uses of Guitar in Hip-Hop," Guitar World ranked Martinez's contribution to "Rock Box" at Number One, saying "Eddie Martinez's searing lead work puts this track from the group's 1984 debut over the top—and ahead of its time.