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Everything is still too surreal for Nicholas "Aqua" McCarrell. Just two years ago he was an intern at MTV News, making BETA tape copies of news footage and transcribing interviews with artists such as Jay-Z. This year, he helped Jay make The Black Album.
"Yeah, sometimes I think I'm on 'Punk'd,' " Aqua said last week in his old stomping ground, the MTV News room in New York. "MTV was a great way for me to decide what I wanted to do. It shows you a lot of different perspectives of the music industry and it made me realize I didn't want to be involved in the corporate ladder and sit behind a desk all day."
The 21-year-old still can't believe how his life is turning out. After his internship ended in August 2001, Nick, who's gone by the name "Aqua" since he was in ninth grade, returned to his hometown of Los Angeles, where he realigned with his childhood friend and Capitol Records A&R man Joe "3H" Weinberger. 3H shares production credit with his friend and brokered the deal for Aqua's beat to surface on The Black Album, on the track "My 1st Song."
"We'd been doing lots of money-making ventures all throughout high school, from party-throwing to concerts to things I can't even talk about on the record," Aqua explained about his beatmaking origins. "But I started out DJing and then I realized that spinning the records was not really where you generate the most income. I figured I wanted to be the guy who made the beat on the record that's being spun."
Aqua compiled his first beat CD in January 2002 and started to generate a buzz in the industry, especially in the Roc-A-Fella camp. A friendship was fostered with track guru Kanye West, and Beanie Sigel rapped on a bunch of Aqua tracks. Even though those records have yet to be released, Roc A&R rep Joshua "Hip Hop" Kyambo kept Aqua's craftsmanship in mind when it was time for Jay-Z to work on The Black Album.
"I get a call from Hip Hop and he was like, 'Have Aqua go to the studio right now and track [the beat],' " 3H remembered about the nod he got four months ago.
"It didn't hit me at all," Aqua said about his excitement at the prospect of his record making the cut. "I just kept living as normal." He did have a slew of other projects in the interim, like producing records for DJ Whoo Kid's upcoming compilation album, which will feature guest appearances by everyone from the G-Unit to Missy Elliott to Beanie Sigel.
Reality set in over the summer when Aqua had the chance to meet the Jiggaman right before Jay got onstage in Vegas during the Rock the Mic Tour.
"We had a cool 10-minute conversation about the music and where he wanted to go with the song and different things he was trying out," Aqua said. "It was a deep creative talk. I was so impressed by the way he spoke to me, like there was nothing condescending about it. I mean, I'm a 21-year-old white kid, I have red hair, I don't really look like your typical hip-hop producer, so most of the time people might laugh, think I'm a runner, ask me to go get them coffee.
"One of the coolest parts about [the song] it is that it's entitled: 'My 1st Song,' " Aqua continued. "There's a lot of underlying symbolic meaning going on."
"That's actually the last song on the album, but it's really the first song," Jay clarified further. "It's about having the same focus throughout your whole career, about me treating my first song like my last and my last song like my first."
You can say that musicmaking is in Aqua's blood. His father, Ron McCarrell, worked in Marketing and A&R on such albums as Michael Jackson's Thriller. Besides working with rappers, Aqua also scores music for the "The George Lopez Show."
— by Shaheem Reid, with reporting by Rahman Dukes and Curtis Waller
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Photo: MTV News
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