The Dutch producer mostly wants to make sure everyone he knows gets treated well.
“Take good care of the people around you, take care of the people around you, take care of your friends, and always take care of your principles,” Afrojack tells Huffington Post Music Canada. “That’s the most important thing, because if you don’t, you’re a dick!”
Raised in Spijkenisse, a suburb of Rotterdam in Holland, he’s been able to take the values he grew up with on the professional road.
“The most important thing is you’re doing what makes you happy and the next day you can look at yourself in the mirror and be proud of yourself and not think, ‘yeah, I fucked that guy over, I’m an asshole,'” says the man known on his passport as Nick van de Wall. “Because you will never be happy. You will never be happy if you fuck people over, because you will know that you made yourself by fucking people over.”
While good business ethic is refreshing and important in any industry, Afrojack’s musical integrity has come under fire, mostly through a radio ad spoof where cuts of his signature repetitive bleeps are played over and over, each as a separate song.
“That’s my thing,” he argues, taking the jab in full stride.
“Some people always wear red shoes, I always put a bleep in my songs,” says Afrojack, who covered former special friend Paris Hilton’s music with his bleeps. “But you can’t just make a song and bleep it the fuck out, you need a good buildup, and the bleep has to come from an unexpected corner.”
And hey, it’s true. A signature sound is what will get you recognized at the end of the day. And it’s not like he doesn’t semi-secretly work with megastars on the side. It’s perhaps a lesser known fact that he produced “Look At Me Now” for Chris Brown, Lil Wayne and Busta Rhymes, as well as “Pon De Floor” for Major Lazer. And his latest remix had him approached by the Michael Jackson Foundation to put his touch on “Bad.”
It was both a thrilling and chilling experience.
“I was thinking, ‘Are you sure you’re talking to the right guy?’ I’ve been making music professionally for the last five years and you want me to remix the biggest legend of pop music? Yeah. It was weird and scary, but you can’t say no. If Michael Jackson were still here and he asked you to moon walk, you have to say yes.”
