A 16 year old Nigerian Canadian girl named Ebony Oshunrinde produced a track on Jay-Z’s new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail. Ebony, known also as Wondagurl, got the call from Jay Z after meeting one of his friends who passed her beat to the rap mogul. Ebony is credited as a producer in one of Jay Z’s songs titled ‘Crown’ in the new album. The 12th grader said “It’s a really good feeling. I want to show young people that they can do it.”
Her story is inspiring and impressive: after watching a video of Jay-Z and Timbaland working in the studio together at age 9, she began to download music software and teach herself how to use it by watching YouTube tutorials. “I wanted to do the exact same thing that [Jay-Z] did,” she recently told the Star. When she was 14, she made it to the quarter-finals of Toronto’s Battle of the Beatmakers. She won the title the following year, because she is incredible, and went on to sign an exclusive management deal with Black Box.
According to Ian Stanger, a representative with Black Box, “It’s amazing to see somebody with that much talent working as hard as she can to make the most of it at such a young age. It’s her work that people should be paying attention to, not the fact that’s she 16.”
And her work is exactly what people have started to pay attention to. Earlier this year, Oshunrinde sent the beat to her friend Travis Scott, a young rapper and producer. He happened to be in the studio with Jay-Z when he received it – and when he told her that the cut had made it to the album, she thought he was joking.
“Usually that kind of thing doesn’t happen to 16-year-olds,” she explains. No, Ebony, it usually does not.
It was her work on “Uptown” that caught Hov’s ear and he snapped up the hazy, loping trap beat that WondaGurl programmed for “Crown,” which sits alongside production by Scott, The-Dream, Boi 1da, Pharell Williams, Hit-Boy, Mike WiLL, and her first hero, Timbaland, among others.
“I made a beat and sent it to Travi$ Scott and he said he was gonna do some stuff with it,” Oshunrinde recalls. “A few days later he texted me and said he was about to change my life but he wouldn’t tell me what he was talking about. Then he called me and told me I was officially on Jay-Z’s album.”
Oshunrinde says that, as a fan of Jay-Z and the people involved on the record, the placement means a lot to her. She had no real intention when making the beat; she had a sample for Sizzla’s “Solid As A Rock” and applied it to her aesthetic, which she describes as “trap/hip-hop-type beats but, like, hard.”
“A lot of people are making trap and it’s,like a little bit of that with real hip-hop mixed into one beat,” she elaborates.
Has she spent much time listening to the much-discussed production on “Yeezus” by Kanye West? Does she look up to him, as an artist and producer?
“It’s really different; I like it though,” she says. “As a producer yes, but not so much as an artist. I want to work with him, though,” WondaGurl catches herself.
All of this stems from a childhood spent watching YouTube videos of Timbaland working in the studio. In fact, Oshunrinde says her entire musical education derives from watching YouTube and just trying things out on keyboards and computers supplied by her aunt and other family members, who have been very supportive of her dreams (“I want to win a Grammy,” she says in a matter-of-fact way).
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