Everybody loves an underdog. So what happened to Skee-Lo?

He started life as Antoine Roundtree, supposedly picking up his eventual stage name as a kid because of his skill at the game of skee-ball. His family originally lived in New York and Chicago, where he started rapping at a very young age, influenced by the first wave of East Coast rappers, and he took those rhyming ambitions with him when his family moved out to California in the early 80’s.

By the early 90’s, Skee-Lo was in the studio recording songs and out on the street trying to find a record deal. He submitted demos to every label and every one of them rejected him. Gangsta rap ruled the airwaves at the time with profanity-laced lyrics about guns, girls and gangs — these were real life issues for many rappers, but Skee-Lo kept it clean and rapped about what he knew, which wasn’t that triple-G lifestyle. Eventually, he got a track played on a popular Los Angeles radio show called “Five Minutes of Fame,” and this led to one of the labels that rejected him…unrejecting him.

With financial backing now in place, Skee-Lo went back into the studio and smartly sampled a section of a little-known song called “Spinnin’,” by early 80’s funk keyboardist Bernard Wright, which served as the basis for an upbeat, slice of life track about living in L.A. as Skee-Lo. Released as a single in the spring of 1995, “I Wish” — a humorous, self-deprecating song which defied the current hip-hop trends — burst forth from the radio and onto the charts, peaking just outside the Top 10 in the US.

Unfortunately, Skee-Lo and his record company entered into a dispute (as is often the case) and, like Prince and George Michael before him, Skee-Lo refused to make new music rather than let the record company make another dime off of him. It took another five years before he would return with another album, but by that time the audience already thought of him as a one-hit wonder, and it’s difficult to shift public perception. Momentum holds great importance in the music biz, as it does in skee-ball — if you’re not rolling forwards, you’re rolling backwards.

So tell ’em, “Scat, skittle, sca-bobble.” Go simple, go easy, go Greyhound … with Skee-Lo.