Skee-lo: wished he was a little bit taller. Wished he was a baller. Born at the wrong time, he had the misfortune to be a mid-eighties party rapper in a mid-nineties world, not nearly gangsta enough to compete with the various Doggs in the marketplace of his day. The guy who lived next door to me in college used to blare, at all hours of the day and night, two albums: Dr. Dre’s The Chronic and Repeat Offender by Richard Marx. So clearly, this guy was up for anything. I never heard a peep from Skee-lo come through that wall. But if he mounted a comeback today, he’d be huge. Bigger than Clay Aiken. Any marketplace with room for multiple Hillary Duff albums has a place at the table for Skee-lo.
To me, in many respects, Skee-lo is 1995 and vice versa. The phenomenon of 90s alterna-rockers fetishizing childhood 70s nostalgia was at its apex; I have all sorts of compilation CDs from that year of bands covering cartoon theme songs, “Hong Kong Phooey” as reimagined by Sublime. Skee-lo was on the “Schoolhouse Rock” tribute album. I can hear him now, rapping, “Mister Morton is the subject of my sentence/ and what the predicate says, he does, yo.”
As legacies go, it could be worse.
Skeeball and I have a more complicated relationship. At Showbiz Pizza, I always preferred the video games, dodging bottles as a vaguely Popeye-shaped blip object or “playing” Space Ace, which is to say putting $3 in a slot to watch a five-second cartoon of a kid getting incinerated. During one visit, in a desperate attempt to sneak sports into my diet through the back door, my dad coaxed me into trying skeeball. Unfortunately, lacking any instruction or basic observational skills, I threw my first skeeball overhand like I was trying to strike out Reggie Jackson and it slammed right into the top of the machine with a loud CRACK. My dad came as close as he ever did to swearing, and my skeeball days took a hiatus until adulthood. I think the next time I tried it, I was in the Wisconsin Dells on the boardwalk, where my friends and I got our first pistol flashed at us. In general, I’m not much for skeeball.