Skilla Baby’s raps—powered by careful wisdom, hard-won perspective, and endless charisma—almost feel effortless. The combination of his searching growl, world-weary rhymes, and impeccable beat selection has catapulted him to the top of Detroit’s ever-competitive rap scene. The rising star currently has more than 57 million US streams, and his YouTube channel has a combined 42 million views. He sounds like a rapper who has been doing this his entire life. But to hear Skilla explain it, rap almost accidentally happened to him. “Where I’m from, everyone raps, but since everyone does it, it’s not that special,” he says. The teenage Skilla had no reason to believe his freestyles were any better than those of his peers. He was simply killing time until his next football practice or shootaround practice for basketball. But as he began to book studio time and release projects like 2019’s Push That Shit Out Skilla and 2021’s Standing on Business, it became abundantly clear that no one could rap the way Skilla Baby does.
Arts and Entertainment
