Have you ever wondered where your favorite one-hit wonders vanished to over the years? You might hear an old song you haven’t heard in ages somewhere on an old playlist and think about how you haven’t heard from the artist in forever. Why? Where did they go? Are they still making music? Did they give up their music dreams and start working a “normal” job?
This is as true in hip-hop as it is in other genres. Oftentimes, there will be a song that defines a significant chunk of your year, and you end up never hearing the voice on the track again. Here are four one-hit wonders that essentially disappeared from the spotlight just as quickly as they entered it.
Four One-Hit Wonders Who Seemingly Vanished From The Public Eye
Rob $tone
Rob $tone’s delirious, whistle-driven “Chill Bill” was inescapable the summer of 2016. The bird chirp-esque refrain glued to the brain the same way The Andy Griffith Show theme song did decades prior. Mix that with a suffocating 808 and a sticky flow, and “Chill Bill” was guaranteed to stick for years to come.
However, in terms of music, that was all we came to hear from him as an artist. Once he knocked out XXXTentacion in 2017, he basically vanished from the spotlight. Call it bad PR or just not having another song as catchy as “Chill Bill”, but he never bounced back. Nowadays, he still makes music, throwing out singles intermittently.
MIMS
“This is Why I’m Hot” was so catchy, it was almost primitive. The sparse, minimal beat left plenty of room for MIMS and his playground insults. He’s hot because he’s fly. You’re ain’t cause you not. The verses aren’t really much to write home about. But through sheer force, the repetition of “This is Why I’m Hot” was battered into our inner psyches in the ringtone era.
Ultimately, though, MIMS was relegated to one-hit wonder status. Nowadays, he works in tech after becoming increasingly jaded by the music industry.
J-Kwon
Arguably the ultimate party rap song, guaranteed to get the drinks flowing and the people jumping. People nowadays might know it best as the framework for one of the biggest pop songs of all time, Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”. He put off letting people sample “Tipsy” for years until Shaboozey, something he told Rolling Stone came from a lot of prayer. Moreover, he appreciated how the interpolation was, in his eyes, actually creative.
“Just to see what I bring to the game merge into other lanes and be super successful, I wouldn’t have signed off for anybody else,” J-Kwon said in 2024. “No one else would’ve used this because you have to go through me to even use it. You have to get the okay, the stamp, the cosign. That was just one person that I really, truly wanted to cosign. I liked how his energy was…how he was persistent about me cosigning it. I just liked everything around it. It felt really good. And I talked to God about it. He told me it was the right thing to do, and I did it.”
Skee-Lo
Skee-Lo’s “I Wish” is the kind of record you could only hear in the 90s. There’s a certain cheeriness to the record, a loose quality to its humor that allowed it to shine. People everywhere could respect and even relate to someone wishing they were just a bit taller and could have all the ladies and the nice rides. Skee-Lo was an everyman in hip-hop. But it didn’t last.
Lately, he’s still chugging along as a rapper. Back in December 2021, he sold some of his rights to the song so he could eventually buy back all of his Masters. “It was BMI performance royalties only,” Skee-Lo explained to TMZ. “On a buyback deal to fund a new album project I’m recording over the holidays to own the Masters. I still own my publishing for ‘I Wish’.”
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