ARTIST FEATURE: I AM SKIDO

LIAM EASLEY, TRUMPET ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR

Je Skido is a rapper and third-year student at Wartburg College. He has been making music since he was in high school, and will continue to do so beyond college.

Je Skido was a name given to him by a friend from Ghana, his home country, who called him “Skido.” After junior high, he kept the nickname and began to work on his ability to rap.

He would eventually develop the “Je” in his name, which means two things. Skido went to high school with a rap group called the Jay Brothers, and he adopted the name “Je” from them. However, Skido spelled it like the French pronoun for “I.” He then became Je Skido – I Am Skido.

Now that he already has a full-length album and several singles under his belt, Je Skido writes a mixture of party music and personal music, but he enjoys writing songs with meaning. Je Skido has big ambitions for his music career, but he understands what the public wants and prioritizes that over what he wants to write.

“Right now, the industry’s like, to blow up, you have to make the jams instead of the positive music,” Je Skido said. “People don’t even listen to that anymore. They like more … commercial stuff that you can sing to and party with. I don’t like writing those songs, but I like stuff that is deep.”

While he doesn’t like to write commercial music much, he intends to keep writing it until he has a larger following. Only then will he release a full album of music that has a closer meaning to him personally. Until then, Je Skido will still slip in a few “deep tracks” onto his releases so that his touch will still be there.

Je Skido understood that people enjoyed commercial music more after the release of his 2020 single “10 Piece,” which gave way to plenty of acclaim.

The transition to an audience in the United States was drastic for Je Skido. In Ghana, he would mainly write in Twi or Pidgin, but after coming to the United States, he started writing in English. The lingual transition was difficult, but he was able to conquer it.

What came next was the revision of his lyrical content, since, according to Je Skido, there are a lot of things you can write a song about here that you cannot in Ghana.

“[People] here look at things different from [Ghana],” Je Skido said. “It was a very big change to move here. … There’s some stuff that I can say [here] that I can’t say back home. … Here, there are a lot of other things you can write about. You can make a song about depression – people go through that a lot here than back home… Here, people would definitely need that song.”

Keep your eye on Je Skido’s YouTube and Spotify, since he will be releasing a new song soon titled “Influenza,” which should be out this month at the earliest. The song is finished, and Je Skido is currently working on the promotional side of it.