At the album listening party for his latest album, Skales told notjustOk.tv invariably that he has the biggest ‘grass to grace’ story. The declaration is not completely apt, but it still manages to get Skales’ point across without blurring the details of what we already know about him.

To recap, Skales had been in the same forward thinking class as Wizkid earlier in his career. But the inability of his label at the time, EME, to squeeze radio hits out of Skales led him through a series of sound shifts from his initial style as a rapper and eventually out of the label. By his exit from EME in 2014, and against the backdrop of a Wizkid soaring exponentially career-wise, Skales became the butt of social media jokes and comparisons with contemporaries who had all seemingly surpassed him.

Though Skales soon got snagged by Baseline Music, who have since managed his career since in the same year, the lowest point of his career came a year later, following a public war of words with Wizkid via Twitter.

Negative as it sounds now, the public’s focus on all the things Skales was not doing right in comparison to Wizkid did one thing for him though: it kept him in conversations. And as luck would have it, Skales finally struck gold with “Shake Body” the lead single off his Man of The Year debut album in 2014. It took nearly a year, but after a couple of months, “Shake Body” became big enough to be re-fixed with an alternate French version to reach Francophone markets. This marked the beginning of Skales impressive but poorly documented rise back to DJ turntables and playlists.

Though Skales’ debut, Man of The Year, was all-around a mediocre project, the fact he even has an album in the first place proved he wasn’t letting up despite the repeated jokes about his uncertain career potential. And to cap that off, Skales recently followed up his debut with a sophomore release titled The Never Say Never Guy. Though first listen reviews are still making rounds across social media, what Skales’ latest project holds true from its title, is a statement of Skales’ relentlessness against odds.

Stories like Skales’ are important to the progress of the culture because it serves as reminder for anyone willing to make it to the top, that hardwork only pays off for those who don’t give up even when the rest of the world writes them off.

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