"I Wish" — Skee-Lo

Skee-Lo was born Antoine Roundtree in Chicago, moved with his family to Poughkeepsie and then to Riverside, California, when he was nine, and worked his way into the Los Angeles scene in the early 90s. "I Wish" was released on April 10, 1995, on Scotti Brothers Records as the lead single from his debut album of the same name, recorded at Sunshine Studios in Hollywood and produced by Walter "Kandor" Kahn with Skee-Lo himself. Most of the instrumentation is sampled from Bernard Wright's "Spinnin'," with a crowd-shouting vocal sample lifted from Malcolm McLaren's "Buffalo Gals."

The hook was the whole joke and the whole appeal. Skee-Lo wishes he were taller ("like 6'9"), wishes he were a baller, wishes he had a girl who looked good and a '64 Impala instead of his 1974 Ford Pinto with an 8-track and a flat spare tire in the back. In the year of Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise," a rapper listing his own shortcomings was a novelty, and radio loved it. The single peaked at number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, went gold, and reached the top ten in Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. The Marty Thomas-directed video, out the week of May 14, 1995, picked up three Billboard Music Video Award nominations.

"I Wish" was nominated for Best Rap Solo Performance at the 1996 Grammys and lost, fittingly, to "Gangsta's Paradise." Skee-Lo quietly stepped away from rap not long after, which made the song a textbook one-hit wonder, and it has lived on that way: Blender ranked it number 359 on its "500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born," and thirty years on, everyone still knows that the Impala is a '64.