Skillibeng and Skeng Both Got the Nicki Minaj Call

Skillibeng got the call in May 2021. Skeng got his in August 2022. Nicki Minaj reached into Jamaican dancehall twice in the space of fifteen months and pulled out two artists whose paths had been running in near-perfect parallel, giving each of them their first entry on a US Billboard chart and, in the process, confirming something the Kingston music scene already knew: a new generation of dancehall had arrived, and it sounded like nothing that had come before.

The two artists share a template. Both came up through the traphall wave, the sub-genre that fuses traditional dancehall riddims with the darker, slower cadences of American trap. Both broke through on a single track that spread virally before any major label infrastructure was in place. And both found themselves, within a year of each other, on the receiving end of a Nicki Minaj verse that introduced their sound to an audience that had never heard a Jamaican deejay rap over a beat like that.

Skillibeng, born Emwah Ryan Warmington in St. Thomas Parish, Jamaica, made his first serious noise in late 2019 with "Brik Pan Brik," released via local label Claims Records. The track fused a syncopated dancehall rhythm with sharp trap drums and dramatic strings, and its subject matter, stacking cash in a country where scamming had become a national news story, gave it an edge that made it impossible to ignore. By 2020, he had released "Crocodile Teeth," produced by Johnny Wonder and Andreas "Adde Instrumentals" Nilsson, a gunplay track whose hook lodged itself in the ear of every dancehall listener from Port Antonio to Peckham. The song's crossover potential was apparent from the start. When Nicki Minaj added a remix to the re-release of her 2009 mixtape "Beam Me Up Scotty" on May 14, 2021, the track debuted at No. 100 on the Billboard Hot 100, Skillibeng's first US chart entry. It trended at No. 1 on YouTube in Jamaica for three consecutive days.

Skeng, born Kevon Douglas on February 13, 2001, in Spanish Town, St. Catherine, came up a year or two behind Skillibeng but moved fast. His breakout single "Gvnman Shift," released in 2021, established his signature: an aggressive, clipped delivery over trap-inflected production, lyrically rooted in the streets of Spanish Town. His relationship with producer Rvssian helped sharpen his sound, and by 2022 he was releasing hits in quick succession, including "Protocol" with Tommy Lee Sparta, which set streaming records in Jamaica. Then came "Likkle Miss." Originally released in early July 2022, the track caught Minaj's attention within weeks. On August 28, 2022, she added a remix to her compilation "Queen Radio: Volume 1," produced by Drop Top Records and Di Truth Records. The remix peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Song Sales chart and No. 4 on the Rap Digital Song Sales chart, giving Skeng his first US Billboard entries.

The symmetry between the two moments is striking enough to be worth examining. In both cases, Minaj did not discover the artist. She amplified someone who had already built a genuine audience at home. "Crocodile Teeth" had over 20 million YouTube views before the remix dropped. "Likkle Miss" had nearly 2.7 million views within weeks of its original release. Minaj's verse was not a rescue operation. It was a co-sign from someone who had been listening to Jamaican music long enough to know which records deserved a wider room. Her collaborations with Gyptian, Mavado, Beenie Man, and Skillibeng before Skeng are part of a consistent pattern: she treats dancehall as a peer genre, not an exotic detour.

What the Minaj co-sign did, in both cases, was compress the timeline. Skillibeng had already signed to RCA Records and his own Eastsyde Records imprint by March 2022, a deal that Billboard reported as a significant moment for dancehall's mainstream crossover. The "Crocodile Teeth" remix had been part of the evidence that made that deal possible. For Skeng, the "Likkle Miss" remix arrived at a moment when he was already being named Male Artiste of the Year by Jamaican outlets, and it pushed his profile into markets that had not yet caught up with what Kingston had been playing for months.

Skillibeng won the MOBO Award for Best Caribbean Music Act at the 25th annual ceremony in November 2022, the same year Skeng's Minaj collaboration was charting. The two artists were now operating at the same altitude, and the dancehall press was beginning to treat them as the twin faces of the traphall generation, alongside Jahshii, Silk Boss, and Intence. Skillibeng, for his part, pushed back on the traphall label in interviews, arguing that what he made was simply dancehall in evolution. "Just because these tiny little changes are being made, it doesn't mean it's not Dancehall," he told The Face in late 2022. "It's an evolution of the music."

The story has a coda that neither artist could have scripted. In December 2023, Nicki Minaj released "Pink Friday 2," and on the track "Forward From Trini," both Skillibeng and Skeng appeared together. The two artists whose parallel rises had been defined, in part, by separate Minaj collaborations ended up sharing a record with her. It is the kind of detail that, in a different genre, would be treated as a narrative arc. In dancehall, it is simply what happens when the music is good enough that the same person keeps calling.

The traphall generation did not need Nicki Minaj to validate itself. The streaming numbers, the sold-out shows, and the MOBO wins were already doing that. What the Minaj moments did was make the argument legible to an audience that processes Jamaican music through the filter of American hip-hop. Skillibeng and Skeng broke through on their own terms, in their own language, on their own riddims. The phone just rang twice.