Skillibeng

Emwah Ryan Warmington was born on December 23, 1996, and raised in the rural community of Lyssons in Saint Thomas Parish, on Jamaica's southeastern coast. He started recording as Skillibeng around 2015, putting out his first official single, "Pain & Emotion," that October, and spent the next several years working the local mixtape and single circuit before wider recognition arrived.

Skillibeng's breakout moment came in September 2020 with "Crocodile Teeth," a raw, minimal trap-dancehall track built around slang for high-capacity gun magazines. The song crossed over commercially after Drake shouted it out on OVO Sound Radio, and it subsequently raced past 27 million YouTube views. A remix featuring Tory Lanez and later Nicki Minaj pushed the record onto the Billboard Hot 100, cementing Skillibeng as one of the faces of the emerging trap-dancehall sound alongside artists like Skeng and Rytikal.

He built on that momentum with a run of releases: the Prodigy EP (2019), the album The Prodigy (2020, which reached No. 16 on the US Current Reggae Albums chart), Crocodile Teeth LP (2021), Mr. Universe (2022 EP, later expanded into a 2024 album), and Eastsyde (2023). In October 2021 he signed a deal placing his Eastsyde Records output under RCA Records/Sony Music, and in 2022 he won Best Caribbean Music Act at the MOBO Awards. He performed at the BET Awards in 2024 and has collaborated with artists spanning dancehall and hip-hop, including Sean Paul, DJ Khaled, Popcaan, Vybz Kartel, Wizkid and Nicki Minaj.

Much of the controversy around Skillibeng has centered on lyrical content rather than personal legal trouble: songs such as "Crocodile Teeth" and "Whap Whap" were effectively frozen out of Jamaican radio and TV rotation after the Broadcasting Commission's October 2022 ban on content deemed to glorify guns, drugs and scamming. No well-documented arrests or court cases involving Skillibeng personally turned up in available research. As of 2026 he remains an active, prolific recording artist signed to RCA/Eastsyde, and is widely credited alongside Skeng and Rytikal as one of the artists who defined trap-dancehall's sound and aesthetic in the early 2020s.