User:Hardhitr3/Skewby

Skewby — Cameron Drake Smith 21-year-old Cordova High grad — has been keeping company with Gotti.

In the April/May issue of The Source — the Rolling Stone of the hip-hop world — there's a full-page feature on Gotti. Just a few pages over, Skewby is introduced in the magazine's influential and long-running "Unsigned Hype" column, becoming the first Memphis rapper to be so honored.

After graduating — barely, he says — from Cordova in 2006, Skewby skipped to Atlanta, where he hustled his way into studios as a fledgling producer, selling beats to other artists. He spent a year there, mostly crashing in the Morehouse College dorm room of a high school friend. He only returned to Memphis at his mom's request — after she demanded he come home and get a real job.

Back home, Skewby set about assembling his current team: producer/DJs Crumbz and Charlie White (the latter also works with local acts Al Kapone and Free Sol), manager Antonio Tubbs, and onstage sidekick/"hype man" Reggie P.

After a few stand-alone Internet singles, Skewby, Crumbz, and White finished Proving You Wrong Since 1988, a wildly impressive free mixtape album that was made available online last fall and has so far garnered widespread notice on hip-hop blogs, gotten the attention of The Source, and generated more than 50,000 downloads, according to Tubbs. (You can get it at skewbymusic.com.)