DJ Skee Built a Giant Multimedia Hip-Hop Empire

The vibe in DJ Skee's 5,000-square-foot offices is like that at a dot-com after an infusion of venture capital. There's a Skee Ball machine, mounted flat-screen TVs, fridges full of Monster Energy drinks, football jerseys and album covers. Twelve employees are scattered across six studios, a radio room and eight offices.

Skee himself, the 29-year-old TV host, mixtape DJ, and radio personality, sits in the corner office of his nerve center, called Skee.TV. At 6 feet 3 inches, with short, blond hair, blue eyes and sharp cheekbones, he looks more like a major league baseball player than a DJ. Think Chipper Jones if he favored crisp white tees and limited-edition imported sneakers instead of rhinestone-studded Affliction.

Skee.TV is located a few blocks away from Skee's home near the Lake Hollywood Reservoir, adjacent to the 101 freeway, and from Skee's office you can watch the cars tearing past. It's impossible to take your eyes off them.

PHOTO BY JULES SCHRATTER

DJ Skee

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• DJ Skee
• The Game (Rapper)
• Consumer Cyclicals
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Hip-Hop and Rap

The problem is that if you stop focusing on the conversation, Skee will lap you. Other DJs operate at autobahn velocity, but Skee motors at Formula 1. By the time you finish asking a question, the KIIS-FM and Sirius XM Hip-Hop Nation DJ has already begun a fully formed and thoughtful response. It's as though he has the answers ahead of time.

Maybe he does. Scott Keeney might be the most accomplished DJ his age in a major market. Both Billboard and Forbes have named him to their yearly power-players-under-30 lists, alongside artists like Frank Ocean and Carrie Underwood. He's made seminal mixtapes with The Game and Freddie Gibbs. And Mark Cuban has given him a show, SkeeLive, which debuts July 30 on the Dallas Mavericks owner's cable channel, which reaches roughly 42 million homes. "It's not a reality show of my life but everything I do within my life, turned into segments," Skee says of the program, which will be filmed before an audience at downtown's L.A. Live and broadcast live on AXS TV, with no tape delay.

"Skee is the Oprah of music," Cuban says via email. The pair met when Skee hosted DirecTV's Super Bowl party. Impressed with his quick wit and insider information, Cuban asked Skee to host his network's Grammy special, and Skee sold him on SkeeLive shortly thereafter.

"He has access to everyone because they know and trust him, and his interviewing skills are second to none," Cuban adds.

SkeeLive will feature interviews and performances with musicians, comedians and athletes, plus tech reveals, man-on-the-street bits and sneaker porn. His white board reveals tentative guests for the initial 12-episode run, including many stars known for ducking paparazzi.

"I've been able to walk between all these worlds — from a big club DJ playing dance music, to a mixtape guy in the street, to terrestrial radio. L.A. is an epicenter for music, and I want to capture that feeling on TV," Skee says.

Baseball was Skee's first love. But after his sophomore year in high school, the son of a college psychology professor and an elementary school teacher switched from center field to spinning records. He intuitively understood the art of hustle. Through a family friend, the teenager from St. Paul, Minn., maneuvered an introduction to Stretch Armstrong, the legendary New York hip-hop radio DJ. "I'd save money and fly out there and help him out — just hang around while he was doing his radio show," Skee says. "He was on Hot 97 at the time and guys like Redman and Cam'ron came in. I absorbed everything."

During these trips to New York, Skee scooped up every available mixtape on Canal Street. When he returned to St. Paul, he'd make his own mixtapes from the source material to sell to his friends. "I'd take DJ Clue? and DJ Kay Slay mixtapes and sold them at school," Skee remembers. "This was when CD burners came out and took forever. So I set my alarm to wake up every hour in the middle of the night and change it and make new copies."

Skee expanded the business by cold-calling record stores and selling them on his homemade compilations. He worked with local rappers and got his own Saturday-night radio show on a Minneapolis community station. He learned engineering through a program at his high school. Label executives and magazine editors started hitting him up for meetings and interviews, not realizing that Minnesota's street-rap mixtape king was 16. His reign lasted until he got an email from the Recording Industry Association of America.

"They said they were suing me, so I just deleted it," Skee says, flashing a Dennis the Menace smile. Then one day, he came home from school to find his father having a serious phone conversation with a lawyer. The RIAA mistook him for the copyright violator, because Skee had bought his domain name with his dad's credit card. "They wrote the RIAA a letter basically saying, 'Please don't sue, he's sorry, it's just a high school project,' " Skee says.

Another moneymaking scheme involved flipping rare sneakers and video-game consoles. Through Armstrong, this brought him in contact with Loud Records founder Steve Rifkind, who was desperate to get his son a PS2 for Christmas. Skee came through, so impressing Rifkind with his entrepreneurial spirit that the pioneer of the rap street team took him under his wing.