Songfacts®:

• In this self-effacing '90s hip-hop classic, Skee-Lo (born Antoine Roundtree) lists his wishes like a Disney character, starting with the big one:
  
  I wish I was a little bit taller
  
  Height confers lots of advantages that would help him fulfill his other wishes, like being good at basketball and getting a girl who looks good.
  
  He wrote the song when he was a student at El Camino College in the Los Angeles area. "I wanted to do anything but school," he told the Los Angeles Times. "So I started listing wishes."
  
  Skee-Lo was 23 when the song was released in 1995.
• "I Wish" stood out from the braggadocio gangsta rap songs of the era, which was intentional: Skee-Lo was more interested in girls and basketball than in violence, and he had no interest in following the trends of the time. It made him very marketable because it was hard not to really like this guy rapping about his misadventures over a severely catchy groove. Skee-Lo started showing up as a VJ on MTV and in the Dangerous Minds TV series. And then he vanished.
  
  "I retired five months after it was released," he said.
  
  Skee-Lo was at odds with his record label, Sunshine Records, who he said "took all the profits" from the song and from the album, which was also called I Wish and like the single, was certified Gold. "I refused to shoot any more videos, promote or record music," he told the LA Times. "I'm not their slave. I wasn't working for free."
  
  We didn't hear from Skee-Lo again until 2001, when he released an album on his own label. It was around this time when he finally gained the publishing rights to "I Wish" and was able to earn money from the song. The ordeal, though, left him depressed.
  
  "It got to the point where I told my wife and children that I didn't want to live anymore," he said. "Then a voice spoke to me clearly and said, 'At what point in your life were you truly happy?'"
  
  He posted some music on MySpace, and in 2012 he emerged with the album Fresh Ideas, which he actively promoted.
• "I Wish" was the first hit song to use the word "baller" in the hook ("I wish I was a baller"). That term had been floating around for a few years as a reference to a successful young man who likes to flaunt his wealth, often an athlete or entertainer, but Skee-Lo associated it more with basketball, which we hear about in the verse:
  
  When it comes to playing basketball
  I'm always last to be picked
  And in some cases never picked at all
  
  Over the next few years, the term "baller" came into rap lyric vogue, showing up on tracks by 2Pac ("Life Goes On"), Puff Daddy ("Can't Nobody Hold Me Down"), and many others. Destiny's Childs used it in their 1999 #1 hit "Bills, Bills, Bills," where they're after a baller who can pay their bills.
• In 2018, Skee-Lo remade this song as "Smaller" for an ESPN video celebrating small basketball players like Stephen Curry, Chris Paul and Kyle Lowry. "I wish I was a little bit smaller," he raps.
• Skee-Lo wrote the lyrics first, then came up with the beat on a MPC-60 sequencer-sampler after hearing a horn section on an old record he was listening to. That record was probably "Spinnin'," a 1981 track by Bernard Wright that sounds like it provided the main riff on "I Wish."
• Parts of the music video parody the 1994 Tom Hanks movie Forrest Gump, with Skee-Lo as Forrest, sitting on a bench with a box of chocolates. We also see him getting frozen out of the pickup basketball game at the park, and rolling up his hatchback, which doesn't impress the ladies like his dream car, a 1964 Chevy Impala, would.
• Skee-Lo performed this song for the first time at the Good Life Cafe in Los Angeles, where their open-mic nights gave life to many rappers who would later emerge on the underground hip-hop scene, including members of Jurassic 5.
• The girl Skee-Lo is after in the song he names as Leoshi. He says he never did get with her, but she appears in the video.
• "I Wish" was used in a 2013 Toyota commercial starring Kaley Cuoco as a genie who grants wishes that inevitably go wrong.
• The song has appeared in episodes of Lizzie McGuire, The Real Hustle, The Simpsons and Fresh Off The Boat. It's also part of a Family Guy gag in the 2020 episode "Connie's Celica" where we see Skee-Lo getting his wishes granted by a genie. He becomes taller and a baller, and he gets his rabbit in a hat with a bat, but Peter Griffin scolds him: "Skee-Lo... You need money!"
• This song plays throughout the trailer to the 2026 animated movie GOAT, about an undersized goat who wants to be a basketball star.