J. Dash

At the age of eight, Jacksonville, Florida native J. Dash was capable of playing Mozart compositions on the piano. By age 13, he was in a band. Eventually, he took up producing and rhyming, and released his first two albums, Odyssey of a Corporate Looney Tune and Something Else: Music for the Color Blind, respectively, in 2006 and 2007. A few years later, the second album's "WOP" (as in "without prejudice") -- a club-rap track driven by bright synthesizer sounds -- gained some traction and prompted him to re-tool the song. He released this new version on his third album, Tabloid Truth, in 2012. In 2013, the reach of "WOP" extended -- propelled by a popular official video and many unofficial videos, the single entered Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart a second time and reached the Top 15. It even managed to cross into the mainstream Hot 100. All the while, the University of Florida graduate kept his birth name a secret and remained employed as a computer engineer.