While they're not exactly the talk of the town quite yet, the Scribbling Idiots, a crew of five and coalition of twelve hip-hoppers, have been feverishly making songs and albums and are perhaps on the verge of making a major impact in the hip-hop community. Their mixtapes and solo projects have been turning heads and ears for a number of years already and it's all been leading up to their first combined effort.
Releasing on illect recordings in late December, The Have Nots finds the crew joining forces and presenting a high-energy album with depth in lyrics and breadth in scope. I was able to chat with Just Me, one of the founding members of the group, recently about the new album, the origins of the supergroup and much more.
brenten gilbert: How's the day been going for you? Just Me:It's been going pretty well.
Well, I guess the best place to start is with the history of Scribbling Idiots. How did you guys all get together and decide to form a group? Well. The way it started was, in... I wanna get my dates right... In 2002, I moved to Kentucky from Southern California and I went to Scribble Jam. I met a kid named Cas Metah. He was a fan of my previous group, Solseekers. And I had just put out a self-released EP. So, I asked him if he knew anybody that we could hook up with to do shows and he had some connections to do shows. So, I agreed to help him record music if he agreed to help me get shows.
We ended up doing a bunch of shows and, the first time he came over to work on some music, we decided to do something together. It came out really good. So then we said, "Well, maybe we should do a project." And I just, off the top of my head, said, "We should call it Scribbling Idiots." At the time, we were both just solo artists, so we figured we would call it JustMe and Cas Metah are Scribbling Idiots. What ended up happening is that Cas is this huge connections guy. He loves to start relationships with people online and with anyone he meets at shows and stuff. So he had all these relationships with producers and emcees all over the country, who we ended up having featured on that album. So we decided to call it, "Scribbling Idiots Presents: JustMe and Cas Metah." And Scribbling Idiots was this group of people from all over the world.
From there, he and I continued to do shows and one of the guys was Mouf Warren. He moved from where he was living in South Carolina back home to Ohio. So he was closer and he started doing shows with us. And while doing our shows, we met Theory Hazit and Wonder Brown. They both lived in Cincinatti and were working together. We decided to ask Theory Hazit to join the group as a DJ and a producer. Then he sort of proved himself at rapping, so he became one of the emcees as well. And then Wonder Brown just kind of stuck around Theory Hazit and just did whatever he was doing. So we decided to make a space for Wonder Brown in all our shows where we let him perform one of his songs and he just stuck around. What ended up happening, with this whole group of people from all over the world - I think there were twelve - the five of us were the ones getting together and recording and doing shows. So we said, these five - JustMe, Cas Metah, Mouf Warren, Theory Hazit and Wonder Brown - are the core members of Scribbling Idiots. Everyone else is kind of like an affiliate. So Scribbling Idiots is a crew of about eleven or twelve members, but for recording purposes and putting out albums, Scribbling Idiots is these five members.