Interview: Joe Scudda (11/19/09)

Born in Georgia, but raised in North Carolina, Joe Scudda gained hip hop notoriety through his involvement with the rap collective, Justus League.

To date, two of his biggest hip hop accomplishments were being featured in Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show and Murs’ Murray’s Revenge, dropping a great verse on each album.

Joe is currently working on a handful of projects, looking to put his name back in the mix, as he has been absent from the game for a minute.

HipHopAtLunch.com stopped by Statik Selektah’s studio to speak about Joe Scudda’s upcoming album.  He also gave us a story about a 15 year-old J.Cole and shared his views on Twitter’s use in hip hop.

The image of Joe Scudda making balloon animals at a circus is hilarious!

I can only imagine how crazy it would have been to witness a young J.Cole tearing it up at local shows in North Carolina.  As mentioned in the interview, he’s a hard working emcee who deserves all the success that is about to come his way.  Be on the lookout for J.Cole’s upcoming solo album under Roc Nation.

One of the highlights of the interview was when Joe spoke about using Twitter to even out the playing field.  He makes a good point in suggesting that ignoring Twitter means you’re not taking advantage of every possible way to get your name out there.

Obviously, the other highlight of the interview was Joe expressing his love for PBR!

Statik Selektah is producing every track on the upcoming project, bringing back the cohesive feel found in early hip hop albums.

It’s true that not too many people are familiar with three-verse Joe Scudda songs.

Even though Joe was not scheduled to perform at CMJ, he was asked to take the stage and perform a few tracks.  Here he is performing “Trunk Rattle” off the Reservoir Dogs mixtape, which dropped in September.

Joe spits cocky lines with:

“I’m young, fly, and fresh that’s why I rock low,
Your lil ass a mess, you are not Joe,
You’ll never be Joe, You don’t wanna see Joe,
At the bar taking free shots, like it’s a free throw,
I get loose off goose, go black off Jack,
Say hello to a chick, get ass off that.”

His confidence and relaxed delivery adds a lot to his stage presence.

Later he performed his verse on “Loving It,” off of Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show.

I still can’t believe BET refused to play the official video for “Lovin It,” stating that it was “too intelligent!”  How can any music video be too intelligent for TV?

Joe’s most recent video appearance was on Statik Selektah’s “Jaded,” featuring Truck North and Diz Gibran.

Despite the fact that these three emcees are continually gaining fans from their work, they are still far underrated as they all spit dope rhymes.

Before I left the studio, they let me hear the tracks they were working on for the upcoming album.  The project is full of conceptual records that have Joe spitting creative rhymes over great production.  Needless to say, their album is going to make waves when it drops.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for Joe Scudda’s upcoming solo album Fashionably Late, which will be dropping before his project with Statik.