Jae Scott

Coming up in Atlanta Ga I have always been a little different when it came to music. At an early age it was no mystery what was my first love. When my mother was pregnant with me she used to put headphones over her belly and play music for me. She said I used to move when she did that. It got to where she would put certain songs on and I would move more than I did to others. I guess I was picky with music even then. As a child my earliest memories of music were groups like the B52's, The Jets, Luther Vandros, Sade, Whitney Houston, 70's Motown, Gino venelli,James Brown,Curtis Mayfield, along with countless others. My mother and father were avid music collectors. So I was exposed to all types of music. My father was former lead man for a band back in Chicago called "Black Snow". He moved to Atlanta to attend Morehouse College while my mom went to Georgia State. I first fell in love with hip hop at the age of 4. The first song I can remember being drawn to was basketball by Curtis Blow. I was a little kid at the time but something about the cadence of his lyrics intrigued me. It was after I heard Bam's Planet Rock and Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash's The Message I was totally hooked. It was something beautiful in the way they described their environment and what was going on. Although I was all but 5 I felt I understood. At this young age I looked outside a lot of the things that they spoke on was going on right in front of me. I didn't fully grasp everything in detail but I understood. It wasn't until age 11 I really got the urge to write rhymes.

Me and my cousin used to play all day and I can remember we both wrote raps just to see if we could do it. I cant remember the rhymes but I'm sure it was trash. I didn't care though I felt like it was something I could do. So I just used to dabble every blue moon just keeping them to myself. I liked writing poetry more although I would find its all the same later. Around 92,93 I really started to get a bug to rhyme big time. I was into all types of music still but Hip Hop was what I was into the hardest. The first tape I bought on my own was Black Sheep Flavor Of The Month maxi single(hey we were broke) I got like 10 dollars for part of my Christmas present. I went straight to turtles and copped that and A Tribe Called Quest's Check The Rhyme single. By that time I was into EPMD, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, KSolo, Masta Ace, Mc. Eiht, Dj. Quick, Del, BDP, Eric B & Rakim, Gangstarr, Spice 1, Naughty By Nature, Onyx were a couple that come to mind. By 94 I was writing for real. We used to freestyle at lunch and before school in the gym and anytime me and my people were together. We used to call ourselves the Hit Squad. I can remember being a shorty like "yeah im gonna be in the Hit Squad with Das, EPMD, Redman, & K solo. So it was only right we call ourselves the hit squad. We were deep but it was mainly me (they used to joke and call me Jamison J lol), GC(Gordon), Armond(Advocate), Mike J(The Specialist), Erron(The Professional). Since I was the best Beatboxer I had to handle the beatmaking even back then. We would rhyme all the time being in the streets hoping on the Marta. We remained cool throughout high school. I played Football and ran track in school so I wasn't around the hood as much during the summers. GC played too so we were kind of MIA most of the time. After high school GC went to GT(Georgia Tech) on a football scholarship and I went to Perimeter to improve my GPA and transfer to Georgia State. Although I was a College prospect and could have played in college it wasn't my path. Around 01 was when I started pursuing music seriously. I along with Still Ill( Erron) founded Asylum, which was basically the same click of individuals rhyming from high school. It was myself, Still Ill, Wonder, Geometrix, and Cinstar. We recorded our 1st full length titled "Penocide".

I did not make beats when we recorded our first LP but I always had beats in my head and ideas for samples. I payed attention when we were in the studio. I asked questions and just watched what they were doing. The first influence on my beats was Godzeala. He was a dude we linked with around this time. He used to work with Still Ill and he was always raving about how dope his beats were. He finally hit him with a beat tape and Ill let us hear it. He used an SP1200 and he as sick with it. I knew then that this is what I wanted to do. The beat tapes were not the best quality most of the beats played out of one speaker and were low. We had like 4 tapes of beats but we couldn't ever get up with my man. We had rhymes for days and had a spot to record finally. Up until this point we used to make mixtapes on Geometrix's boombox by hooking headphones into the mic jack in his stereo. A friend of ours Amin had a homeboy who had a studio and he knew we rhymed and had talent so he introduced us to his homeboy Ralph Clark. He wanted to see what we were working with so he wanted to have a session. So we wen