It’s been almost two decades since he and his Living Legends crew helped usher in a new era of DIY in hip-hop, and Scarub is still doing things his own way. In fact, he’s doing everything his own way.

After releasing his first solo effort in eight years, Want for Nothing, in November, Scarub is preparing a major tour in support of the album—and he’s doing it all by himself. That means scheduling dates with promoters, booking hotel rooms and plotting his route across the country, which will drop him in San Jose this week, when he headlines the Friday the 13th Monster Jam at Back Bar SoFa.

And while the additional work might be a hassle sometimes, Scarub, a.k.a. Armon Collins, says the freedom he gets in exchange makes it all worthwhile. Being his own tour manager and booking agent ensures that he can visit the special places and people he has come to know and connect with since he began performing back in 1998.

“It’s not like I have to fight for a seat or time table with whoever else is on the tour who wants to do other things,” he says, referring to the complicated logistics of attempting to keep the entire crew of rappers in line and on time. “I get to move at my own pace.”

Doing things on his own terms has helped get Scarub to a place where he is more at peace than he ever has been—a state of mind that is reflected in the title of his new record.

“It’s a play on words, on both sections—light and dark,” he says. “Hustling until you achieve it, or caring less about it and freeing yourself of those desires or obsessions. I’ve always worked with mottos. At my age, I’m at a point where I want to want for nothing. I want to be comfortable in my skin, and no one else can do that for me.”

Being comfortable and working at his own pace also means that the emcee won’t be worrying about pushing out new music at the speed of the Internet. He plans to stick to emphasizing quality over quantity. He particularly notes the output of De La Soul as a point of inspiration. “They put quality time into it, and that’s what I’ve done,” he says.

Scarub says he wants his fans to take their time with his music—to notice album through-lines and reprised motifs that will reveal themselves upon repeated listens. That attention to detail may explain why Scarub is still able to tour while plenty of his contemporaries are long gone.

“I think you need to give people more time to listen to music instead of giving them more and more and more music,” he adds. “At the end of the day, I think if someone has five potato chips versus a whole bag of potato chips, they’re gonna savor those five potato chips.”

Released this past November, Want for Nothing is Scarub’s seventh solo release, his latest since 2011’s The California EP. The album builds on a number of sounds, from the bluesy guitar lick on “My Moment” to the head-bobbing bounce crafted from a shuffling drum beat that accents the spare, contemplative keys of “Go.”

For the latest exposure to what he’s still capable of lyrically, check out his video for “Get Out!” where dancers respond to the beat as well as Scarub’s elastic flow, which shifts from elongated syllables to rapid-fire cadence. Once the double-time hi-hats appear, injecting a new-found energy to the beat, Scarub unleashes a lyrical barrage. Thankfully, lyrics appear on-screen to help the viewer keep up. It’s a great example of the studied nature to his cadence and the effortlessness to how he switches his delivery from one line to the next.

Asked about the crew that helped launch his career—along with the careers of Murs, Grouch and Eligh—he both confirms and downplays much of what has been said about Living Legends of late.

It’s true that both Murs and Grouch no longer associate with the Los Angeles and Oakland hip-hop collective, and yes, what’s left of the group hasn’t been nearly as active as it was at its peak, but that’s just life, Scarub says.

“We’re no longer in our teens or our 20s,” he says. “We’re in our 30s, man—so people have mortgages. People have bigger responsibilities.”

And while cracks seemed to appear within the Living Legends camp after the departures of Murs and Grouch, Scarub is quick to insist that “the energy’s still good” among all of the group’s members. He doesn’t rule out more Living Legends releases in the future.

“There is no hate.”

Scarub plays Back Bar SoFa on March 13 as a part of the Friday the 13th Monster Jam, which will also feature supporting performances from Cannabidroids, Pariah and TOAST. More info.

Much like the Aesop of antiquity, it isn’t particularly easy to get a bead on Aesop, the emcee of the Bay Area and Los Angeles hip-hop crew, Living Legends. A Wikipedia search of the Aesop of Aesop’s Fables will inform you that scholars are undecided as to whether Aesop ever really existed or if folk tales were simply attributed to him. Similarly, Google searches for Aesop of the Living Legends crew turn up websites that haven’t been updated for years and YouTube clips from the late aughts.

This is due to many factors. First and foremost, any online query featuring the words “Aesop” and “hip-hop” will return an avalanche of hits pertaining to Aesop Rock, a similarly named rapper with a larger online footprint and a free-associative, tongue-twisting style quite different from that of the Aesop in question.

Second, for the past few years the man known to his close friends and family as Derrick McElroy has been on a bit of a hiatus from making music. Reached by phone from his current home in his native Fresno, he says he made the conscious decision to retreat from hip-hop a few years back to focus on his family and take up some lower-profile work as a promoter and sound engineer.

Beyond that, McElroy says that he isn’t a very easy person to get a hold of. “If you hadn’t caught me today, you might not have gotten this interview,” he says with a chuckle. It’s easy enough to believe. Over the course of the interview, the multi-instrumentalist, producer and lyricist frequently walks away from the phone—his voice growing faint as he walks across the room to tend to some other more-pressing business than talking to a local paper. (He later confesses that he is making a sandwich.)

“I’ve always been about doing things underground,” McElroy says, explaining that he’s never had a publicist, that he doesn’t often give interviews except informal ones to fans after shows, and that he has always booked his own tours—including his forthcoming tour of the West Coast, which includes a stop at the Back Bar SoFA this Wednesday, Oct. 22.

McElroy, who sometimes goes as Black Aesop or Aesop’s Fables, says he is preparing to come out of hibernation—both to push his recently released a mixtape, Seeds of Hip Hop, which McElroy made with DJ Hecktik and features remixed versions of some of the duo’s favorite hip-hop classics from the ’80s and ’90s, overdubbed with new verses and slightly modified choruses.

The spooky boom-bap beat of “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit,” becomes “LL Crew Ain’t Nuthin to Fux Wit!!!,” with Black Aesop spitting verses from his catalog in place of the verses from RZA, Inspectah Deck and Method Man. The sparse creeping electric piano of Nas’ “One Love” becomes “Love One.”

“It was a really weird thing I did,” McElroy says of the Seeds of Hip Hop project. “It was using beats from the past, in the future, but with lyrics from the past.”

Weird or not, it would seem that making the mixtape helped to inspire the emcee—reminding him of why he got into rapping in the first place. McElroy had played in bands and written poetry all before he finally decided to pursue hip-hop full time. Asked why he chose that path, he says it’s hard to say, though he recalls being moved by the likes of KRS-One.

“Listening to a lot of KRS one made me want to be good at rapping,” he recalls, adding that he was inspired by many rap groups from that era. “Old school hip-hop—real rappers from the ’80s and the ’90s, inspired me to be the real intelligent rapper that I am.”

Now, McElroy says he is in the midst of putting together what he hopes will be the best album he’s ever made. “For the last couple years that’s what I’ve been doing—making this magnum opus,” he says. “This album won’t be released until it’s perfect.”

Until then McElroy says he is looking forward to getting back on the road and touring—noting that he is especially excited to be playing at Back Bar SoFA, the former space that housed the Cactus Club, which as he recalls was the first place Living Legends ever performed.

“San Jose is where I started my career—was the first time I played with real sound, a real stage, real lights, real artists,” he says. “It’s a big deal anytime I walk into that place. The memories are crazy.”

Aesop is performing at Back Bar SoFA on Oct. 22 at 9pm. More info.