DJ Kay Slay

Keith Grayson was born on the fourteenth of August 1965 in Harlem, New York, and was raised in the East River Houses, a public-housing development in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan. He came of age at the very birth of hip-hop, and the city's streets became his first canvas and his lasting home.

Before he ever touched a turntable, Grayson was a graffiti writer of standing, working under the tag "Dez." His art carried him into the 1983 documentary Style Wars, which preserved him among the founding generation of New York's writers. As graffiti's golden era waned in the late 1980s, he passed through a period of narcotics and incarceration, from which he was released in 1990.

Upon his release he remade himself as DJ Kay Slay, and beginning in 1994 he became one of the principal architects of the mixtape economy that powered New York rap for two decades. Crowned "the Drama King," he issued well over 500 mixtapes and released studio albums beginning with The Streetsweeper, Vol. 1 (2003). For more than twenty years he hosted "The Drama Hour" on Hot 97, a curator and kingmaker who gave a platform to countless artists.

Keith Grayson died on the seventeenth of April 2022, at the age of 55, of complications from COVID-19. In 2023 a corner of East Harlem was renamed DJ Kay Slay Way, so that the neighborhood that raised him would carry his name forward. May the Drama King rest honored, his voice still echoing through the city he loved.