COVID claims DJ Kay Slay, ‘Drama King’ of hip-hop
DJ Kay Slay, a swaggering graffiti artist, record executive and radio host who helped shape four decades of New York hiphop but was best known as the “Drama King,” the creator of in-demand mix tapes that served as a battleground for some of the biggest rap battles of the early 2000s, died April 17 at 55.
His family confirmed the death in a statement released by the New York radio station Hot 97, where he hosted a weekly hip-hop show, “The Drama Hour.” Additional details were not immediately available, but he had reportedly been hospitalized for four months with covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
As a teenager in Harlem, Kay Slay — born Keith Grayson turned subway cars into his canvas, using as many as 40 spray-paint cans a night to execute elaborate, multicolored pieces on the 1 and 3 lines that rumbled through the city. Creating a graffiti piece was like “telling the world something: I am somebody, I’m an artist,” he said in an interview for “Style Wars,” an acclaimed 1983 documentary that aired on PBS. “But they don’t recognize it as art. A lot of people recognize it as vandalism, and it’s not.”
By the early 2000s, he had traded his spray paint for turntables, creating mix tapes that were sold at specialty stores and on street corners, helping listeners keep tabs on the latest hits and up-andcoming artists. The tapes also served as a platform for established rappers to experiment and, increasingly, to take on their rivals in diss tracks like “Ether,” a 2001 song in which Nas went on the attack against Jay-Z.
The track first appeared on a mix tape by Kay Slay, helping to secure his reputation as a DJ who championed and even encouraged feuds, sometimes including a diss track and a rejoinder back-to-back on his mixes. “He’s like the Jerry Springer of rap,” said DJ Goldfinger, the host of a weekly hip-hop party in Manhattan, in a 2003 interview with The New York Times. “All the fights happen on his show.”
After the East CoastWest Coast rap rivalry culminated in the killings of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, diss songs had receded somewhat from mainstream hip-hop. But Kay Slay was credited with helping to bring them back to the fore, and became a favorite of rappers in part because of his willingness to embrace a diss song, no matter how ruthless. “Cats know it’s no holds barred with me,” he told the Times. “They know that I’m not going to edit anything. It’s going out the way you gave it to me.”
His tapes served as a venue for diss songs exchanged between 50 Cent and Ja Rule, as well as between Ja Rule and Eminem. They also helped launch his own career as a recording artist: In 2003, he made his major-label debut with “The Streetsweeper Vol. 1,” which featured guests including 50 Cent, Mobb Deep, Nas and Eminem. The album peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s rap and R&B chart, and a follow-up in the Streetsweeper series also reached the Top 10 the next year.
“The game was boring until I came around,” he said shortly before making his major-label debut. “Everybody was too busy being fake, acting like they got along and talking about each other behind their backs. I brought the controversy back. I brought the game back to life.”
Born in New York City on Aug. 14, 1966, Kay Slay grew up living with his grandparents at a publichousing project in Harlem. His father was an R&B DJ in Manhattan, and his parents separated by the time he was 5, according to a Vibe magazine profile.
By age 12, he had started doing graffiti, later adopting the tag Dez because he liked the shape of the letters and the brevity of the name. “I wanted a nice small name that I could get up everywhere, and do it quick without getting grabbed,” he said in the “Style Wars” interview. When he was caught the first time, “the cop scribbled on my face with a marker” and had him call his parents.
As he rose to prominence through graffiti, he also got “caught up in the negative side of life,” as he put it, committing smalltime robberies and developing addictions to PCP and cocaine. He was arrested in 1989 on charges of drug possession with intent to sell and spent a year in jail, according to The Times.
Upon his release, he sought drug counseling and became sober, landing a job at a support center in the Bronx for people with HIV and AIDS. He later worked as a security guard and office assistant and made extra money selling T-shirts, jeans and socks from a shopping cart, using the proceeds to buy music equipment and stage a comeback in hiphop. Beginning in 1994, he started releasing mix tapes, sometimes putting out one or two a month.
With the success of his Streetsweeper series, he started working as a record executive, heading A&R for basketball star Shaquille O’Neal’s label Deja 34. He later became a mentor to rappers including Papoose, helping them land record deals while also running a hip-hop magazine, Straight Stuntin’, and continuing to release his own music, collaborating with artists including Lil Wayne, Queen Latifah and Kendrick Lamar.
Many of his albums referenced his tumultuous early years, he noted in a 2003 interview with Spin magazine. “Every record plays like a part of my life,” he said. “This is the life I live this is how I came up. So if you see me acting a certain way, don’t judge me you ain’t walk in my shoes.”