DJ Kay Slay

Keith Grayson was born on the fourteenth of August 1966 at Harlem, New York, the son of Harlem residents whose names do not appear in the surviving public record. He was raised in the Lincoln Houses public-housing project of Harlem and at the Harlem 145th Street corridor in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He entered the New York City hip-hop subculture as a graffiti writer first — under the tag Dezzy Dez — in 1980, when he was fourteen. He was among the writers documented in the 1983 Charlie Ahearn film Wild Style and in the 1984 Tony Silver documentary Style Wars — the two foundational filmic documents of the early New York graffiti subculture. The two films contained the brief Dezzy Dez interviews that across the following four decades served as among the principal documentary sources of his pre-DJ career.

He withdrew from graffiti in the mid-1980s after the death of his close graffiti-writer friend Quik in late 1985 and across the years 1985 to 1990 worked in entry-level New York Sanitation Department and food-service positions. He returned to hip-hop in the early 1990s through the new urban-mixtape economy of the Harlem 125th Street.

He took the disc-jockey name DJ Kay Slay around 1994 and across the following decade built the principal mixtape brand of the New York hip-hop economy. His mixtapes The Streetsweeper from 1996 to 2003 produced the principal local-radio New York mixtape platform for new artists of the post-Notorious B.I.G. period. The Streetsweeper compilations released through Columbia Records in 2003 and 2004 reached the Billboard 200 album chart — the first hip-hop mixtapes to do so as commercial album releases.

He became the principal weeknight host of the New York hip-hop terrestrial radio station Hot 97 from 2003. The Streetsweeper Radio programme of Hot 97 ran across the following nineteen years as the senior New York hip-hop radio mixtape platform.

He died of complications of COVID-19 at New York on the seventeenth of April 2022, at fifty-five.

He is honored here as the architect of the New York hip-hop mixtape economy.