When it comes to music, Memphis has spent much of the past few decades relegated to the shadows. Within the state of Tennessee, it is the Mets to Nashville’s Yankees. In the sweep of time, its past—Elvis and Graceland, Carl Perkins and Sun Studios—has tended to eclipse its present. In the ‘90s and 2000s, when it provided hip-hop with significant innovations—D.J. Squeeky arguably inventing trap music; mixing horror scores samples with grizzly lyrics; that propulsive lo-fi rattle undergirding the beat—its influence was swallowed and reappropriated by its more unified neighbor to the east, Atlanta.
But that all began to change last year. A new crop of talent was percolating in Memphis, and this time, the sun shone down on them. By the sun, of course, I mean Drake. A year-long dalliance with Memphis, the home of Drake’s father, culminated last September. During a Nashville stop on Drake and Migos’s "Aubrey & The Three Migos" tour, the 6 God shouted out the often overlooked city. "I’m about to go finish this tour. Imma go home, I’m gonna spend some time with my family, with my friends, and I promise you that the next thing I’m doing is going right back to the studio with Tay Keith from Memphis, Tennessee, and we gonna make us some more music,” he said. It was a small moment, one that was easy to miss if you weren’t at the show, but it was packed with symbolism: Pop’s biggest star was in Nashville alongside Atlanta royalty, and his mind was on the future, and the future was in Memphis.
“Drake is the goat,” Tay Keith would tweet in response, a sign of his appreciation and mutual admiration. What else was there to say? By this time, Keith was growing accustomed to receiving love from Drake. Over the course of the year, Drizzy rapped over three Tay Keith beats (the Blocboy JB collab “Look Alive,” the hood-shaking single “Nonstop,” and, of course, Travis Scott’s sinuous song-of-the-year, “SICKO MODE”) and he even included Keith in the video for “Look Alive,” wrapping his arm around the young producer as if they’d been friends for ages.
Keith, who’s just 22, wasn’t exactly struggling when Drake tapped him and Blocboy for “Look Alive.” At the time, he was a senior at Middle Tennessee State University, and he’d already produced tracks for Memphis mainstays like Yo Gotti, Blac Youngsta, Moneybagg Yo, and his childhood friend Blocboy. His beats, which live in a menacing, 808-heavy minor key, were already bouncing hard as they steadily dribbled along, helping fuel Blocboy’s “Shoot” to virality. And he also already had his trademark producer tag—“Tay Keith, fuck these niggas up!”—a signature that even John Hancock would think emphatic. (He recently replaced it with the more understated, “Tay Keith is too hard.”)
But as happens when Drake gets involved, things escalated quickly, especially in the wake of “Look Alive.” “Everybody started calling me,” Keith says, sitting on a couch in a Midtown recording studio in early April, frequently looking down at his iPhone. “Publishing companies. Record labels. A&R.” Stars, too. He quickly went on to produce tracks for the likes of Eminem, Quavo, Metro Boomin, Lil Pump, Juicy J, Lil Baby, Future, and, most recently, Beyoncé (“Before I Let Go” from her new Homecoming). And his credit on Travis Scott’s “SICKO MODE” (the song is the work of six producers, but Keith’s tag is the only one included in the song) would land him a Grammy nomination.
Now, Keith is beginning to get his feet under him in the industry. When he shows up to the studio, he’s decked out in all black everything—a silky Champagne Papi turtleneck, tight pants, gleaming Louis Vuitton sneakers—and expensive jewelry, his long braids falling in front of his face like a curtain he only occasionally opens. His day has been spent in brand and label meetings, and with press. Amid his entourage are two young producers, Dinero Love and IVBeats, the first signees to his recently-formed producer label, Dramatized. “I don't want to be labeled as just a producer,” he tells me. “Producers have little control and they get little respect. And I'm a man of respect… I want people to see me as the entrepreneur, the boss, the public figure, the person who motivates.”
The role of famous multi-platinum producer slash budding mogul, though, is one that Keith is still adjusting to. It’s meant forcing himself out of his comfort zone, which he says involves being ”at the crib, making beats, sending them to artists.” With the help of a stylist, he’s changed how he dresses, embracing form-fitting streetwear in place of the baggy jeans, casual t-shirts, and long shorts he wore growing up. And being here, talking to me is part of it, too. “Now it's like you gotta go to New York, you gotta do a press run. You gotta be willing to try different shit.”
Keith, very much the recent college graduate, often speaks prescriptively. He has a career philosophy that centers around a Zen-like approach to consistency. “It's like, you can be consistent in any kind of way not being consistent,” he says. He means that he’s aimed to build a distinct style that incorporates variation. And indeed, even without his conspicuous producer tag, a Tay Keith track would be easy to identify. “His sound has a certain amount of layers with his simple drum sounds,” says Devin Steel, a host on K97.1, Memphis’s hip-hop station. “If you're in a spin class, if you're in a car, if you hear it in a club, or you hear it on your phone, you can bob your head to it. It's easily recognizable. It's not real complex.”
In all of these ways, Steel says, Keith’s beats are “very Memphis.” (He says Memphis trademarks are “a strong, simple bass line,” crisp snares, and the presence of triple-tom hi-hats.) But Keith’s beats are not just Memphis in their construction; they’re Memphis in their conception. “I always think of different places [in Memphis] when I make my beats,” Keith says. “I could just remember me being on Prescott or off Elvis Presley.” Each beat exists in a different nook of the same universe.
Where once Atlanta artists folded Memphis sounds into their music, Tay Keith is folding other artists into Memphis’s sound, filtering their work through his city. And as hip-hop’s biggest stars have hopped on Keith’s beats, in many cases churning out memorable hits, Memphis has begun to be acknowledged in a way that’s long overdue. “When you see something like [Tay’s rise] happen so quickly, it opens people's eyes,” Steel says. “It makes the masses look and say, 'I'm going to find my Memphis rapper, I'm going to find a producer from Memphis.' It's all circled around, and he's a huge catalyst for it.”
Keith sees his music as a unifying force within Memphis, too—a way of bridging divides and bringing the city’s adversarial factions together. “I made a difference,” he says. “Not saying that I just made a difference with music. The difference I made could've saved lives. It could've changed a lot of shit within Memphis.” He’s proud, but he’s looking ahead. “I'm living up to my tag, 'Tay Keith fuck these niggas up!' In a sense what that means to me is, have em surprised. Shocked. That's what I feel like is going to happen.”
