How Tay Keith Made the Mainstream Sound Like Memphis
Tay Keith made national No. 1s out of a piano figure, a slab of 808s, and a lot of empty room, and left the rapper on top to finish a song he'd built half-empty on purpose.
For much of two decades, the meanest drums in American rap stayed at home in Memphis, the sort of Three 6 Mafia or 8Ball & MJG records the rest of the country could only hear second or thirdhand. At home, a teenager in South Memphis spent his nights redoing those records on a piano and putting the finished versions out on YouTube or DatPiff—including a version of Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” made by him. By the time he was famous outside his city, Brytavious Lakeith Chambers had come to understand that the danger of that sound travels best with almost no one else present. As Tay Keith, he took that blueprint all the way to No. 1 on the Hot 100 a total of four times.
Yesterday, he was found dead in his Nashville apartment at age 29. Metro Nashville Police said foul play was not suspected; the cause of death was not immediately determined, pending the results of an autopsy. He had a future ahead of him as he still had gas in the tank to deliver more bangers. It’s unbelievable that he lost this God-given talent so soon, as his impeccable production career blew up unexpectedly, as you wouldn’t imagine.
There is not much going on in “Look Alive,” a 2018 record all of whose credits belong to him. A single melodic piano loop, a heavy 808 pattern rolling on, and vast spaces where a second melodic figure might have gone-that’s all there was to the tune, which landed BlocBoy JB inside the top five and dragged Drake down to Memphis. BlocBoy name-checks 901 Shelby Drive, his block in South Memphis, clear as day, and the beats sit under him practically untouched. Drake’s 2018 “Nonstop,” off Scorpion, works the same minimalist arithmetic; a spare enough bounce that he was obliged to make up the whole damn difference himself, with a flip of a switch on the hook on a song that seemed ready to fall asleep beneath him. No countermelody was in the process of arriving to come to either one’s rescue. The drums, with all the space they contain, did all the work.
The one structural idea of his that most people can hum is the beat switch in “Sicko Mode.” He co-produced that 2018 Travis Scott hit with several other producers, and somewhere midway through the verse, the track abandoned its first part, then rebuilt itself into a second beat, and then a third, handing each change off to another version of Travis Scott while stitching in a Drake verse in an entirely different flavor somewhere along the fault line. The flip was a tired trick; the number one record, which hinged on three beat flips, was new, and the thing became diamond certified and nominated for a Grammy for best rap song while he remained one of its composers.
At the beginning of most of his beats, you’ll hear a spoken tag (“Tay Keith, fuck these niggas up!”). The irony is that it’s not his voice. It is, instead, a Clarksville artist known as Lil Juice, who sent in a couple of choices after Chambers posted on Twitter that he was looking for something in particular, and then went back and forth with the other artist until one popped. That tag can’t be repeated for profanity reasons, but since 2018, it has come out before the rest of the beat, whether it’s on the radio or blasted through the speakers at the club, the single most memorable second of his sound was something he took from a person he did not know.
Before any Drake album or Grammy envelope, BlocBoy JB and Chambers were writing and producing music together as teens. BlocBoy’s 2018 “Rover”—for which Chamber’s production, along with the remix with 21 Savage, hit charts like the beat drop itself hit, was propelled by sparse keyboards and the impact of drums slamming like a door, while “Shoot” relied more on slaps beyond the notable hook. They both found their audiences locally first—on Memphis’ radio stations and in the YouTube comment sections-and broadcast the city’s feel and style nationally without losing the edges of what made it distinct.
And more voices continued to land on those few same drums. Eminem ran at double-time over one on “Not Alike,” from 2018’s Kamikaze; Beyoncé had recorded over one with Tay Keith’s co-production on “Before I Let Go,” the bonus cut on Homecoming; Future, Key Glock, and Denzel Curry—one after another—and the rhythm barely warped. As on Rolling Stone, the 29-year-old said that his native Memphis sound has formed the basis of his career; he dragged its familiar shape from room to room until it broke down the door instead of waiting for it. “Pound Town,” the blown-out 2023 Sexyy Red single he produced, marked the first time the artist—who had been a figure as behind-the-scenes as one could be—had an entry on the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead. Future continued the party on “SkeeYee,” a bubble gum bounce under her most outrageous lyrics, while Chambers, whose album has been credited as an executive production by him under his own name.
In December 2018, between the peak years of the Memphis boom he championed, the 23-year-old completed his course at Middle Tennessee State University and graduated. The minimalist quality he first discovered playing on an upright piano never left him; the figure continued as the backbone of each of his beats, as does an 808 that was as massive and resonant as a human voice. Tay Keith will forever be missed.