Despite co-signs from legends like 3rd Bass, Bobbito and Dana Dane, KEO was the most anonymous hip-hop icon in New York. Two decades later, he’s fresh outta rehab and looking to get his life back. Complex sits down with the biggest graf legend/MC to never blow.

Story by Ben Osborne; Photography by Alessandro Simonetti

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(PHOTOS) DAVID "CHINO BYI" VILLORENTE

It’s a bright spring day outside, but Blake Lethem sits inside Don Carlo’s, nursing his café con leche and pollo guisado. The Dominican restaurant rests in the shadows of the Frederick Douglass Houses, one of the few relatively non-gentrified slices of Money-Makin’ Manhattan left—just blocks from the halfway house where he’s been living. He’s clean and sober now, which is where the halfway house comes in, and his sharp features peer out from under his driver’s cap as he recounts the events of two nights before, when he attended a memorial service for breakdancing legend (and original Rock Steady Crew member) Wayne “Frosty Freeze” Frost. “The hardest part,” Blake says, “was when these dudes—who I hung out with real tough back in, like, ’85—drank and poured out their liquor for Frosty, and I was like, ‘I’m good.’ I didn’t mean any disrespect, but I had to explain that I don’t drink anymore. Afterwards, they all wanted to go to the next spot and I was like, ‘I’m on a curfew!’”

Admittedly, hip-hop heads in the iTunes Age don’t normally extend b-boys their rightful props, but trust that the O.G.s know about this cat. As KEO, he’s an all-city graf writer who brightened (or dimmed, depending on one’s taste in subway art) the commutes of millions of straphangers. Early Brooklyn rappers know him as Lord Scotch, a mainstay of ciphers outside schools and inside parks, while people up on the current literary scene know Blake as the younger brother of best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem. (In fact, Blake is the role model for the narrator of Jonathan’s award-winning 2003 novel Fortress of Solitude—“Parts of the book are pretty much verbatim from him,” Jonathan confirms.) Others may know Blake’s artwork, which adorns album covers by the likes of MF Doom.

But while he’s a solid entry in the Who’s Who of hip-hop pioneers, a face-to-face conversation with him doesn’t just happen. In this particular case, it comes after more than a year of emails and conversations with the people who knew him back in the day: his brother Jonathan, MC Serch, Dana Dane, Bobbito Garcia, Pete Nice, MCA and a host of others who all reveled in sharing tales of the baddest white boy they ever knew…but could barely get on the phone. Blake Lethem, KEO, Lord Scotch—this is your life.

Growing up in 1970s Brooklyn, Blake came in on hip-hop’s ground floor. Check that: He looked down on it from 15 feet up. “I was watching jams at the P.S. 38 schoolyard from out my bedroom window when I was 6,” recalls Blake, who, despite plenty of hard living, looks younger than his 40 years. “I never believed that one day there was no ‘hip-hop’ and then the next day, suddenly it appears out of nowhere. That notion, of hip-hop being born in the Bronx, is so chiseled in stone now, you can’t undo that—but I remember it evolving out of a lot of things that were going on. When the writing crew the Ex Vandals brought DJ equipment out to the park and played disco, funk, Caribbean shit, whatever, wasn’t that hip-hop?”

Indoctrinated by the sounds from the playground, and freed from any domestic responsibilities after his mother died, Blake was running the streets from age 13 on. “I pretty much ran wild,” he says. “I was writing on trains, I was tripping on mescaline and acid and stealing 40s and spray paint every day. Boosting clothes. I went to jams, I went to places where even my friends were like, ‘You need to get the fuck out of here. This is no place for a little white boy.’ It was like that.”

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