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

Blake attended (however loosely the term can be applied) Music and Arts High for a couple of years, with the likes of Serch, Dane and Slick Rick, though he spent more time drinking and tagging than going to class. He got down first with T.P.C. (The People’s Choice) graffiti crew, and later with the famed XMEN. “He was the cool white boy,” remembers Serch. “Rapping, always looking fresh in Wallabees or whatever. New clothes. He was that dude. He used to clown me, to be honest, but I respected the shit out of Blake.”

Artist and former Source magazine graf columnist Dave “Chino BYI” Villorente met Blake when they were pre-teens. “I’m Puerto Rican and Filipino from Fort Greene,” he says, “and at that time even I was a minority there. So you can imagine how much Blake stood out trooping through. But he did it and people accepted him. Blake was always ahead of the curve, and he was always the best dressed. If something was fashionable in June, he’d been rocking it since January. So seasoned. He knew all the big graffiti guys before I’d heard of them. The thing I always told people about Blake—and I’ve told him this, too—is that he planted seeds for people all around him to go on and make a career out of what he was into.”

Blake did use his abilities to get in some studio shows as well, including a 1982 show at the Fun Gallery with Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dondi and Futura. “I was a nobody in a group show of big names,” Blake says. “But the people that did the true graffiti, which belonged on an IRT train, didn’t do too well. It’s not meant for canvas, and it’s not really fine art, you know what I’m saying? With fine art there’s no rules. With graffiti, there are very definite rules—you can only bend a letter so far before it’s not that letter. Dudes who didn’t have a sound letter form were considered toys. They were wack. And the worst graffiti writers became the most popular fine artists, whose works today commands millions. Other guys didn’t make it at all in that regard but are looked at highly. It’s the same thing as a lot of MCs whose stuff didn’t translate to making records ’cause they didn’t set out to do that.”

Needless to say, Blake knows from which he speaks on the MC tip as well. As a class clown, he used the rhymes and snaps that were going around at that time, the “M.M. Chukka from the coconut grove/he was a mean motherfucker, you could tell by his clothes”–type stuff. It wasn’t rap yet, though. “I didn’t hear real MC rhymes over a beat until maybe ’77, around the [NYC] blackout,” he says. “That’s when jams would have someone with a mic and an echo chamber saying simple stuff: ‘The sounds you are about to hear-hear-hear/may be devastating-stating-stating to your ear-ear-ear...’ That’s when I tried to write my own first little rhymes.”

There’s no doubt that Blake—who would finally show up on a record (Dub-L’s Day of the Mega Beast) in ’04—was more into graffiti and getting high in the mid-’80s than flipping his talent into mainstream exposure. “I had no interest in making records. I just wanted to be a dope battle MC,” he says. “SAKE was kind of trying to push me to get down with his boy Pete [Nice] from Columbia U., but I really thought the whole idea of a ‘white rap group’ was corny, plus the Beasties had already done it. That year Licensed to Ill was the biggest record on the planet. But I was happy for Pete and Serch when they finally did it. I remember hearing them for the first time on Video Music Box in the day room in Rikers Island, doing ‘Brooklyn Queens,’ and telling everybody, ‘Yo! That’s my boys! I know them!’ And dudes were like, ‘Yeah, right—that’s why you can’t make bail.’”

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