Today in Hip-Hop — September 15: KayGee Turns 57 - Custom Creative

September 15, 1969 — East Orange, New Jersey. Keir Lamont Gist, the world would come to know him as DJ Kay Gee, is born into the same city block that would eventually give hip-hop Naughty by Nature. He turns 57 today, and the production sheet alone settles any debate about where he belongs in the culture: he’s the hand behind Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.,” the label boss who discovered Zhané, and one-third of the trio that made Grammy history.

The High School Friendship That Became an Empire

Kay Gee, Treach, and Vin Rock all came up at East Orange Campus High School before they were anything — just kids from the same New Jersey blocks who turned into Naughty by Nature. The breakout, 1991’s “O.P.P.,” hit #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 flipping the Jackson 5’s “ABC” into a call-and-response that still gets shouted in every barbershop and cookout in America. “Hip Hop Hooray” followed with a Spike Lee-directed video, and by 1995 the group’s Poverty’s Paradise made history outright — the first album ever to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album, at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards.

Kay Gee’s fingerprints didn’t stop at his own group’s records. He produced “U.N.I.T.Y.” for Queen Latifah — a Grammy winner in its own right — and founded Illtown Records in the mid-’90s, which grew into Divine Mill. Through that label he discovered and developed Zhané, Next (whose “Too Close” he produced into a #1 hit), Jaheim, and Koffee Brown. He walked away from Naughty by Nature in 2000 over a financial dispute with Treach and came back in 2006 — but the catalog he built in between is a résumé most A&R execs would kill for.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

Foxy Brown’s “Get Me Home” turns 30. The Blackstreet-featured lead single off Ill Na Na dropped September 15, 1996 — produced by Trackmasters and Teddy Riley, built off a flip of Eugene Wilde’s 1984 “Gotta Get You Home Tonight,” and co-written by a 26-year-old Jay-Z before he’d even dropped Reasonable Doubt’s follow-up. Peaked at #10 on the Billboard R&B chart.
CyHi Da Prynce turns 42. The G.O.O.D. Music signee has racked up five Grammy nominations for Best Rap Song as a writer — credits that run through Kanye West’s catalog and Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode.” His own debut, No Dope on Sundays, finally landed in 2017 after a decade of grinding on mixtapes.
Bump J turns 47. The Chicago Goon Squad general signed a $3 million Atlantic deal in 2004 before a 2007 bank robbery conviction buried the album that never came out. He resurfaced in 2023 on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s “Vultures” alongside Lil Durk — a top-40 hit fifteen years after prison nearly wrote his ending for him.